This week’s reading was based around what media is and about taking a theoretical stance on the topic.

David Gauntlett, author of Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Cultural Studies (2015) discuss the two ends of the media spectrum: media for the purpose of expressing creativity and media for the purpose of surveillance and exploitation.

He poses the discussion that two evidently do not interconnect harmoniously.

I think that media for the sake of self expression or entertainment is a beautiful thing. It’s extraordinary when people such as the filmmakers, photographers, writers, editors and cinematographers of the world are able to put forth their expertise, knowledge and ideologies to produce something palpable that can connect with varieties of people. It’s integral that the makers of the world can use media as a platform, and perhaps I’m biased as a young media producer, but creative expression is such a key aspect of our identities.

Media has been given a bad name by the use of propaganda through the centuries, capitalism, and misrepresentation of particular groups in advertising.

Media is so much more than ads for beer during the breaks of footy matches, media is more than the magazines in waiting rooms.

Media is a means of communication, expression, and a way of life.

This week has thrust me into my own sense of self and left me questioning who I am and what I’m doing and why I’m here.

Last week we set 10 goals that we hope to achieve before completing our degree.

“Simply graduating” was at the top of my list. I desired nothing less than to see my parents brim with pride at the ceremony.

“Decide if Media is what I want to do with my life” was next. I wanted to be a journalist in Year 6 when I got an A+ on my reflective piece. I wanted to be a photographer in Year 8 when my brother placed his Canon EOS in my hands and taught me how to take photos. I wanted to be a Public Relations consultant when I was in Year 10 and I realised that companies had lost sight of how to advertise to their audiences. And now, in my dream university course, I’m questioning what I really want to do. Media has been the only constant for me, this is the field that I love, and hell, I’m good at this. This is all I’ve really been good at.

And a little further down the list:

“To be more confident about myself and my passion“.

All of this self-doubt is so overwhelming sometimes, I think it’s about time to refocus and discover whether this is where I need to be, and if so, accept the fact that I deserve to be here.

I’ve always liked the idea that the world revolves around each individual’s existence; the idea that the reality that each of us have come to know would be completely altered with the addition or subtraction of any life. It’s always given me a falsity of significance, the notion that without me or without my best friend or without my childhood goldfish, the world – my world – would be entirely different.

And there is some sense in that. Without me, my parents wouldn’t have a third child, there’d just be a gaping hole between my oldest and youngest sister. Without my best friend, I wouldn’t know how to speak Macedonian and I wouldn’t be able to comprehend the act of putting someone else’s happiness before your own. Without my childhood goldfish, I wouldn’t have known how to look after another life and I wouldn’t have learned that goldfish can actually die from being over-fed.

I had this entire thought process on the train into uni while I was avidly reading “Blood in the Gutter”, by Scott McCloud, who suggests that we all perceive the world in a certain way as a result of the experiences of our sensory systems and that our perception is fragmented by what we know is real and what we think is real. McCloud is essentially proposing that the world outside of our own personal experiences ceases to exist if we don’t notice it or have an awareness of it.

Which is a thrilling thought when you consider that we know so little, but there is so much that occurs in the gutters that we simply “fill in”: there is so much knowledge that we could attain if we only paid attention.