Media Avoidance
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In my everyday life I use all sorts of media, they range from cable television, Internet, radio, and the newspaper. For myself media, is the form and technology I use to receive and communicate information. The different forms of media I was trying to avoid were cable television, the internet and radio. I figured if I could avoid those things I would be doing well in avoiding most obvious forms of mass media. What I realized as I began this whole experience this whole experience is that the mass media is an important if not the most important part of my everyday life. I use it for almost everything I do and it surrounds me.
On my first day of avoiding the media, which was on a Saturday, my plan going into was not check my e-mail, not watch television and not listen to the radio. This was not as easy as I thought, that morning when I woke up my first instinct was to check my e-mail. After I couldn’t do that I felt all this anxiety that I was missing out on something. But I went without, and was able to get to work without reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. It was easy for me to avoid media at work because I work at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and all I do there is check people into cars and drive around the city all day. If I don’t turn on the radio when I’m driving cars then I pretty much avoid most media. The only problem I had at work is when I would be talking to some customers and they would be talking about things they heard in the news, sports etc… and I couldn’t really participate in the conversation.
So I got off work at about one o’clock and went home. I had no idea what to do, I normally get home watch some television and then get on the internet. The only thing that I could think to do was go and rent a movie. So thats what I did and it worked beautifully, I watched the movie “Man on Fire” with Denzel Washington (it is actually a very good movie). When I finished watching that my roommates insisted on watching MTV (music television if you didn’t know). I did catch a glimpse of that was happening in the world of music (oops). Realizing that I was straying I decided to go and get another movie from the video store. I got the movie The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise and watched it, which killed another couple of hours out of my day of avoiding media. So finally it was 7pm and I had been fairly successful in avoiding most media and I only had a couple of hours till I could go out to the bars with my friends and then go to bed. For those last couple of house I decided to spin some records to kill time. Its the only other thing that I do that does require me to access other forms of mass media. I fortunately made it through my day and out to the bars, I then came home and went to bed.
On my second