Reflection and Analysis of a Week of my Media Habits

1) An account of a week in your life with an awareness of the different types of media you use, reflecting on yourself as a media consumer. See the media you chose in relation to both form and content.


Firstly, to dispel some preconceived notions. I am not taking “media” to be defined as its social definition i.e. “all forms of electronic media”. Rather I am taking “media” back to its linguistic root: “media” being the plural of “medium”, a method through which one may express themselves. This working definition of media expands the ambit of what can be considered media in my daily life. This is necessary because these various forms of media have been used in multiple ways to achieve my goals. 


To list all the kinds of media I have interacted with in the last one week, it would be:

  • Social Media: as a means of communication; as a marketplace for both conglomerates and small businesses; as a means for advertisement. (Figs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12). 

  • The World Wide Web: as a GPS; as a reserve, recaller, and point of access for all other points of access of knowledge; access to platforms for creative functions (Google Drive; Canva, etc); as recreation (Youtube, Netflix); as a means to access transportation and travel. (Figs 4, 7, 8, 9, and 14).  

  • Video Gaming: as a recreational activity. (Fig 13).

  • Print Media: as books; as a worksheet containing prompts for an academic paper; archived records. 

  • Portable Electronic Devices: as physical access points to the digital world of media (smartphone, laptop, etc.).

As a media consumer, I consume diverse forms of media on a daily basis: from listening to music to editing films and writing this essay right now. I am deeply immersed and intuitive when it comes to seeking a form of media that helps me achieve my goals whether that is making online payments through my debit card or UPI, or mapping my journey to a destination. As a media consumer, I am heavily reliant on these forms of media to help me achieve my goals, and find myself helpless without them. For eg: my chosen bank has installed a limit on my UPI apps, limiting my UPI payments to 4 payments every 24 hours. To avoid being stranded without any payment method, I make sure to keep cash on my person at all times. My smartphone’s SIM card often glitches and fails to pick up a signal. I feel helpless and afraid when I am travelling in such situations. In the possibility I get lost, I cannot rely too much on my phone to reliably provide a way home. Thus, I keep mapping my way around the city I travel, ensuring I have cash on hand in order to safely reach my destination. 


Media is now an integral part of my professional life as well. One of the main responsibilities of my part-time job is to create social media content on a daily basis. This is primarily for Instagram: creating posts, reels, and stories; authoring captions and hashtags; curating images and content across platforms. In this way, I am not just using media for its capabilities but also creating media by communicating information across different platforms - physical and digital. 




2) Analysis of your media habits using some of the readings you have done in class. (A minimum of three readings from the class must reflect in your final submission. Beyond this, you have to choose one more reading from a few PDFs we will upload on the google drive by Monday.) 


At this point in the essay, as described earlier, my relationship with media is one of dependence and in a lot of cases, distraction. The number of Social Media, Recreational, and Commercial Applications I have on my phone are all testaments to that fact. Here is where Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ comes in. Defining the spectacle to be capitalism’s tool to distract and placate the masses, it can be found in every interaction we have with any form of media, including all of the ones I had described earlier. Even this essay becomes a part of the spectacle, a distraction from the very real terrors of climate degradation, economic recession, xenophobia, homphobia, and the countless other crises that plague society today.  All of these forms of media:

  • Social Media

  • The World Wide Web

  • Video Gaming

  • Print Media

  • Portable Electronic Devices

serve as distractions from the world and its very real terrors. However, these forms of media, like this essay, serve as space for reflection, study, and offensive/defensive measures against the very real terrors as well. Taking this essay itself as an example. To write this essay and support it with the correct theoretical framework, I need to have a working knowledge of academic writing, which academic sources and reserves are trustworthy, what makes them trustworthy, what makes them detrimental to my essay, how to combine different theories to support my argument. All of this framework that supports the act of me writing this essay can be termed as “Media Literacy”. Stated in “Information Disorder” by Claire Wardle, it is defined as “Researching and evaluating best practices for teaching digital literacy in an age of information disorder.” Media literacy is then not limited to the writing of academic papers, but also to all of the media I consume. How do I know that a particular video game is suitable for me? How do I verify that the small business that has an Instagram account is a legitimate business? How do I verify and understand all of the information that activists are disseminating through social media and be 100% certain that it is true and factual and real? The method of discernment between Misinformation, Malinformation, and Disinformation is something that we learn as students of media through Media Literacy. 

Information Disorder - the sharing or developing of false information with or without the intent of harming others - is not just limited to Misinformation, Malinformation, and Disinformation, in my opinion. I believe it to be expanded to the overwhelming abundance of information that we can access at the touch of a button. For the last few weeks, I have been under duress writing multiple essays for the different courses I am pursuing. I research for each essay, sifting through dozens of academic papers, articles, dissertations, novels, all in hopes of formulating and formalising an argument which will get me an A+. The access to the Internet means that I have access to a globe’s worth of opinion on the same subject. This overwhelming abundance of information has at many times disoriented and overwhelmed me, pushing me to step away from the screen. Adding in the time I spend browsing other applications and recreational spaces, I search for the serotonin that researching and writing essays does not give me. This I believe has become an essential part of Debord’s spectacle. The distraction is not just the form of media, but its various forms, and the multiplicity of media content. This is again where Media Literacy helps, not just in verifying trustworthy media, but selecting, managing, and holding on to those sources. The trademarks of trustworthiness are then formalised and taught as Media Literacy, resource lists of trustworthy sources and generational knowledge aids in the curation of trustworthy media.


However, media at this stage in the essay remains a distraction, a spectacle. How do we go about making it something more? This is where the youth’s use of media comes in. This essay, as I mentioned earlier, becomes a space for action rather than distraction. On publishing it anywhere on the internet, it will join the thousands of academic papers that testify to the fact that Media Literacy is a tool that can be taught and instilled in people, and testify to its usefulness. In the same way, posts on activism regarding human rights, climate change, feminism all contribute to discourses, discussions, and the development of their respective academic fields. This is again comes down to the same principle: if there are thousands of perspectives on the same subject, there have to be thousands of people with access to media. We then live in the age of crowd-sourced information creation and dissemination. Media then becomes part of an essential toolkit of the proletariat in making their voices heard and taking affirmative action against the terrors that plague human society. One of the most recent examples of this being Elon Musk’s Twitter poll, asking Twitter users if he should step down as owner of Twitter, saying he would abide by the decision of the poll. 57.5% of the voters said that he should step down. Since then the platform has seen mass exodus from  its users to competing platforms due to the recent bans of journalist accounts as well as accounts of other social media platforms. Another great example of this is the Uncensored Library in Minecraft. To understand its significance, we will need to go back a ways. 


Minecraft is a sandbox video game with a gameplay element that provides players a great degree of creativity to interact with, usually without any predetermined goal, or alternatively with a goal that the players set for themselves. In an environment where the players are free to do what they want, they created the Uncensored Library. The Uncensored Library is a Minecraft server and map released by Reporters without Borders and created by BlockWorks, DDB Berlin, and MediaMonks as an attempt to circumvent censorship in countries without freedom of the press. The library contains banned reporting from Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. This is one of the greatest examples of affirmative action against the spectacle of media, as well as the use of media in a way that media and factual information is being crowdsourced, crowdfunded, and crowd maintained. People, by the virtue that they are people, will continue to rage against the very real terrors of this world, and media plays an integral role in that. Just like this essay that you have read. Just like this essay that I have just finished writing. 

3) Visual aids in the form of photos or short videos (not more than a minute long) that supplement/support your essay. These visual aids should be captioned and cited.


MCS Final Assignment - Photos and Video

Works Cited:


Kandel, Nirmal. “Information Disorder Syndrome and Its Management.” JNMA; journal of the Nepal Medical Association vol. 58,224 280-285. 30 Apr. 2020, doi:10.31729/jnma.4968

Debord Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books 1994.

Gordon Eric and Paul Mihailidis. Civic Media : Technology Design Practice. MIT Press 2016. 

Silverblatt Art. Media Literacy : Keys to Interpreting Media Messages. Fourth ed. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO LLC 2014.

Wardle, Claire. “Information Disorder, Part 1: The Essential Glossary”. First Draft, Medium. https://medium.com/1st-draft/information-disorder-part-1-the-essential-glossary-19953c544fe3

Wardle, Claire. “Information Disorder, Part 2: Mapping the Landscape”. First Draft, Medium. https://medium.com/1st-draft/information-disorder-part-2-mapping-the-landscape-efa470155e7b 

Wardle, Claire. “Information Disorder, Part 3: Useful Graphics”. First Draft, Medium. https://medium.com/1st-draft/information-disorder-part-3-useful-graphics-2446c7dbb485

“Sandbox Game”. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game 

“The Uncensored Library”. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncensored_Library#:~:text=The%20Uncensored%20Library%20is%20a,%2C%20Saudi%20Arabia%2C%20and%20Egypt. 

The Uncensored Library. https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en

Hern, Alex. “Elon Musk’s Twitter poll: 10 million say he should step down”. The Guardian, 19 Dec. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/19/elon-musk-says-step-down-twitter-ceo-poll-tesla

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