Blog #2 - Simon Robson

       

This week I interviewed my coworker, Mrs. Bessie, about her views of media and the way that it has changed through her lifetime. Mrs. Bessie is 71 years old and works with me in the bistro in the DSU. She often asks me for help doing things on her phone so I figured it would be interesting to interview her about this and to hear what she thinks of all the changes that have come about. When I first asked her Mrs. Bessie said I needed to ask someone else because she was too old and there was too much that had changed since she was my age, but I told her that was exactly the point. Once she found out this was the point, she had no problems coming up with things that are different from back then. 

            She told me that when she was my age the only media that she regularly consumed was in the form of music. She told me that she used to listen to lots of cassette tapes and 8 tracks and sometimes the radio. She told me how different the radio used to be though and how there were very few stations and they weren’t accessible in many places. The music was also very different, she said, much less electronically produced sound. One of the ways that we both have enjoyed music though is records. I personally really like being able to physically hold albums and the way it sounds playing on a record player, so I have a small record collection of my own. When I told Mrs. Bessie this, she was very excited and started telling me about the old records that she used to listen to. The only album that I had that she also used to have was the album All Summer Long by The Beach Boys. Here is a picture of the record player that I listen to my records on versus what her record player most likely looked like. My record player is a 7 in 1 device so in addition to records, it has Bluetooth, a CD player, cassette player, radio, auxiliary port and recording capabilities. 

           

She also discussed that newspapers were another main form of media that she had when she was my age. Although she rarely read the newspaper back then she told me that she has even seen a difference in the newspapers today. She explained that when she was my age there was really only one newspaper every week, compared to today when you can get a newspaper every day. She said that there is so much more garbage and nonsense in the papers today rather than actual news and things that matter. Music and newspapers were the only media that she said she really consumed when she was growing up. 

            She also explained the way that phones have developed since then. She was explaining how it is crazy to her that there are wireless phones today that do everything they do. When she was my age all the phones had cords and all they could do was make calls. Now Mrs. Bessie can do so much on her phone that it is overwhelming to her, not to mention that she can also have her phone with her no matter where she is. She said a lot of the things that she experienced are out of date now because all of it can be done on your phone including music, movies, cameras, news and more. Being that she was not always accustomed to this as she was growing up, she finds much of it very unnecessary, confusing, and overwhelming. 

            For me a lot of what makes media old versus new is the connectivity and streamline of it. Today it is so easy to share, find, or view things without really any effort. With old media things were not nearly as connected and available. In just a matter of seconds you can share a message with hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. You could find any piece of information that you wanted to by just pulling out your phone and typing it in. We are constantly connected which gives us so much variety of media at our fingertips, but the weird part is that it is almost all through the same medium, our phones. Back in Mrs. Bessie’s time you needed multiple different mediums for all your different media. You needed a phone to make calls, a newspaper to read the news, a record player, cassette player, a radio or other things to listen to music, a TV and a VHS player to watch a movie and more. This is why we are so tied to our phones and are constantly so caught up. We have literally everything right there and while it definitely has its benefits it can also be harmful especially when people don’t understand all of the ways that their media works. 

       Social media is a very recent development and while most of my generation kind of grew right into it, others had to adapt, and it hasn’t always been an easy process. Looking back now I feel like most of my life things have just built on one another, so I always somewhat understood the new media and things that have come about. When inevitably there is a completely new technology that brings radical change to the way we consume media I hope that I will be able to take it in stride and become accustomed to it easily. Some of the things we have read and talked about for class show how things like this can be harmful especially for people who don’t understand everything about it. The Facebook documentary that we watched was a good example where people did not quite understand the implications of their social media usage. In the video we see the way that many people took everything they saw on social media as fact without doing any further research. People also did not understand that when they signed up for Facebook that they were giving permission to do what they wanted with their information. As a result of the constant evolution of media there is a lot of misunderstanding of the consequences or the uses and gratifications of new media from older generations. Another example of this would be the reading we did about Gamergate. This reading and some of the videos we watched in class about it showed the ways that some people used social media to voice their opinions in entirely inappropriate ways because of their lack of knowledge of the consequences. During Gamergate some of the women who had spoken out about the way women were portrayed in games faced very serious threats from people on social media. I believe many of these people posting threats did not realize some of the implications that came with these actions. Not only do these tweets create such a scary and dangerous environment on social media but it also can yield real life consequences anywhere from dislike by others to job loss or even legal consequences. I think that many of these things are done by older generations as a result of their incomplete knowledge about new media and how it works. 

After my interview with Mrs. Bessie it definitely made me think more about the drastic changes that have come in media during her life so far and made me wonder what kind of things I will see during my life. It was very interesting to me though that even with how much has changed I still use one of the forms of media that she was very familiar with when she was my age in my records. Although this is not a super common form of media today it is still sold in many stores and has stuck around for many decades now. The evolution of media has come a very long way over the past 40 years or so and I don’t see this stopping anytime soon. We just have to make sure that when new media comes about, we are competent in its usage and understand its consequences.