Elli Arzbaecher’s Media Blog

          As I, and I'm sure all of my peers, have experienced before, one of the biggest complaints from our parents and just general older people in our lives is that the Millennial and Generation Z kids are constantly on their phones and computers, cycling through all the pointless media that is, according to them, making us brain dead. While there is truth in their statements, and I have to agree that it is disconcerting just how much time I and all my peers spend on our various devices, I can't help but excuse myself at least a little bit knowing the motive behind it. For me at least I think that part of the reason I spend so much time wrapping myself in online entertainment is that it just completely takes my mind off of all of the messed up parts of my world. We're constantly surrounded by pressures from our teachers and parents and even our own expectations, infuriating and disappointing news stories, problems in our friend groups, and anger at the ...

           With Prince Harry's engagement to American actress Meghan Markle, there was a lot of talk about everything from her previous marriage to her religion, but the most prominent topic of discussion was about her race. Following the news of their engagement there was talk that she was a symbol of hope for the end of racism in Britain, while other articles countered that stating that her marriage into the royal family means little when it comes to the current societal issues regarding race. The first article I encountered was from The Guardian, and it followed along the lines of the first reaction I mentioned above. In this article the author first introduces the topic with a history lesson on the relationship between race and the royal family. She does this to point out to readers how big of a step it is in her eyes, and should be in others, that there is a royal engagement with a biracial woman. She uses the past as a way to further her argument t...

          A part of advertising I have long thought unconventional and captivating is the ability, on some platforms, to pay to disable advertisements. This has become an especially amplified topic to me as I spend more and more of my time listening to music on the app Spotify. While there are definitely many other platforms that also offer upgraded versions of their application that remove ads at a monthly cost, Spotify adds another way of ad disablement to the media world, and it is this method that really grabs my attention. For people that have not used Spotify before, a common occurrence for those without Spotify Premium is the interruption of your music streaming to present the screen display and audio pictured above. Rather than just bombarding you with commercials, you have the option to watch what they call a "short video" in order to get 30 minutes of ad-free music streaming. While I am not going to delve into it in this blog post, it is interesti...

       As someone whose connection to social media is very limited, I tend to think that I am relatively uninvolved in media because in high school it seems like social media platforms like Snapchcat and Instagram are the only relevant forms. As someone who grew up, and is continuing to grow up, with parents with the mindset that social media is a way for companies to steal my rights from me, I felt extremely isolated from my peers. Although in time I have grown to become indifferent to my lack of Instagram and my zero followers, and have stopped becoming embarrassed when people ask me my Snapchat, I still find that there is a whole world that I am not a part of, though I'm not sure I necessarily want to be a part of it anymore. However, it is important to recognize that media comes in many other forms than just the overrated social media sites that, to me at least, seem to be used as a popularity contest,...