Pop culture is such a big part of our world today, and it keeps growing.
The Media that is part of our lives can drive us into mayhem. Artwork by Tori Wallace
Almost everyone on Earth has something media related incorporated into their spare time, causing people to take on a more lazy mentality for the future.
Some can’t live without their music. Others spend countless hours watching T.V. or on Facebook. However people happen to use the free time available to them, chances are they use it up with some sort of media outlet. Our world today is chock full of free and paid electronic entertainment of many kinds. Things like music, books, and movies have been around for as long as most people can remember, but all three are vastly different entities today than what they used to be. These days, video games and the Internet dominate our world, being the biggest and newest media outlets. If anything is certain it’s that all of these provide popular entertainment.
Literature has been around as long as intelligent societies have been around to produce it. Books have transcended the ages, and are still a viable source of media entertainment. Sadly, unless assigned by a teacher or required by a particular job, our society of today has seen a plummeting descent in the reading of literature. According to nea.gov just from 1992-2002 alone, the rate of young American readers who read for fun vs. those who just read for work or school was at a 9% decline. That’s almost one percent per year, and now 2013 is upon us. Things like magazines still hold the attention of the masses, but Newspapers have almost all gone digital. Even books have seen a digital update in Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. I love reading from time to time, but even I have to accept that reading is not my most go-to media outlet today. This could eventually lead to a less intelligent world, if it hasn’t already.
Film has become one of the biggest industries in our world today. According filmbug.com, it all began when William Kennedy Laurie Dickson invented a motion-guided form of the celluloid strip, and Thomas Edison showed one of these moving pictures with his Kinetograph and Kinetoscope at the 1893 Chicago World Fair. Since then, movies have become an ever-evolving art form and have become the multibillion-dollar projects they are now. I adore movies, but they are not the only part to this visual outlet. Television has been a hit ever since it’s début in the 1950s, and continues on through the beginning of the 21st century. These days, television is bigger than ever with sports, cartoons, and reality and fictional TV shows dominating the airways. This has lead to people often wasting a lot of their valuable time watching whole TV shows through web applications such as Netflix. Otherwise, people may record the plethora of content available to them on the TV airways, and watch it all whenever they get the time.
The Internet is the newest and biggest media outlet. The actual World Wide Web (www) has only been around for about 21 years. That may seem like a long time, but in the greater scheme of things the web is a very young technology that has blown up since its release. According to computer.yourdictionary.com the www only started with approximately 3000 hosts on the network. The Internet rapidly grew into its current outrageous 644 million active websites today, and it continues to grow. People today use the web for almost everything, like social communication, (Facebook, email, and Twitter) news, research, entertainment, and even online schooling. Things that used to be print have now adapted to the digital age, with many newspapers and magazines going digital. I don’t spend as much time on the Internet as many people do, but I have the utmost respect for its sheer power, and how it has changed modern society for better or for worse.
Music began with people simply making noise and (as everything else) has evolved and changed throughout the ages. Orchestras playing beautiful scores are still present in our society, but pop-culture is the biggest effect on music. A lot of people these days listen to music all the time, with Ipods becoming the definitive way to enjoy music on the go. Others, like me, only really listen to music during something boring or tedious to liven up the action (Long drives, mowing lawns, working, ext.). Sadly, the Internet has made the music industry decrease in much of its wealth. People no longer even have to purchase and download music from iTunes to listen to it. Instead they can stream songs for free from websites like YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora. Even though I’m not the biggest fan of modern music, I will continue to listen to it occasionally on the radio and my Ipod.
Like it or not, the video game industry is a monster. What came from people waiting in lines at arcades to move an electronic paddle up and down (Pong), has become a cinematic entertainment experience. According to celebritynetworth.com Modern Warfare 3 set the world record for any entertainment item sold in history, hitting the $1 billon mark in only 16 days. With life like graphics, hours upon hours of content, and a $60 price tag, games really aren’t just the simple fun they used to be. Some video games have the heart and history of a piece of fantasy or science fiction literature, the cinematic cut scenes (non-playable story segments in a game) equating to a movie, a beautifully orchestrated musical score, online multiplayer formats with dozens of gamers playing together, and the action-packed fun that only a video game can offer. These features make video games the ultimate media outlet in my eyes, combining every other outlet mentioned thus far.
People still enjoy playing sports and spending time outside, but almost everyone has a vein of lazy present somewhere in their personality. Many of these media outlets provide great fun when one is not felling particularly productive, but just wants to kick back and relax. Others use these as a reward, topping off a pile of work. The Internet can be used for research, homework, and word processing, which gives it a powerful edge compared to the rest. Music can be listened to during almost any action, and mobile gaming/movie watching is becoming a popular trend in our tech savvy world. Books have always been an on-the-go outlet, and probably offer more knowledge than any other outlet one can use. There is only one definite fact pertaining to all these outlets no matter how much they change: they are never going away. With all the changes they’ve gone through and all the people that utilize them, these five things may eventually rule our world some day. After all, they already rule the lives of many people in a psychological sense. It’s only a matter of time before they extort more power out of the addictive relationship many people have with their products.
