My Physical Relationship to Media

Media is integral to my daily life, but I find myself strategically separating myself from it. Life is so busy that I find myself longing for and plotting for ways that I can have a free day without leaving my apartment or using my car, checking my email or even turning on my computer, and while I always have my cell phone with me, it is usually turned off. While my media is harmless in itself and an essential part of my life, I see it as a connection to the world and an ever present connection to the people in my life. I’m surrounded by people almost every hour of every day. I go to school, and I am in constant contact with my students, officemates, teachers, classmates, random people etc. I go home and have calls and/or emails from students, teachers, classmates, friends, and family members waiting for me. Sometimes the demand of being available 24 hours a day 7 days a week gets to be too much and I decide not to turn on my computer for a day and to keep my cell phone turned off. While it is often liberating to make myself unavailable and being unavailable often helps me focus on work because I know there will be no distractions, I often feel guilty and selfish taking this time and cutting myself off from the world. This process also often makes me feel left out like I’m choosing to undergo a self-imposed exile. These feelings show just how essential my media is to my life even when I choose not to use it.

The most poignant example I can think of, of my reliance on the media was a time when I did not choose to exile myself but found myself exiled anyway. I had just moved to Fargo and knew very few people in town. My Internet hadn’t been hooked up yet, I hadn’t gotten rabbit ears for my TV yet so I didn’t get any reception, and my cell phone quit working. I’ve never felt so isolated in my life because all of my methods for interacting with the outside world were gone. My primary use of my media is to interact with the world. While I don’t frequent chat rooms or sites like Second Life, I use remediated forms of technology like emails or Facebook posts to write to people and phone calls to talk to them when I can’t in person. Essentially, I use my media to interact with people when I cannot or chose not to interact with them in person, and while I often chose to use my media to separate me from the people in my life when I need a break, the situation becomes very different when the media is taken away and not using it is no longer a choice.