My Relationship to Media in 2017

     I attended around 50-75 thanksgiving dinners on Thursday evening while visiting my grandparents house.  This is almost impossible you might think, how could I visit this many family gatherings from one spot?  Simply by clicking through my Snapchat, I viewed all the Thanksgiving meals of my followers family from the screen of my phone.  Rather than ignoring the harmless posts, it dawned on me how these people were looking at a glowing screen while their families sat as shadows in the background.  My interaction with media is a love-hate relationship mostly regarding my social media accounts.  I find myself glancing at posts during my free time and chat with friends from school like most students in high school.  Snapchat and Instagram are easy ways to stay in the loop with things happening outside of school, which I follow.  Yet, I see others taking advantage media by publicizing their entire life just to get the extra followers, likes, or comments.  Humans are acting as if media is the center of the universe and are becoming hypnotized by these apps.  Rather than enjoying the moment they are in, people feel the need to capture it on media, bombarding my feed.  I feel that people have transformed media into places where they can simply brag about their lives, complain about a current problem, and use emojis to replace their emotions.  Media in a broader sense has also taken over the human population through the TV, ads, and other forms of mass communication.  In a way they control our lives by pulling people away from reality through the fear of missing out.  We feel the need to be within arms reach of our electronic devices of every second, of every minute of each hour.  The scary new norm, “people don’t want to be left behind,” has become the new reality in 2017, and I feel has given media control over innocent minds.