Mass media: It’s on your TV, on your phone, on your porch, on your computer screen, on your shelves. It’s traveling through the air and under the ground. I’m as “plugged” in as anybody, so it’s a little strange to turn back the clock.
Recordings were probably my first exposure to mass media. My parents bought me lots of cassette tapes with children’s songs and stories. Some of those I actually found still in the family possession while doing some spring cleaning! There was also a brief period in my life when I greatly imitated the singing of Vietnamese pop stars on Paris by Night, a traveling music concert show, from their CDs and concert VHS tapes. Nowadays I occasionally listen to CDs, but mostly when I get a hankering for music I turn on the radio to the local alternative rock station. This mostly amounts to when I’m driving, which isn’t really much time at all. As of late, I’ve been trying to educate myself by listening to some NPR, because I find their interviews available online to be a good resource for research. But it’s not really the kind of listening that makes sense in five minute segments, so I don’t think this will become a habit of mine.
From my early childhood, I also know for a fact I watched VHS tapes of Disney movies (especially The Little Mermaid) very frequently, as well as movie classics such as the Star Wars trilogy. VHS is also how I got my first exposure to television, our antenna television having terrible reception. I owned tapes of Barney and other children’s programs, but I also spent a much more significant time watching rented tapes of Chinese serialized television dramas with my grandmother.
Other than a brief flirtation with becoming a film major that lasted through around 1934 of my History of Film class, I’ve never been particularly interested in movies. I like going to the movies as a social activity on occasion with my friends and would never turn down, for example, seeing Casablanca at the gorgeous Stanford Theatre, but as a medium, I don’t particularly care for its storytelling abilities.
As for broadcast television, the first TV show I watched actively was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, I don’t watch as much television as I once did, looking up schedules to budget my time more wisely. I do however, follow the shows I enjoy very closely and discuss it frequently on the internet via forums and blogs and other sites that connect fans. The internet also makes it easy for me to watch older television shows for the first time, as well as foreign shows on occasion (mostly British shows, but also sometimes Korean dramas or Japanese animation). I'm drawn to shows with a humanist perspective and in particular with strong female characters (the eponymous Buffy and Samsoon, Donna Noble of Doctor Who, Leslie of Parks and Recreation are a few examples that come immediately to mind).
I started loving to read books at around fifth grade and even then started skipping recesses to hide among the bookshelves. I frequently read novels through middle school classes. Now I still read probably one book a week, mostly fiction because after all the reading for classes I do the last thing I want to do is absorb more facts! While books are still important to me, I also have many more entertainment opportunities and the less immediate conversation opportunities. I currently write book reviews on a book networking site (see my right-hand widget), which I feel forces me to more thoughtfully consider my reading.
I read the newspaper with my dad growing up, but have for the most part switched over to reading online versions of newspapers for the convenience. They even have the crossword online and it saves having to deal with the inevitable newspaper buildup in my living space if I am lax even one day. I have never been particularly interested in magazines. Although I rifle through them at the shopping check-out line, I rarely ever buy them. I do love (and subscribe to) National Geographic Magazine and follow a couple of columns from the online sites of Entertainment Weekly and other magazines.
All this speaks to the convergence of course, in how much I use the internet! I’m online at least two hours a day. Besides conducting school business such as communicating with professors and doing homework (such as this assignment), I’m also contacting my friends casually through instant messenger or checking the news or reading fanfiction. I also blogged frequently in high school and still participate in several discussion forums. I remember in elementary school, in the early days of widespread internet usage, when a classmate shared a site with a real-time world population counter (at that time the world population was at the cusp of six billion). How amazed we all were, and now those same classmates of mine probably can’t go an hour without updating their Facebook pages!
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