Media in the Life of a Student

Media in my Day to Day Life

Hello, my name is Elliott Drewry. Over this past weekend, My classmates and I collected the number of hours each of us spent viewing media. 

This past weekend I viewed seven different types of media including watching a movie, two episodes of a T.V. show, played video games, read a magazine and viewed the adds inside, read online, and posted, searched, and replied to comments on my three Instagram accounts.
Technology plays a relatively large role in my life. I use it religiously for schoolwork; for submitting assignments, research, writing, etc. I also utilize technology for entertainment at home and during my two-hour commute to school and back each day; this is when I catch up on Instagram and the latest news in subjects I'm interested in.
I currently run three different Instagram accounts. My personal private account that I post my daily life achievements and the others are accounts I created for my two main hobbies: Nerf blaster modifying and shooting + hunting. I regularly post on my hobby accounts about current projects and things that I am working on. I enjoy having these accounts because it attaches me to a community I am not able to communicate and fully participate in my normal day to day life. I am able to learn and discuss subjects new to me and that will grow my knowledge of my hobbies. 

Reflection of the Commercials Viewed in Class

From the commercials that we viewed in class, I learned there are so many ways to look at a text, in this case, media. We first watched the videos normally straight through. We discussed what we saw and the opinions that we had on the information and message stated.

Then we turned off the sound of the video and really looked at the structure of just the video without the music and dialect. this was interesting because it singled out the stylistic choices of the creators of the commercial and really showed some of the more hidden meanings of the images portrayed. 

After having no sound through the commercial, the instructor then turned off the projector so that all we would hear was the sound of the commercial. This was my favorite way we viewed or in fact listened to the text because it was very cool to notice that the tempo of the music actually got faster as the commercial intensified and then slowed back to normal speed when the solution was presented at the end. This speed increase added a stressful feeling to the negatively portrayed subject in the video. 

Here is a link to a commercial we viewed in class that was created by the soap and body care brand Dove. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zKfF40jeCA