After the Media 1 lectorial, and the two readings provided for week two of the course, I literally could not stop noticing. Whether it was towards, advertisements (the main culprit), how people were interacted with media and technologies (basically seeing that blue/white glow ascend to their faces), or how people interacted or behaved in a given environment. I couldn’t stop.  I began paying more attention to my exterior world, than my own interior thoughts. It haunted me!

But this idea of noticing also had me thinking a few thoughts (yes, back into my own mind again!). Were the people I was subtly, or not so subtly observing/noticing, noticing themselves, what behaviours they were conducting in? Do they know that they are being completely immersed with media and technology? Are they willingly surrendering to power of social media’s own baby Jesus, Facebook? … But this is starting to sound like the beginning monologue of an end-of-the-world/Mark Zuckerberg-robot world takeover movie – I’ll continue. I’m sure some of these people do realise, but what else are you supposed to do on a 40 minute train ride into the city? Talk to the person sitting next to you? Not at 7.30 in the morning you’re not. (Most of my observing took place on the train..) But others I truly do believe are unaware of the power and grasp the media/mediated artefacts has on influencing our own thoughts/opinions/beliefs. And this could start a whole other rant or relentless amount of blabbering – but I won’t, because I’ll probably get too caught up in my own thoughts to write out something legible.

Another thought is this though. What if the world we live in today were completely void of all the power-house media institutions/organisations/technologies. What kind of mad, hell-hole place would it be?! It could be a boring place: nothing to distract ourselves, on our way to work or university in the city, there’d only the newspaper to read or a sudoku to complete on the train. But this seems a bit dramatic.. It’d probably just be a place where human conversation flourished and stranger-danger may not be so intimidating. Somebody bumping into you may actually lead to a genuine apology instead of a half-arsed grunt. But this place did once exist, in the past. Where Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, electronic advertisements, the internet, iPods, iPhones (all the i’s really) and so on, didn’t exist.  But living in the now future, our present, I can only hear of stories or imagine for myself what it would be like. I am sure of this however. If we didn’t have these distracting media artefacts glued to our hands and eyeballs, we would notice more. We would notice more of our natural, given world.