Media Log, Sunday, August 29, 2010
8 am: Awake now, but really don’t want to be just yet. The laziest distraction within arm’s reach is the iPod. I plug her in and listen to The Doors for a half hour.
The Doors may seem like an odd choice, seeing as there is little about The Doors that isn’t odd. In fact, I had listened to very little of their music before this summer. What changed? I watched Oliver Stone’s The Doors for the first time and thought that it was awesome. This is not unusual, for me to be drawn to a media artifact due to exposure to it through film or television. I have read books, listened to music, and even visited places because of said exposure.
8:30 am: I make my way to the restroom, which is a gang restroom (in Main Campbell here on campus). In the stall I notice that there is several news articles from the Washington Post website taped up. I suppose someone was doing their homework in here and then didn’t bother to take it with them.
Something I see all of the time is people carrying around printouts of news articles from the Internet. If you’re going to be carrying around pieces of paper with news on them, why don’t you just buy a newspaper?
8:40 am: I begin my daily computer routine. Up first; e-mail. Over the summer I would occasionally skip a day without checking my e-mail, but during the school year that probably won’t happen often. Things happen so quickly and we are normally only notified of changes through e-mail, so we must check it early and often.
Today, I don’t have much spam. Most of the junk comes from my alma mater, George Mason. They send me lots of news updates and such, which are great, but it is usually only a thin disguise for a request for money. I’ve come to ignore most of these.
Next up is Facebook. I don’t use Facebook as much as I did as an undergraduate. I don’t post frequent updates and then look through dozens of profiles to make comments. In fact, I purged my account of a hundred or so “friends” that I really had no interest in reading updates from, nor did I care for their opinion on my updates. By and large I use it to communicate with a small group of people who, for the most part, use Facebook more than I do.
Last year I checked Twitter often. Most people that I follow are those whose comments were rarely public before. In my case, these are authors and filmmakers. For whatever reason they find posting on Twitter convenient whereas posting on a blog is too much work. Over the summer I rarely checked my account, and I have yet to get back into checking it daily.
Next I check Fark.com. Fark is a site which aggregates news stories from all over the world onto one page, groups them into categories based on the type of story it is, and then usually creates a humorous headline to accompany it. I find it interesting to check this page because the news selected comes from all over and from all political leanings. I also check Digg.com. Digg is similar to Fark in that it aggregates news stories, however the top stories on Digg are chosen by the users themselves rather than an editor. Users indicate that they like a story by “digging” it. The stories with the most digs will appear on the front page. Just in the last week, Digg has changed its format. From what I can tell, far fewer new stories appear in a day and the categories have been narrowed rather than expanded. On old Digg, I could go to the entertainment section and then see stories just about films. No longer can I narrow my search, which I cannot at all understand. As far as I can tell, the user response to the change has been very negative. It will be interesting to see if the response will be enough to force Digg into reverting back to its old self.
After going the unusual route for news, I will usually fall back on an old favorite; the Washington Post. I don’t read dozens of stories, but I will get a taste of the big ones in each section. Typically I will come back several times in a day, getting to a few stories every time. I feel like I am moving about too much to sit down and read it all at once, but thankfully just about every location I get to have a computer terminal that invites me back into the news day.
10:30 am: After my extensive computer time, the books come out for awhile. First up is the reading for the class that I TA for, Introduction to Cinema. The book, written by the professor (Dr. Stephen Prince) is very well written, but crams an incredible amount of information into a single chapter. I can just see the looks on the students’ faces when the first test comes around and some of the obscure information in the book is asked about in the first ten questions.
For my part, every time I come across an interesting example in the book I am itching to put that film in to see the example at play and also to see what neat things I can find myself. Since I own a lot of these films, which makes said desire easy enough to satisfy, it can be difficult to actually sit down and read the whole chapter. However, I sucked it up and got through it.
1 pm: After reading about the really neat opening shot of Snake Eyes (starring Nicolas Cage), which is, ostensibly, a 20-minute single tracking shot, I put that book down. Next I took a lunch break, which served as another opportunity to check my e-mail and return to the Washington Post.
2 pm: There was a break, but I can’t escape the books for long. This time I prepared for a marathon with the readings for this course. To avoid distraction, I kept all other forms of media at bay for a few hours.
4:30 pm: I was victorious over the week’s readings, and I thought I had earned a break. Turns out my reward was having to drive over to Radford to drop off some of my brother’s stuff that was left in my vehicle. I put my buds in and began my 20-minute walk over the Duck Pond. I listened to, of all things, an academic lecture. To be fair, it was a neat lecture from a professor at Wesleyan about the Magnificent Seven, so I haven’t nerded out completely.
I don’t have the fancy gizmos to plug into my radio that lets my iPod play through it, so I have to rely on the local waves. I have found one station that is usually decent classic rock, so rarely even touch the dial for fear of losing it.
7 pm: Upon my return, e-mail and Facebook gets checked again. I realize that I need to view the assigned film for Dr. Prince’s class this week, so I dig out my syllabus. I am relieved that this week is Easy Rider, a film that I like and am fairly familiar with. I pop the film in, but before I start it I whip the computer out again.
I don’t know if it is troubling or relieving, but I rarely watch anything without having to look it up online first. How did the film do at the box office? How about critically? Has anyone written about it academically? Who was it inspired by? Who did it inspire? Of course, in the case of this film, there has been decades for these questions to be answered by someone else, so I just see what they observed. The big story right now is that the film’s star and director, Dennis Hopper, recently passed away, which does put a slight gloom upon the experience.
10 pm: Finally, I have earned my reward of not having to do school stuff for a few precious hours. Right now I am filling my free time by watching Joss Whedon’s Angel. Of Whedon’s four television shows, this is the only one that I haven’t watched all of the way through. I am now finishing up season one and I am not as thrilled with the experience as I was with his other shows, but it has been a good enough way to pass the waning hours of the evening.
