Media Blog

At the age of 16 I am surrounded by the media everywhere I go.  This unit helped me take notice of appeals that sway me in one direction or another.   On days I don’t have practice or other extra curricular activities I get home and relax on my phone for an hour or two.  Because I am scrolling through millions of posts, fully entertained by the excitement I often get caught up. I get sucked into the virtual world that is my phone, and when I finally get to my homework I dread it.  When I force myself to do homework I am unplugging myself from the media, or so I thought. This unit has taught me that the media is everywhere. In the music industry artists make pop culture references, if the news is on I’ll hear commercials, I can’t really escape it. Through keeping this media blog I was able to create a timeline of my relationship with the media.  I have documented observations from the news, including opinions, and personal statements. With the blogs I can see how aware I am of

Its crazy to think that social media is used enough for pets to profit.  I can’t decide if thats a good or bad thing. On the up side its a great way for you to have an extra source of income.  Owning a pet has its expenses and if they are instagram famous those costs could be covered.  Plus owners would be offered plenty of free pet products that brands want them to put on their account.  New jobs are also created as pet managers are “needed” to manage the legal side of contracts. However I feel like this could also be a sign that we are using social media too much.  Is it ok that we rely on these virtual animals for happiness? Rather than going outside to see these animals in real life we click on an app to scroll through pictures.  I feel like throughout this unit we have talked a lot about the effect social media has on women and men. It can create an unrealistic expectation for its viewers of what their life should be like.

Social Media seems to be the place where you can find anything.  I recently read an article off of the CNBC website titled “ Pets are the new social media influencer, and this Harvard Law grad represents many of them”.  The article is written by Erin Barry and talks about how well pets perform on social media. Barry talks about how the pet influencer business has become large enough to the point where the animals have more followers than a lot of humans.  These furry stars need representation to navigate their popularity. With pets tending to perform better on social media the pet influencer market has become the biggest.  Everyone loves their pets, they make you happy, so when people see the pets with a certain brand they associate that happiness with the product. The social media accounts don't just have pet products, they have a variety of brands including movie studios, hotels, and cleaning products.  If these furry influencers have an audience of around 1 million fol