Growing up in the early 90s, my main source of media consumption consisted of the oh so familiar Nicktoons, MTV’s TRL, and AOL chat rooms. I feel like I’ve always stayed in a nostalgic setting within my media consumption over the years as in never wanting to get out of that innocent “judgement free zone” that I knew almost everything about. For example with television, I knew what shows were going to play at each hour, I knew the top 10 countdown and would guess its number 1 spots like if I produced the show myself, and talking about it the next day was the highlight of going to school or meeting with friends to discuss what happened the day before. So once social sites started during the time I hit middle school, I was like a deer in headlights. While my friends in middle school were talking about sites like Myspace and who would be their top 8’s I was concerned with who was it while playing tag.
I was always very behind when it came to social media, never not once feeling the urge to jump on the bandwagon of it. I was almost so against it because it was a site to interact with my friends who I saw and spoke with everyday during that time anyways. I actually never created those sites myself, my friend in middle school came up to me one day and was like “Whitney, here's your log-in and password, I created you a Myspace since you're the only one that doesn't have it.” Even after that I just wasn't huge on being apart of that wave, until I finally logged in one day and by that time no one used myspace anymore because now Facebook was the new IT trend and again that same exact friend came with my login info saying i had to get on that, its for the older kids… keep in mind I'm like 14. I just wanted to record TRL music videos to recreate them with my sisters and be outside riding bike to our pool. I didn’t want to fit the norm of being like everyone else especially on certain sites. Durning high school I began taking production classes and we would need content to either fill slots or images to further along our stories which is where I want to say I had involved myself more in media, I joined twitter which is HILARIOUS because I joined when it was absolutely nobody on it besides like Ashton Kutcher and the twitterbot, but I actually was made fun of for having it because no one understood a site where you would just write your thoughts. Crazy right? But I followed a lot of CNN pages, and news pages, and pop culture pages which was good enough for me, since twitter was and is still known for starting a lot of scandals which lead for good content. Instagram then arrived and i think again for me everything went downhill but in a different way this time. I joined pretty up to date as others and found I had a huge following since people recognized me from my twitter account, I posted whatever i wanted and always got some sort of feedback from my followers, I loved the attention…. Until I didn't.
With more followers, came more likes which provided more comments which aren't always good. I wouldn't say that social media would bash me in particular but I would see the effects it had on other people. People who I grew up with looking and acting different on Instagram to give this persona of who they want people to see, which is fine to a certain extent since I personally didn't put all of my business on the web. But the kind of photos and videos that were being portrayed of what Instagram's standards needed to be was unsettling for me since again, I was never up to speed with these social sites to get the full magnitude of how fast everything changes on these sites. What was cool wasn't anymore what wasn't cool is now, being cool isn't cool, being uncool was still uncool, it was just all very confusing that left me feeling soooo much pressure to continue to post what i wanted without having that back thought, “is this pretty enough, will this get enough likes, will i get hate comments” I couldn't deal with it so with my many followers I decided to just delete my instagram and it was like a weight of pressure was lifted off, which I'm sure now is a common theme within media consumption being as influential as it is and not necessarily always in a good way. I've always felt that I was a very free spirited and vocal individual who has always been in tune with myself no matter what, but even the strongest have moments of weakness and in my case was social sites, I felt devalued in a sense like if I didn't have the instagram standard in a few months I'll become irrelevant even to people who know me in the real world which left a bad taste with me.
I needed some time off social media to regain my normal thought process that I shouldn't let things like that define me or influence what I post or how I feel about myself since I was being so harsh on a face and image that I looked at everyday in the mirror. I constantly tell myself and my friends that without self love we’d be lost souls. Media fits into my life now because its all around us and we can't really avoid it but I chose to use my energy different with it, which influences what I watch for example like extraordinary homes on Netflix or Masterchef junior on Hulu or Jeffree Star and Ace Family for my makeup advice and good humor, I like to watch things that make me want to better myself or try something new or just have an overall positive view and with online media, I'm huge on music so YouTube is great inspo for a lot of content I aspire to make as well as Tumblr which is my secret main source of “social media,” which no one knows about but I get to post EVERYTHING I want on there since its not as big as other sites. I write blog post, I publish images that show who I am and what I like and what's aesthetically pleasing to me which just makes me happy. My identity with media now I feel like is a loaded question within itself since it's hard to fully describe that, but I would say I'm happy with where I am in media, and what I'm learning and have taken away from it.
http://blazinbadzulaa.tumblr.com/
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