Blog Post # 3

Chapter six in the media textbook talks about media saturation and how every facet of our daily lives is filled with media.

Well, I found an article on the Lexis Nexis database entitled, Entertainment Overload; Tivo, Dvds, Ipods, Blogs, Xbox 360: It’s a world of endless possibilities. But is that really good for us, that fit this topic of media saturation perfectly.

The article used three individuals to emphasize how much of an effect media has on everyone. The three people chosen were either innovators or early adopters who stayed up to date with the latest technology. Specifically, one of them had a “34-inch-screen HDTV with surround sound and digital recording capability, an iPod Nano, two Apple computers, and an Xbox 360, the latest in video game technology.”

After establishing that media is all around us as individuals, the article went on to question if this saturation is a good thing or a bad thing. The textbook does the same thing. It opens up with an article about media saturation which basically states that it is impossible to avoid media, wheter it is on TV, radio, ipod, phone, magazine, newspaper, or billboard! The book talks about media overload and how people are bombared with messages, specifically spam email messages.

The articled discussed the same media overload, stating that by having so many media outlets and options from which to choose from, people are cluttering their day and creating more distractions to overcome in 24 hours. For example, if a college student has to write a paper they may have the TV on in the background or the radio on or the may be trying to talk on the phone at the same time. By constantly having a rush of media, individuals have less concrete time and more distractions to ignore.

Personally, I feel that this is true. I mean I always feel like I never have enough hours in the day to complete everything I need to. I wonder how many hours I spend a month listening to my new ipod shuffle and watching shows on BET.

Both the book and the article discussed the abundance of information and how this pertains to society. The article highlighted the fact that this abundance is making individuals have a very short attention span. For example, commercials have roughly five seconds to catch our attention and hold it. If they don’t we will most likely flip the channel or tune out. This is proving to be a major problem for networks and companies like Nielson, that try to capture data on TV viewership.

Another issue for indivduals is that they can never hear about everything no matter how many media outlets are accessible to them. Therefore, a person could read all the articles on a news website and still miss a newsworth event that happened the same day.

So what does all this mean for the future of the media? Well since Moore’s law states that chips double in ablity every year and half, technologies are only going to improve and add to the saturation problem. However, there are spyware services for spam messages and not all media is bad. For example, online dating has helped to create many successfully marriages and video games have helped to prepare troops for war.

All in all, media saturation is time consuming and unexcapable. But nowadays you have to take the good with the bad.