MCS164 Five Visuals: What I Learned
With the introduction of the web and the public sphere, we have learned about the political economy that the Internet is facing. We are forced into this technological consumption and are constantly hiding behind our scenes. Here, I have selected five images that I took the most heart and understanding out of this. Most of the images are more related to our phones and the usages of how they can affect our daily lives.
This first image describes the reality of how we are our phones. Even at a social gathering like a family dinner, people are constantly using their phones for entertainment and not being social with the others around them. It is more important for people to take pictures of their meals and post it for their audiences, than having a time to sit down and enjoy a meal. Furthermore, it enhances the fact that this gathering isn’t a necessary thing. We used to see a sit-down meal as a time for relaxation, catching up and a social experience. Now, it’s just us and our phones.
This second image describes the reality of dating applications and our dating culture. We now are heavily influenced by dating applications like Tindr, to find a sexual encounter, sometimes not even a committed relationship. This, however, does open up to fraud and more importantly, cat-fishing. It can be easy for anyone to hide the fact they are much older than stated, like the picture below. It becomes easier for predators to manipulate and hide their true intentions from the public.
These next few images are more geared towards the Internet and social media. This third image shows the reality of Internet trolls. We can constantly find comments from any social media site and take it to heart. Anyone is allowed to speak whatever opinion they want and use any source of language. In reality, these people don’t realize their intentions they may have on you. Sometimes, they consider these negative comments as pranks or a joke. This can heavily affect the younger generations, ranging from 10–21 years old. Because we live in such a tech-savy world, we are constantly feeding on media recognition and likes. Like the image, trolls are the pigs of the Internet; they feed off of putting negative comments on anything, without knowing what they did wrong.
These last two images play a huge role in describing the activism that social media has on the world. The first image is a girl holding a twitter bag as a lifeline. What I took out of this was similar to the events described in Syria. Victims have been using these social media sites as an outlet for reaching out to communities and others, in order to raise awareness. They literally rely on media sites in order to survive and to send help to their nations. Even like the image below, they are literally using Facebook to fight against police brutality and wars. Because of the heavy media influences we have on today, anyone and everyone is allowed to stream their mediums and display it to the public. They can have huge communities from everyone raise awareness for a cause and even bring light to certain events that mainstream media doesn’t.
Media is an extremely powerful tool. Like the last article we read, we can’t do much until we start to notice. We can’t progress and advance as humans if we don’t question the things around us. If we just let things happen, are we really contributing ourselves to the world? The participatory democracy we have in media is an important tool to get our word out and to show that we won’t be consumed by the capitalist society. Media is a weapon, a tool and a lifeline.
