Each day that I decide to log on to Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook or YouTube, I am making the active decision to not be a bystander with
media. I consume it in the way that people consume the news. Whether I’d like
to admit it publicly or not I absorb a lot of my news from social media. I try
to do my part by fact checking but depending on the friend that posts or shares
it, my first instinct is to take it as fact. The amount that I choose to engage
with others depends on a variety of factors including but not limited to: time
of day (which relates to the amount of engagements that I am likely to receive
if I post something) or how much I like the celebrity that is being cyberbullied
today or it could simply just boil down to my mood. My first year at Hunter
shaped the way that I interact with the media because I was taught to be
suspiciously critical of the media. Since then, I consider the agendas of the
media maker and weigh reliability before I respond to it. There is a lot more media
content today that I can proudly say that I measure myself against. I purposely
seek out that content and I have for a very long time. Shows like Being Mary
Jane, Insecure, and Love Is display issues that I as a black, educated, woman
faces. I purposely seek out content that I can identify with. If not on tv,
then on YouTube and networks such as Black & Sexy TV. Film has a huge affect
on my life because art imitates life and how I see myself in this world.
I remember when I was a child and I saw Love & Basketball.
It affected the way I decided to see the world. I was watching black actors on
the screen as lead characters who
graduated high school and went on to college to have professional basketball
careers. More importantly, I saw a black woman with agency who decided to
follow her dreams and pursue the loves of her life – love with Quincy and love
for basketball. I remember being taken aback by the thought of women playing
professional basketball and seeing how Monica as a young girl was so confident
of her ability and power as a woman despite being told that girls couldn’t
play ball. I resonated with her character because I’d been told plenty of
times at school what girls couldn’t do and I too, would stand up for myself and
show them that I was just as good if not better at the games or sports we
played. The next scene Quincy asks Monica to be his girlfriend and to ride on
the back of his bike because he’s seen his dad drive his mom places. When he tells her to come on, she thinks and
says, “I don’t have to do what you say.” She’s then rejected by him and they
begin to fight. A black woman who stands up for herself despite knowing the
consequences that can occur from bruising the male ego. I liked it. No, I loved
it. This is how I felt and who I wanted to continue to be at 7 years old and
there it was staring me right in the face. Yes, it was a love story but it was
so much more than that. It was a visual representation of so many other black
young women standing against the status quo.
I am the media influencer in my friend group because I
introduce them to new shows and support the content that I want to see more of.
I actively engage in debates and critique things on social media daily. Twitter
is a fun but sometimes scary place. I belong to the family that is black
twitter. I say that because it’s important to recognize that we all live in
certain bubbles when we interact on social media. Some of those bubbles are
bigger than others and have an impact on how we digest the media. The one thing
that I love about Twitter is that sometimes it feels like the people I
retweet/follow all speak the same language and have gone through very similar
experiences even though more likely than not, we don’t know each other and live
different lives.
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| Similar Twitter experiences |
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| Have we all lived the same life? |
However, it also goes
back to the bubbles that we socialize in. If I followed a bunch of
conservatives on Twitter, then the content I saw on my timeline could differ
dramatically. I recognize that the people I follow have an impact on the content
that comes across my timeline and so I look forward to awards shows or highly
anticipated biopics (right now it’s The Bobby Brown Story) because it’s like
the internet becomes a family as we react together to what is going on. Of
course, it is not always roses because sometimes social media becomes a toxic,
vicious place with stans that unofficially represent artists and will attack
and destroy your online presence in a heartbeat if your words about their
favorite artist aren’t chosen carefully. I thread carefully with
the media I choose to share and comment on because one wrong move has the power
to destroy you. I’ve seen people get fired from their jobs and kicked out of
school because they weren’t careful about what they said online. I saw
something on the news about Internet safe spaces and I just think about all that
can go wrong. I used to be addicted to
social media and although I still go on it often, I’ve slowly drifted away from
it. I deleted my Snapchat in January and haven’t looked back and I post on
Instagram probably once every 3 months. It’s hard to completely step back from
social media and figuratively impossible to try and eliminate the media in
general from your life because it’s everywhere. I went to Spain this summer and
came back feeling so removed from American culture but at the same time I still
knew about some things that were going on here because although a lot of my
Internet usage was blocked, my Instagram and Twitter worked just fine. At the
end of the day, even when my options were limited, media was all around me. It
can be overwhelming so I think carefully about what I choose to do with it. More importantly, the influx of information reminds me daily that I have a choice in what I choose to read, see and respond to on my timelines.
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