The Media and Me

                                    

How do you use the media? What is its importance to you? Its purposes? How are teenagers portrayed in the media?

I use the media for a variety of things such as watching television series, movies, talking to my friends/family, playing games, homework and many other things. The media is very important to me because I use the media everyday for majority of my day. I use it for talking to my friends, research, watching movies and shows, listening to music and online shopping. For me, without media life would be very hard because media has made a lot of things easier for us such as research for school. We can find a wide range of things with just the click of a button.

The media has many purposes in someone’s life because media is the most popular form of communication nowadays; it gives us the news and tells us what is going on around us and around the world, to deliver information about something, online shopping and advertising but media also comes with it’s downsides such as spreading false information. Teenagers are portrayed in the media as materialistic, popular, pretty, naïve, dramatic and sometimes infatuated. Even though these elements can be true sometimes, most of the time a typical teenager’s life isn’t like this. Hardly ever does the media show teenagers doing their work and having a social life. Most of the time it’s just about the teenager’s social life and the teenager having fun while in reality we have to balance school work and our social life. Also, the media does not show some of the challenges we teenagers face and sometimes the media causes our challenges.

Online Privacy

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3078835/#.UtMPMZGhBuY

Summary

What this article is basically saying is that there is so little privacy on the Internet that people’s information is being sold on the internet for as little as $1 a piece. People’s credit card numbers are being sold for $1, Internet chat rooms are trading, buying and selling identities and people are being stalked through the internet and murdered. There are even people who’s identity has been lost and the person who stole it is out there making a bad reputation on the person’s name. MSNBC investigation revealed dozens of chat rooms where people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers are bought. According to Rick Jackson, a CEO of privacy technology firm Privada Inc said ‘this is only the tip of the iceberg.’

Opinion

This article is talking about how unsafe the Internet is. Nearly everyone uses the Internet on a daily basis and uploads private information on it. Private information that is being sent to someone or a company buying something can now be easily hacked into and lost.  I believe that the internet was always a public place where no matter how many times they say that your information has been erased or is safe it can always be found somehow. I think for sites like Facebook and twitter or any other social networking site there should be more security on it especially for teenagers and children because before Facebook used to have extra security where only their friends and friends of friends can see their information for 13-17 year olds but now that they have lost many teenagers they took off that security so that they would come back. There are so many incidents that happen because of the lack of privacy on the internet. I think instead of talking about this problem so much we should actually find a way to make the internet more secure about private information that is sent out.

            

What Is The Media Reflecting?

                            

What does the popularity of a current fad, trend, and/or product suggest about society/culture?

A current popular trend is the television series 90210. This show is about teenagers who are wealthy, have the latest things, nice clothes and are popular which are also the elements portrayed in the show. This show attracts a large amount of teenagers especially girls because it portrays the kind of life every typical teenager wants to live. Everyone wants to have a high sense of fashion, be wealthy, to have relationships and to be popular. The fact that this show attracts so many teenagers shows that society today just wants to be popular, have nice clothes, be rich and have all the latest things.

A current popular fad is the new iPhone 5S/5C. The iPhone 5S is an updated version to the iPhone 5 with a finger scanner and new features and the iPhone 5C is a cheaper version to the iPhone 5 made out of plastic in different colors. Everyone wants this phone because it is new and very popular. Which can show that society just cares about what everyone has and the latest things.

My last example of a popular trend is the social networking site tumblr. Tumblr is a site where you can upload pictures and get reblogs and followers or also search up a tag such as beach and find many pictures with the tag beach. This site is very popular towards teenagers because you can upload a picture and see how many people reblog it or like it and it is also used as a competition to see who has the most followers. This shows that society now only cares about popularity or who’s pretty, who wears nice clothes, who has more likes on a picture than someone else etc.