Exposure - Dominic Liu

It was yet another one of those lazy-long-weekend-Mondays, with as little interaction with the outdoors as possible. As the day progressed, I found myself jumping from one source of entertainment to another, often multitasking as I consumed multiple media sources at once.

About 20 minutes after getting woken up by my 11:00 AM alarm, I stumble out of bed towards the toilet, remembering to grab my phone from my desk in preparation for my morning Reddit session. 

Returning to my desk, I receive a call from my parents. I realize how much I miss my family and friends at home, and begin searching for flights home during Thanksgiving through Google. 

Disheartened by the exorbitant cost of flying across the country, I close that tab and alternate between browsing Reddit and Facebook, procrastinating before beginning my work on this creative assignment.

At some point along the way, I visit Crunchyroll, a website providing, among other services, an anime streaming service. Though the front page features dozens of shows, nothing there interests me at the moment, and I close this tab as well, uncertain of why I even visited the site in the first place.

After a while in the late afternoon, I decide it’s time to play some videogames, so I launch one of my favorites, Valve Corporation’s Team Fortress 2. Though my feeble MacBook Air can only barely run this 8-year-old game with all graphics settings on low, my enjoyment is only diminished slightly.

Meanwhile, having just remembered to catch up on a few podcast episodes, I open iTunes and begin listening to the latest episode of The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show, a podcast in which the host, Jeff Rubin, conducts interviews with various experts in random fields. In this episode, he examines the history of Beanie Babies.

After the episode ends, I temporarily lose interest in listening to podcasts for the time being, and begin listening to a playlist of songs I compiled, featuring such artists as AC/DC, Dr. Dre, and Imagine Dragons, among others.

Even Team Fortress 2 is not enough to entertain me for much longer. I turn to Reddit again, but this time load up Twitch on another computer monitor. A gaming live-streaming site, Twitch features personalities like Destiny, a self-proclaimed “professional streamer” known for his excitable and opinionated personality.

While engulfed in the whirlwind of “dank memes” and insulting comments formed between Reddit and Destiny’s stream and chat, I suddenly notice a small amount of frame stuttering when I quickly switch between different windows, undoubtedly a result of the MacBook Air’s weak processor and integrated graphics card. I’ve been meaning to build a new gaming pc for a while, so I look up some guides on PCPartPicker, a website providing guidance on computer part selection.

Finally, I decide it’s about time to start working on this creative assignment. But before I can start, a new upload from one of my followed YouTube channels catches my eye. It’s a long anticipated animated film from Piemations, an animator specializing in gaming related flash animations.

Having been cheered up by the lighthearted and humorous animation, I am finally in the mood to begin working. Actually, let me check Reddit one more time…

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Reflections

Through monitoring my media consumption during this fairly typical day, I gained insight on not only media itself, but also how I used it. With so many songs, podcasts, videos, images, and games out on the Internet, it is literally impossible to even sample every bit of content available to us, let alone experience them in full.

Thus, for those who want to consume as much media as possible, the only reasonable solution is to multitask with as many different forms of it as possible, whether that means redditing on the toilet or listening to music while gaming. This is only encouraged by the accessibility of media provided by the Internet, so mind-numbingly simple that I sometimes end up on a different website before I even consciously know why I’m there. We are therefore also encouraged to jump as rapidly between sources as possible, minimizing our time spent bored at one place.

Of course, this manner of media consumption is not without its faults. It is exhausting to pay attention to so many voices and images at once, and I often find myself rewinding a podcast or video for something I missed the first time around. Sometimes, I take a few minutes to fully invest myself in some music or a video, but this only means I will have more to catch up on later.