Rachel Gu - Field Exercise 1.1

I'm a big fan of cooking videos on YouTube, from Cooking with Dog to street food presentations to Alton Brown. Lately, I've been into Gordon Ramsey's cooking channels on YouTube. I started watching full episodes of Kitchen Nightmares . As for the advertisements, on each episode, there would be around 10 ads throughout the video.  Some of these actually stop the video to play the ad while others have a little pop-up that blocks the bottom part of the video, as shown below. Also, I am usually too engrossed in the video to notice, but there are also occasionally ads next to the video, such as the car ad below.

Yesterday, I went to the Utrecht Art Store nearby to check out the back to school sale but found the online prices much better. I went to the Blick, which owns Utrecht, and immediately I see discounts and sales. The first page tempts me to click on the free shipping/discount sale and the red "save now." The cheaper prices usually persuade me to pay for more. I actually only needed to buy a watercolor pad, but ended up buying a few pens to get the free shipping. 

While doing homework, I sometimes take a break, take out my phone, and play some games or chat on Facebook. Game-wise, similar to many games, my game features an option to get currency, that I would have to pay for, by watching videos. This is through the FREE button, but I usually don't notice it. Facebook-wise, the chat heads keep me looking to see if anyone has sent me a message.

Below is a flyer that my roommate and I put up because of the robots. At the same time, it does advertise Facebook and Bring Your Kids to Work Day, but when I look at the poster, I look at the robots usually, not the words.

Summary

Throughout the day, I noticed that I consider media to be typically technology-related, so fliers and signs almost went by unnoticed. On the other hand, I am heavily exposed to videos and games, which reflect my hobbies. Despite YouTube having many ads, whether on the video or next to it, I don't pay attention to those. I got deeply engrossed in cooking videos today, like most days, which led me to binge watch most of the videos on Gordon Ramsey's channel, again. Shopping-wise, I prefer to shop online and usually check the clearance or sale items first. Looking back, I believe this encourages me to buy more because I begin to think “Well, its really cheap now...” or “I should buy over x amount to get the discount/free shipping.” However, for something I don't like, I don't give it much attention if any at all. Similarly for the poster, I like robots, but I haven't paid any attention to the words or companies on it. For my phone games, I usually play it for the story or game-play, which gets me thinking deeply or provides me quick entertainment to continue trudge through homework. Overall, I realize that I am exposed to a lot more advertisements than I expected, but at the same time, I don't pay attention to any of them. Instead, I usually pay attention to only the things I enjoy. I think this makes sense but at the same time potentially dangerous because I then don't know how that media affects me.