A recent report said that American teens use the Media for an average of 9 hours a day. (For tweens, it's six hours.) To get that in context, it means the Media is more of a presence in teenage lives than...

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Parents

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School

 

Friends

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Hobbies

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Church

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Sleep

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As such, there are many reasons to study Media - you might want to work in the industry, or you might simply want to understand contemporary culture more. At a basic level, though, we study it because it is what we 'do' more than anything else; arguably, it is the single biggest influence on our lives. It's probably a good idea to understand what effect that is having on us as individuals and societies and perhaps to make us think a bit more about how and why we consume Media. 

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Your turn!

In order to understand the media, we can start by examining our own use of it. Create your own 'timeline' - choose a day - weekend, holiday, school day, whatever - and note all the uses of media you have that day.

That's the first part. The second part is to decide how to present this information. You can use whatever you want. Prezi is popular. You could present it as a vlog, made using MovieMaker or iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Really ambitious people could make a Flash animation. It could be print based - a diagram created in Illustrator or Photoshop. (Infographics are good...) I don't particularly want to see Word docs or PowerPoint unless you can do absolutely outstanding work in those formats! Media students need to think and care about presentation - this is your first chance.

 

Some examples...

 

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