In a Relationship?? With Media??

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My relationship with media is a complex one. On one hand, it helps me through life. I can watch a Youtube video when I am down and it will help me feel better. I can keep in contact with relatives across the ocean, or I can see what my friends are up to. I can study art from an instructor who usually charges $100 per lesson. On the other hand, net neutrality is increasingly being threatened, and I can find that I spend hours upon hours of time just scrolling through photos and videos on the Instagram explore page. Also, as reluctant as I am to admit it, I get a significant amount of my news from commercialized Snapchat Stories. These Stories only feed you mindless information and when they do tell you information about real-world events, you never know how the stories are manipulated. Not only with Snapchat Stories, but big news stations as well. You never really know when the stories have been manipulated to make one party look better, and to shove the other party into the dirt. Also, gigantic corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon may seem amazing on the surface, but once you do some digging they are actually terrifying. Google has all your information. They track pretty much everything that you do. Facebook tracks everything that you like, and then tailor advertisements for your liking, just so that you are more inclined to buy what they're trying to sell. Amazon takes note of what you look at to possibly buy and then sells it to advertisers on some websites that you may go to. Everything is just so that they can make more money, not caring about your privacy or welfare at all.
With all this being said, I still actively use and consume media. I am an active user of social media, and I do read news articles sometimes. I do watch societal and political commentators like Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert. I do have a Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This media has allowed people to express themselves, but it also has created a huge place where huge corporations can make a huge buck, not by selling products, but from selling you. That, in itself, is beyond scary. Beyond threatening. It is monumentally terrifying.

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