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Video Games

Blog #5: Video Games 

Video games are becoming a big part of our world. People make millions of dollars by playing at tournaments, people have gotten scholarships to play video games in college, and these games continue to grow opportunity for people. Video games are still an outlet to play and have fun. It is very nice to just hop on the game with a couple of friends and have a good time, but I believe that overall video games have become such a massive part of lives that they are becoming important... for different reasons. 

In the thought of video games being comfort for someone is one that impacts me. I have played many video games, but I have narrowed my choices down to two video games that I play. When I mean comfort playing a video game, I mean that by enjoying themselves while playing. The two games I play are Madden, which is a game created by Electronic Arts and is a football game that allows you to play challenges and play others online. I play football and I love football, so it allows me to put my knowledge of football and use it against others and enjoy myself. The other game that I play is Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox game that allows you to do whatever you want. You can play the game so many ways that the possibilities are almost endless. I believe that Minecraft is the best game that has ever been made. The reason I say this is because of this game's ability to progress and continue to evolve. This game has such an outlet of creativity that people have done some insane things with this game, but this is the main reason that I love playing this game. These two games are major in my life and have been a part of me for so long, but some people play these games for thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars playing these games. 

Video games have always been competitive. It was always fun, or not, to play people online in your favorite video game. The way that video games have evolved, there have been competitive challenges that are held with grand prizes of thousands or millions of dollars. There is a large help with services that allow people to stream video games on their platform for money such as YouTube and Twitch. This allows the creators to get money from usual things such as views, comments, and likes, but also receive donations from people watching their videos. These streaming services also welcome an enormous number of endorsements for people that create content, which is where most of the big named gamers get most of their revenue. 

Video games are amazing. Many people look at them and think about them as being a distraction. After these evolutionary moves that video games have made, I believe the stigma surrounding video games and playing them competitively will cease to exist. People will start to look at them in a different light, which will create a better appreciation for games overall. 

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Blog #4: Tracking Social Media Use

Blog #4: Tracking Social Media Use 

I went through a normal day of my life. I didn’t purposefully manage any time throughout this day so that I wasn’t swayed by this project. I usually use the same social media throughout my day, and because I have a busy day most of the time, I wouldn’t have much use of social media as if I did on a free day. My most free day of the week is Monday, so I took the data from Monday and used it for this assignment. This is what I found. 

Instagram was the least used social media that I used the least at around 45 minutes of my day. I rarely use this kind of social media anymore. I will pop on here and there just to see more about sports rather than the people that I follow on the app. I mostly looked on the Instagram stories to just check a couple. I usually click through them quickly and don’t look at them unless I see something interesting. Usually if something happens, I will go on there to look, but if not, I rarely get on. There was a football game on that day, and I wanted to see all the funny memes that people made about the game. Depending on what I see on here is how I feel about being on it. If I am looking at hobbies of mine, I enjoy it, but if my favorite team just lost and it is all over my timeline, I'm not so happy. 

Snapchat was the second least used social media. I spent almost an hour on this app. I used this social media a lot through high school but as I got older, there was little to no reason to spend on it. The main reason I get on this is to look at stories. I see what my friends are up to, and I usually don’t post anything, but some people post a lot, so I find myself getting on quite often, just not for long periods of time. I just feel excited that I can keep up with some old friends on there, but it mostly is boring. 

The third most used social media that I have used is Twitter. In my opinion twitter is so funny. I spent at least 2 ½ hours on this app. This app brings me mostly joy because of some of the hilarious things that I see on there. Twitter is probably the social media app that I enjoy the most because of the good content on there. I also will log onto Twitter if something serious happens to see if it is trending, so it acts as a sort of news source as well. 

The second most used app for the day was TikTok. The rumors of TikTok being an endless and mindless scrolling fest is true. I will mostly use this app if I am bored and no other reason. You cannot tell how long you’ve been there. It is so easy to just keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, until you feel like you’ve been on there too long. I spent a good 3 hours on TikTok. I ignored my homework, but not intentionally, I just got too comfortable and opened the app. I usually feel like a zombie just mindlessly scrolling through until I find something that is interesting or super funny. This is an app that feels like a black hole, and it is impossible to escape. 

The social media that I used the most was YouTube. YouTube is on all the time, even when I am not paying attention, it is background noise. I logged almost 7 hours of YouTube in one day. When I sit down to eat, something always must be on YouTube, and even when I am going to bed. I have so many things and series that I watch on YouTube. I don’t find the amount of time being alarming just for the simple fact that it was mostly just background noise during my 4-hour nap on Monday, but it is interesting to see how much it is in my life. 

Doing an assignment like this really puts into perspective how much social media you use a day. I learned that I seem to have tendencies to do things just because I am bored, or even by habit. If there is a split second of quiet or free time, the first thing that I seem to do is open my phone and open a social media app and keep refreshing until it can’t anymore. I could say that I will try to cut down on social media, but we all know that it's probably not going to happen. 

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Music in Today's Society

Blog #3 

Music has become such a part of everyone's lives. When you are walking around in public, there are about 80% of people around you that are wearing earphones listening to music. Most of us will not drive off in our car until Bluetooth is connected to our car playing our music. We have revolved so much of our lives around music. I believe that it has a heavy influence on our life, majorly on how we feel. When you feel sad you want to listen to sad music. When you're excited, you put on music to feel excited. That is just how we have come to be. 

Music overtime has become more accessible to us allowing us to have it at our leisure whenever. We all know about the times when we had MP3 players and had to illegally download music, and it was just such a hassle. We also remember when we finally got iPods and such to hold our music and gave us a safe way to hold our music, but you couldn’t hold as many songs as you can now. I have on my phone over 6,000 songs. Do I listen to them all? No. I have listened to each song at least once though. (How Much People Listen to Music) One reason that I have all these songs on my phone is simply that I just can. I have to ability to just press a “+” sign and instantly have those songs in my possession. I have playlists for certain songs for specific times or moods. 

Personally, I am one that listens to music a lot. Nowadays I feel like people find silence “too loud”. What I mean by that is someone would much rather have music playing than sit in a silent room. When people go to study they will often listen to music. It could be relaxing music, but they would much rather listen to something than just hear the silence in the room. I will stop whatever I am doing to find the right song. 

I think that music holds a spot in our lives and allows us to dive into memories that we forgot that we had. I believe that hearing a certain song can bring you back to the point where you first remember listening to the song. I linked one song that I love with a time when I was 16 driving around with my friends from my junior year of high school. It reminds me of a time that wasn’t the best, but hearing the song now reminds me of how far I've come from then to now. Songs can unlock memories that we have forgotten about or could even be memories themselves. How many times have you heard a song from like 10 years ago that you used to love, and you can still remember every word of it? I have a lot. 

I think music has become such an important part of our culture, and it gives people the opportunity to express themselves in different ways whether it be music you like listening to or music you make yourself. I believe music will continue to be a major part of our society for many years to come, and I think people will become more acquitted to using music in their everyday lives. 

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Agenda Setting and Framing Theory

Agenda setting isn’t something that you hear very often, but indeed it is very important to try to understand how media spreads and how things are decided over different forms of media. Well, if you don’t know what Agenda setting is, it is basically the thought that news media creates media that they want you to see or hear. For example, that could mean the news media creating a stigma around a certain group of people and then distributing it causing the consumers, such as us, to start creating swayed opinions.

Agenda theory is something that you most likely see almost every single day, no matter it being the news, social media, or any other kind of media. We usually don’t even notice them. We consume this kind of media just like the rest of it, and we allow ourselves to create swayed opinions about certain subjects, and we don’t even know it. I think that this is a terrible thing to do to our society, but can we do something about it? I think people as a group can come together and complete anything that we put our minds to, but if we barely notice it when we come across it because we are so used to seeing this stuff, how do we weed it out from the rest of the media? I really don’t know the answer to that question and worry about how common it has become. 

The framing theory is like the agenda theory but for different reasons. Framing theory is about when something is presented by the media, it is put into a certain light to cause the consumers to create thoughts and opinions based on the way it is shown to them. I enjoy sports heavily, mostly football.

I believe that this technique is used in favor of certain football players, either in college or the NFL. I feel like the media loves certain players at certain positions. The biggest thing I see is quarterbacks that play in the NFL. The media loves players that are nice back to the media and that have great personalities. If someone is not so nice to the media or standoff-Ish to the media, you can see that they portray that person in a bad light and that can most certainly make fans of the sport frame their opinions. Aaron Rodgers is a big name in the NFL that is portrayed in a bad light in the media, and they will always show his bad moments, make sure that the people know that he is rude to the media, and make sure to ask him tough questions to try to catch him saying something that they can twist and show it to the consumers. A couple of players in the NFL that are loved by the media are Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes. They have great personalities and love the media, so the media will bend over backward to make sure that they are always in a great spot for people to love them. Even in games that they lose, they will make sure to show the good moments throughout those games. One more small thing that I see is subtle ways that this can happen by the wording. There is a major difference between saying “Someone lost this game” and “They fell a little short”. These are phrases I see all of the time and these subtle lines can structure how you perceive that piece of media. 

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The Disney Takeover 

Disney. Disney is one of the words that you can say to almost everyone and they will recognize it. Disney has built a name for itself since Walt Disney created it back in 1923. As a kid I knew Disney as a place as in Walt Disney World in Florida and Walt Disney Land in California. I also knew it as my favorite TV channel. I would sit down and wait for the special events and the Disney Original Movies to come out and try to record them on cable if I were to miss them. As I grew up, I started to realize that Disney was much bigger than an amusement park and a TV channel, but something close to what people like to call a monopoly. Now, monopolies are illegal and there are laws in place to prevent monopolies from happening, but that doesn’t stop these big companies from expanding and finding loopholes to try to take over. Disney has been expanding for a long time, slowly chipping away at business and maneuvering their way into buying parts or the whole business. Disney owns so many companies, that own companies, that own other companies. There are a lot of sub-businesses that are owned by other companies that are owned by Disney. 

As you can see in the picture above, there are some very big companies that are apart of Disney. You can probably spot Marvel Studios. All of Marvel content is owned by Disney. Other companies that you can spot are probably Star Wars, Hulu, Pixar, and many more huge companies. There are also construction companies owned by Disney? It feels like Disney owns everything. With Disney’s growing empire, it has made people think about how much power a company can obtain with a certain level of money, and how this will fare with the market to consumers. Disney+, a streaming platform recently released by Disney is one of the most popular streaming platforms in the world, and when it was new, they released a bundle deal with ESPN+ and Hulu along with the purchase of Disney+. With bundle packages like this it is allowing these major companies to swindle the consumer into buying more of their merchandise farthing their empire. 

Knowing that companies like Disney are obtaining so much power and control over the market personally does not bother me. I know that it should be concerning for this kind of control to take place, but as a consumer of Disney resources and platforms, I have had no issue with the company Disney. I believe that a lot of others share the same thoughts that I have. (Did Disney shape how you see the world?) As of right now, Disney has always been a big part of my life and continues to be with its growing number of assets. I know that the power that Disney holds is concerning to most and may be dangerous to the economy and the consumer market, but I am a person that until I am personally affected by someone or something, I hold no grudge or hate towards that thing. 

I will admit to being a consumer of Disney material and admit to knowing about what I am giving into, but personally I have always had good memories of Disney and everything that it has made me feel.