Post #4

Post #4

Being an athlete, I feel it is necessary to touch on media and how it interacts with sports. I am a pole vaulter for the University of Arkansas (that is an event in track and field) and although women's vault is not nearly as followed and supported as something like football or baseball, the media and student body still pays attention to anyone on campus who is an athlete. They always say "WOW you're an athlete here?! That is awesome!!" They understand that it takes some serious athletic ability to be an athlete at a  division one university. Why is this? Why do they think it is so "cool" to be an athlete too? If you think about it, people don't say "WOW THAT IS SO COOL" to people who perfect the world of academics...why? I believe it is because the media in general promotes the image of an athlete. Although someone who is top of their class and very smart may be respected, people do not want to know what they get on every test, quiz, and project. With a football game, people want to know what happened in every single play, who had the ball, what happened every minute. The difference is the positive connotations associated with being an athlete. They supposedly make a lot of money, have a lot of fans and friends, are popular, are athletic and therefor physically fit and attractive, the list goes on and on. Media coverage of sports is HUGE. From NFL to NHL to the Olympics etc etc etc...everyone wants to watch the sports and our media can now provide to us a way to watch it live instantly. As an athlete, we are under certain pressures. If a player/athlete is really good, and in the spot light, that spot light can not only shine light on the amazing things the person accomplishes but anything negative they do as well. College students who are not athletes can get a DWI on a Saturday night and the people who may know about it are friends, parents, and any scholarship providers possibly...but if a star football player gets a DWI it is newsworthy material and everyone knows about it! As a track athlete, I have been interviewed a lot, my name has been in many articles, my picture, accomplishments and name are on the Arkansas website for track and field, the list goes on. Athletes are easy people to find because of stats being posted and information about them being on the internet. I know that this type of coverage is positive for a school. They want to promote the names of their best athletes. It is also positive for me in the future when I go to get a job... having been an athlete at UA will most likely give me a lot of awesome credentials to write on my resume. But there are definitely down sides to being easy to find. This world has become very scary in this way....pretty much anyone who wants to know my name can just google a few things like "pole vault" or "university of arkansas" or "track" and I could pop up. Especially for females, this can be scary. It makes the job of creepy people easier. (Yes, I am talking about stalkers.) Although I have never been personally affected in this way, it is a thought that causions me greatly. So, although the high media coverage of sports is wonderful, and it promotes the school and brings in money, it also gives us athletes more reason to make every facebook page, twitter account, etc a "private" account...it is just one less way for someone to watch our lives from a distance without us knowing.

This thought came into my mind because today I was looking up stats of many track athletes (simply trying to stay on top of my track knowledge and what kind of competition I have this year). I probably spent about an hour or so on my laptop reading articles on runnerspace.com, checking out dyestat, and reading more articles on getinthetrailer.com (a close friend of mine owns getinthetrailer.com. He is a very talented writer). Other media experiences of today have been listening to music. I have discovered a new album called "The Goat Rodeo Sessions" and it is a fascinating mixture of classical, blue grass, and some other sound I simply cannot place. This music communicates with me in an amazing way. From now on, I will listen to these songs (my favorite being "Here in Heaven") whenever I need to escape the cluttered and crazy world and experience the perfect fluidity and beauty of a cello, violin, mandolin  some other string instruments and soothing voices.

Post #3

Post #3

I would like to touch on my experiences I have had with an Iphone app called "Gifboom". This app can be incredibly fun in my opinion but there are also many things I dislike about it. It is a great way to reach out to people via social media while also showing off and practicing your creative skills with photography and images. A GIF file is a file containing a series of images (on gifboom you get 30 frames) which flash one after the next to create what appears to be a video clip, and this loops over and over until you click out of it. You can alter images in so many different creative ways; its seriously an awesome experience that can make a boring day fun. Usually, if you work hard to make a really cool gif such as making it look like you are levitating or using a play on colors, then you can get a lot of "likes". People using this app are driven to get "likes" because if they get enough it might appear on the popular page. So I have said what I personally like about this app, but there are many negatives for me. I would like to point out that I am a 20 year old female who is in college. The average age of users on gifboom is probably around 14. There are of course many outliers to this statistic, but I cannot help but feel outnumbered. But the general demographic is female teens and pre-teens. This guides the content that people post on GIFboom to be very immature and lacking in creativity. For example, most of the gifs that make it to the "pop" page are those of these young girls spinning around in their new outfits or doing what I like to call the "fake laugh". This is such an odd concept when you really think about it, but when you go through the FaceBook images of most teenage girls you see them making facial expressions called "kissy face" or "duck face" or they appear as though they are laughing and they have their hand placed on their hip...well on gifboom, this is dramatized even more because the images are MOVING. So you get a 14 year old girl who makes gifs of herself in her bikini while doing this "fake laugh" as if being in the frame of the camera is a hilarious concept. Why is this? Why are there so many young girls on gifboom? And why do they all make gifs of themselves in skimpy outfits? I think that it is caused by our society's guidance of female behavior. Modern day America asks a lot of its youth...to be beautiful, smart, go to college, witty, funny...and if you aren't all of these things well, then, you just don't fit in. When girls are given gifboom to play with, they make it their outlet for this attention. They crave the praise of everyone who comes across their gifboom page in hopes that they get everyone to say "OMG YOU ARE SO PRETTY" etc. I use this app as an outlet to create slow motion clips and capture funny moments... to express my love for photography and videography and its fascinating ability to be able to communicate with anyone in any language...but society and the media guide youth to use these things in manners that I consider innapropriate.

Other than using this app for most of the day today (creating an elaborate and creative GIF can sometimes take a very large chunk of time) I also watched to movie "Sex and the City" for the millionth time... Every time I want to watch a movie I feel like I always end up watching it. I love it. It presents every girls dream; to find a tight group of friends that love you, to live in a lavish city with endless shopping and males in the sea, and a fun lifestyle that you get to live with a group of best friends. I also spent some time on YouTube watching documentaries. The one I spent the most time watching, and was most struck by, was called "The Most Hated Family in America", and also watched an interview of the family that is "most hated " by Tyra Banks. If you have not watched this documentary, you should go watch it now. It is fascinating the belief systems and cults that people develop, especially these people. They go to the extreme.

Post #2

Post #2:

My interactions daily with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram...

Every morning when my phone buzzes me awake for the day to "Half Acre" by Hem, I immediately roll over, grab it, swipe the little bar to the right to "unlock" my phone, and most likely check both Facebook and the weather immediately. Notice how I said "when my phone buzzes" not "when my alarm clock buzzes"...why is this? Phones have become a huge part of every day life. Mine included. From the minute I wake up to the minute I close my eyes to sleep, my phone is within an arm's reach. Is this good or bad? Honestly, I am not sure. I don't think it is either of those: I think it just is. In the 1950's people were watching black and white TV and waking up to I don't even know what! It is funny how back a couple hundred years ago people were raving about the future, the 2000s, and imagining the crazy gagets we would have. Now that the 2000s are here, we look back at their funny gagets and laugh. Even though time has passed, and multi media has taken over our lives (pervasiveness), we are, in my opinion, just as "into" society as we ever were...we simply have the ability to stay very much more up-to-date than we could when newspapers and telegraphs were the main form of communication. Now, we wake up in the morning, roll over, reach less than two feet and immediately know what is going on in countries all over the earth! I, personally, probably spend about 2 hours a day on facebook, twitter and instagram. Why? Well, lets say I am bored for five minutes while waiting in line to purchase a sub sandwich...what do I do? I get on my phone. I can browse the web, check my facebook wall and messages, send a "Tweet" for the world to see... my phone gives me access to the continually growing web of mass communication. As I said before, I don't think this is good, and I don't think it is bad. Everything has its positive and negative aspects alike. It simply is.

Aside from having immediate access to the weather and any breaking news, I have access to immediate movies and entertainment. I am subscribed to Netflix for about $8 a month, and with this I can watch a variety of movies for that charge per month. I watched the movie "Dirty Dancing" (one of my favorite movies of all time that i have seen so mant times I cannot even count). Throughout the day, I text friends, Tweet at people, get tagged in Facebook pictures, the list goes on and on. I called and talked to my parents back home in South Carolina. I texted a picture of my delicious smoothie I had for breakfast to my sister who replied by calling me on Facetime. (She misses me). Social media and handheld devices give us instant access to anyone anywhere at any time of day. (Well, any time they will respond).

Post #1

Hello world,

If you come across this blog then you likely have found yourself very bored and exploring the very corners of the world wide web. I am starting this blog as a class project, but have always been into writing and keeping journals etc. Now, as we all know, the most recent media event was the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans. I happened to have to move to a new apartment ON SB Sunday, and was trying to catch bits and pieces of it from my neighbors' TVs and updates on my wonderful cellular device. I felt like I was the only person in the world who wasn't kicking back on my couch and eating chips and dip with friends as we all yell at the TV screen to images that cannot hear us. The whole concept of media coverage of the SB is something that we take for granted...we don't think about how amazing it is that such a large number of people could care enough about a game and get together and all be watching our TVs at the very same moment. I'm sure that the SB reaches an even larger crowd than does things like the Presidential Inauguration. It is a phenomenal event. But, being a female, of course I am going to have my own view and opinion about some of the commercials that companies use to advertise their products. As I went back onto YouTube to review the top commercials of the SB, I also came across many people chatting about the inappropriate content of a lot of them. Specifically the Mercedes commercial that appeared to focus more on the female washing their product than the car itself. As many have said about this commercial and many others, I think that they have taken "sex sells" just a little bit too far. This is just one small example of the many many commercials with sexual innuendo and images used to promote their product. It blows my mind that they can put something so provocative in a commercial at all, nonetheless put it on during the SUPERBOWL. This is being broadcasted to a larger audience throughout the US than ANY other media event!! Not only will the eyes of adults see these commercials, but the eyes of children. This is being shown in homes across America. America, The US, likes to think of itself as being Christian, "One Nation Under God"... but how can it claim to be such a thing when it promotes the objectification of women. Not to mention the influence from male producers is much greater due to the number of them outweighing the number of female producers that have any form of influence with the media.

I am also required to talk about all of my contact with media each day that I blog. This morning, the minute I woke, I rolled over and turned my phone's alarm off. Along with turning off my alarm, I checked facebook, my e mail, twitter and instagram. Without even thinking. This is what our society has become; good or bad, its the way things are. Aside from having constant contact with friends and family via text, colleagues and professors via e mail, and the entire world via twitter and facebook, I also have watched a couple YouTube videos today. I watched a documentary called "Supersize me". This documentary also brings to light another aspect of what America has become; overweight. To me, it is ironic that we put so much emphasis on being "beautiful", yet we have the largest percentage of overweight people out of every other country in the WORLD! I highly recommend you watch this documentary. I learned a lot of shocking statistics and facts that will forever make me see McDonald's and other fast food places very differently.

Today I also spent time on my laptop reading updates in the world of sports on Cynopsis Sports. Since I don't have the money to afford cable, being a student living by myself, I have to rely heavily on the internet to get information on weather, news, and sporting events. I would be lost without internet and my phone!!