My Relationship with "The Media"

                            

                                     Intro Log: My Relationship With “the Media”

         A woman approaches my friend and I while we are sitting at a local café. We are speaking casually, our stories blocking out the homework that sprawls across the table. The stranger’s orange-bronzed face is pulled back into an unnatural smile, though her hazel eyes gleam warmly. Through bleached teeth she praises us for being able to hold casual conversation without our phones. I take a slow sip of steaming coffee, flashing my friend an annoyed glance. We thank her politely and return to our conversation as the plastic woman wobbles to her Uber in pumps taller than her.

         My friend and I brushed off the incident, but this woman has become the first in a long line of patronizing adults who have tainted my relationship with the media. Snobby middle-aged parents claim to admire my family because I don’t have social media, as if I am a wholesome and focused person because I don’t have these pixels tucked away in a folder on my phone.

         Nonetheless, I spend plenty of time on my phone. Between music, audiobooks, podcasts, emails, apps to learn French, and the BBC homepage set to default on my browser, I have no issue finding sources. Sources to the tributaries that make up the River of Styx that is “the Media”. We see the demonic ripples in the river and our curiosity wills us to swim deeper. We see this in the way the president’s base speaks of “the Media” in a borderline fanatical way, as if we can force others to hear what WE want to. Middle age parents catch the same wild gleam in their eye except, they don’t fear us hearing the latest presidential scandal, they fear us posting a picture and hearing we are fat as if we don’t say the same cruel things in person.

         However, despite my poor relationship with the media, I am enveloped in its warm waters. I know that I am supposed to be a skeptic but if that means shutting out screaming TVs, closing my eyes to well-written articles, and not finishing the third season of the podcast Serial, I am not willing to do that. Even in toxic waters, I still want to report and write. I want to help filter the waters, but that is more and more difficult with every adult who stops to belittle me with their pathetic expectations.