The Purge

My 12 Hours Without Media

I thought it’d be easy, I thought I wasn’t so dependent on media that I couldn’t stand its absence for 12 hours. But I quickly caught myself counting down to 9 o’clock, when the challenge would end. There were little things in my daily life that I never even thought about as being media, they were just always there. For instance, not having music to listen to at the gym, or not being able to simply look up a restaurant online. The whole day I was worried that I had missed messages and calls piling up in my phone, which I turned off completely and left in my room. There was a definite upside to the experience, however. On my day without media I went to places and did things I had been wanting to do but hadn’t found the time. I visited the coffee shop on the square, went to the cool record store in town, finished my book, and even did some yoga. I walked around campus, for what felt like the first time, without constantly looking down at my phone, and was able to actually take in the world around me. Of course when I saw that beauty my immediate thought was that I wanted to take an picture and post it to Instagram. Wherever I went I felt like the only one not immersed in media. Everyone was on their phones and computers and watching TV. For the first time I realized how annoying it is that we are constantly plugged in. I was sitting across from my boyfriend at a coffee shop and realized he was more focused on taking a cool picture of his coffee for Instagram than he was on his actual coffee. Our generation is addicted to the social gratification we receive (or believe we are receiving) on social media. We’re constantly counting likes, reblogs, favorites, retweets. It’s not just social media, either. We turn towards television and music and movies as a sort of distraction from our lives. We as humans are some impatient that we can’t wait in line for more than a minute without checking our phones or glancing a television screen. At the gym I caught myself watching the football game that happened to be on TV. I don’t even like football! I just liked the distraction it offered while I was waiting. It may seem as if now I see media in a whole new light and I’m against it but that’s not this case. There’s good media thats’s useful in helping society advance, and then there’s mindless media that has no real benefit. I think growing up surrounded by media, it has become something many people take for granted. I’d love to see the chaos of the entire student population of Western Kentucky taking on this challenge at the same time. People might resort to ridiculous measures such as actually talking to one another.