Media and Me: A Day in the Life

Last weekend I went with my girlfriend Elizabeth to visit my dad, his significant other, and my sister in New York City. My parents are divorced, and it was my father’s turn this year to host my sister and I for the Thanksgiving holiday. His girlfriend Lauren lives near Greenwich in lower east Manhattan. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, my dad gave me some money, his metro card, and a map of the city, telling Elizabeth and me to go out and have a good time doing whatever we want. If you want anything in this world, my first suggestion to you would be the big apple.

I’m going to take a step back to Friday morning. I woke up at seven to pick Elizabeth up from her house and get both of us to the train station. On the way I turned the radio on to my favorite station, 94.1. I really like that station because it plays a lot of grunge music. I think it captures the 80’s and 90’s grunge scene really well, “As the first national electronic mass medium, radio’s influence in the formation of American culture cannot be overestimated” (Media and Culture 139). Also on weekends after eleven they play nothing but Pink Floyd. The station was playing one of my favorite bands, the Stone Temple Pilots.

One thing I love about STP is how unbelievably weird their music videos are

We had to take the train to 30^th street station in Philadelphia so that we could catch a Bolt Bus to New York. There was a window of about an hour where we had to just wait around in the train station for the bus to come. I bought a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer because I like to read the about the Flyers in the sports section. The Flyers had blown out the Minnesota Wild two days ago and there was an article talking about the their scoring depth. The newspaper industry has declined immensely in recent years, “The Web site ‘Newspaper Death Watch’ lists newspapers that gave folded since the site went up in 2007 . . . not since the recording industry during the 1930’s or radio during the 1950’s have we seen a mass medium in such a crisis” (Media and Culture 247). With the emergence of television and the Internet fewer and fewer people read the paper anymore. I’m guilty of this too; the only reason I didn’t read about it on philadelphiaflyers.com was because the Internet in the train station was really slow.

The Flyers won 6-1, Image from the bleacherreport.com

There was better Internet on the bus though, we finally got onto the bus and there was better Internet there. I spent most of the two hour trip watching hockey highlights and related videos on nhl.com and reading up on the new Halo: Reach map pack scheduled to release on the 29^th. Hockey has been a major part of my life for as long as I can remember, and it has been the only thing that has stuck with me this long. With all of the things a person can do on the Internet now, I think it’s fascinating that it started from “an attack-proof military communications network in the 1960’s” (Media and Culture 45). I love that I can now find hockey scores and highlights so quickly at the click of a button now.

Friday night after Elizabeth and I spent some time on 34^th street and 42^nd street, we went back to the apartment and decided to watch a movie. We had looked at show times in the local theaters, but didn’t find anything we wanted to see so we watched The Nightmare on Elm Street streaming on Netflix. The Nightmare on Elm Street has always been one of the most iconic horror movies for me growing up as a kid. I think the movie is a great example of a consensus narrative, which is “a term that describes cultural products that become popular and provide shared cultural experiences” (Media and Culture 242). Movies are a massive part of American culture and while I haven’t thought of it this way before, I think they are a major part of our history now. Practically everyone on the face of this planet knows who Darth Vader and Indiana Jones are.

image from experimentaltheology.blogspot.com

Elizabeth had to leave around six on Sunday night, so I had the evening to myself in the big city. My dad, Lauren, and my sister Zoe went to a party earlier and I had the apartment to myself. I decided to walk to a video store on Broadway and I picked up a copy of The Matrix. That’s another brilliant and iconic movie by the way. When I got back, I was in a mood for hockey again. I put The Matrix in my laptop, and played with the sound on while I muted TV and watched the New York Rangers play the Nashville Predators. The Rangers ended up winning in a shootout. While multitasking like a pro, I chuckled to myself a bit. “In 1948, only 1% of America’s households had a television set” and here I was using it as an added activity while doing something else (Media and Culture 146).

Image from dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu

I had to wake up early Sunday morning to catch a bus to get back to Burlington. I was not looking forward to being on a bus for ten hours, and I was really glad I had taken with me the latest issue of USA Hockey magazine. It isn’t Sports Illustrated or anything, whose “circulation rose to 3.1 million in 2009” but I like it because it focuses completely on hockey and hockey related subjects (Media and Culture 298). The latest issue featured a story about Paul Stastny and his family. His father fled communist Czechoslovakia to play in Canada, and eventually he managed to get the rest of his family to North America. Paul Stastny now plays for the Colorado Avalanche and played on the US Olympic team in Vancouver last year.

Image from salmonhockey.org

I had to transfer buses in Boston because there wasn’t a bus that went straight to Burlington from New York. When I got on the second bus, I took out my copy of The Rhetorical Reader and tried to pick a story to write about in my Rhetoric class. I was really tired at that point, and wish that I could have closed my eyes and listened to it on tape. “The number of audio books borrowed from libraries soared in the 1990’s and early 2000’s” and I wished I didn’t have to actually read it. This was for a final paper, and I eventually decided to go with The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien.

Image from moronefreshmen.wikispaces.com

I know what everyone is expecting for the sound recording paragraph, but I’m going to take it in a different direction. I could talk about one of my favorite bands, Radiohead, and how they “decided to sell their 2007 album In Rainbows on the internet for whatever price fans wished to pay,” but I figure everyone is going to talk about the music they listen to. So, I’m going to talk instead about some sound recording I’ve done myself. I’m taking the audio production class at Champlain College this semester, and recently we were given a silent clip from Iron Man where we had to create all of the sound effects ourselves. It took me more than a few hours to do, and I used a mix of effects found in the Soundtrack Pro databanks and effects I made with a microphone and a field recorder. I was afraid of the project before starting, but I found that I actually had a lot of fun doing it.

I was going to show the video here, but the Internet doesn't want me to for some reason. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it here: Iron Man Clip

So there was a weekend in my life in the media world. Even now I’m writing this blog post while watching the Flyers play the New York Islanders with live streaming. We should be blowing this team out 6-0, but its only 3-2 Flyers with two minutes left in the third. Its funny the sense of awareness of media this class has made me. As college students we are exposed to media almost twenty-four hours a day. I would have thought nothing of it if it weren’t for this class.

Champlain College in 60 Seconds

My biggest contribution to the group video was the acting I did for it. Our group decided the places where we shot as a group, and I contributed to the location scouting by helping to pick some of the scenes. Other than that I helped simply by trying to make the process as fun as possible while we were shooting.

While I feel that I contributed a fair amount to the shooting process, I didn’t do any of the editing. I’m happy with the B+ or A- our group got, and I would have probably given myself about the same in terms of effort.

The hardest part of making the video I thought was finding time in the week where all of us were free to work on it. I have class at weird times, some had one or two jobs, and some had other work that needed to be done as well. I think we did a good job of splitting up the work to people that had similar free periods though.

For me, the most rewarding aspect of making our video was getting a few laughs both in between shots and while I was actually acting. Even though we’ve all been at Champlain for almost a semester now, I don’t know too many people outside of the dorm I live in. It felt good to joke around with new people.