(This post is written in response to a class assignment to give up media for a day)
I wish I could write this post about how liberating and freeing it was to give up media for a day. I wish I could say I have decided to give up my phone for the rest of my life. But I can’t. I started out the morning with high aspirations. That is until I realized I had just turned off my alarm which was on my phone. I had set my alarm the night before without even thinking. As I went throughout my morning I went to grab my phone to turn on some Pandora while I got ready but I was soon discouraged when I remembered the media fast. After getting ready I again went to grab my phone to text my friend if we were still on for breakfast. And again I remembered I couldn’t do that so I made the 2 minute “trek” to her room to see if we were going to breakfast.
The day continued in this fashion for its entirety. A colossal mesh of going to pick up my phone and then realizing I wasn’t supposed to. It was inconvenient. It was annoying. It was downright frustrating.
I had to engage with media a lot throughout the day just for classes. I had reading to do for one class, a professor email I had to respond to and a phone call from a prospective internship supervisor that couldn’t be ignored.
While I would not consider my “media fast” a success, I can say without I doubt that I learned a lot. I learned that media is in every aspect of our lives. From class assignments to posters in the stairwells, there are countless avenues vying for our attention every minute of every day. They’re unavoidable and annoying but they are there just the same. I also learned that we take in so much “media” without even realizing it. It is amazing what a day of intentional consideration of media will do for your life.
In conclusion, I learned that media is not going away. It’s only going to become more pervasive in our worlds and for better or worse it’s here to stay.
julia marie 
Julia! I totally agree with you! The media fast was definitely difficult in some ways, but I would add that I felt very free. I didn’t really care that I didn’t have a phone or social media to check, I had much more time on my hands to complete assignments.
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It was definitely a neat opportunity that I wish I would have been able to complete in a more accurate manner. It is so crazy to think about what our world would be like today if we didn’t have social media/media in general.
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I thought it would be liberating too, until I realized how much I actually use my phone for everything. I often found myself engaging in media without even realizing it until later. For example, even just listening to the radio in the car is media, but it is so ingrained in us that we have no idea how much the media is a part of our lives.
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