Le Post 5

Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, media is being thrown at you. You see advertisements that are most likely targeted for you on trains, buses, simply walking down the street on billboards, on papers on the floor, and this is all without bringing up the TV or internet mainstream media sources. These specifically altered ads or biased new sources are a part of everyday life. I'd like to propose the new media sources which seem to be getting more and more popular of late. Blogs/Forums.

Now, of course, you wouldn't want to get all your information from other people. However consider this: A man from China gets a visa to leave the country, and posts on a blog during his travels about specific hardships in China that the Chinese government might be censoring. Understandably this is a unique circumstance, but peers with knowledge and opinions are never a poor thing to at the very least consider. For example: My sister lately does not watch a film that she's on the fence over watching unless she's heard good things over it. Generally Facebook is one medium of which she adheres to this policy. Also, when she looks outward for an opinion, rather than going on what professional critics say via newspaper or something, she checks out sites such as rottentomatoes.com, which not only weighs in audiences opinion and the opinions of critics, but lets people write their comments of the film.

That's just one example, I could proceed and speak about the wealth of knowledge you see on this blog for example that you would not see on mainstream television. Of course you can Google "bell hooks" for example and see all her top drawer works, but a lot of people wouldn't know to search her (as I certainly didn't before I had been introduced into this course). Plus certain blog like that one guy who did the Chris Brown video that we've seen in the beginning of class (can't for the life of me remember the mans name) but that's just a video blog commenting on certain things that occur in our society.

What I'm trying to say is, look around when you'd like to learn about a topic and you can also learn from sources that aren't particularly the most scholarly. For example apparently this Skyrim is the best game existing at the moment, but had it not been for forums or blogs I wouldn't even know this game even exists. I also wouldn't know certain occupy wall street facts and all sorts of relevant real world subject matters. There is a wealth of information in the fingertips of our peers, if only we'd look!