NAME: Leah Hurrell-Atkins
GCSE RESULTS:
C Business
C Math
C English Lit
C English Lang
C Physical Education
C Philosophy and Ethics
C Additional Science
D Science
D Information and Technology
D Food technology
HOBIES:
I enjoy playing football; I play for a ladies team called Marlbarton. I am a very sociable person so use a lot of my time meeting up with friends and family. I also like to listen to a lot of music and enjoy going to festivals and gigs.
MEDIA INTERESTS:
PRINT MEDIA:Usually I won’t even touch a newspaper unless there is a big news story and somebody has a newspaper on them. I feel that it’s a lot quicker and easier to access the news via the internet for example the BBC news website.
With magazines I don’t tend to buy them and if I ever have access to one then I tend just to flick through and occasionally read the horoscopes or a film review.
The good thing about print media is that it’s portable and can be read anywhere. Although there can be limited access to it for instance if you were at home and heard a major news event had happened you couldn’t just go and buy a newspaper to read about it as it wouldn’t have been published yet.
Print media is also being destroyed by companies such as apple. They have created such products like the iPhone and IPad making it as simple as swiping a screen to access magazine and newspaper articles. These products mean that people are accessing the news, sports ,politics , celebrity gossip etc where ever they go completely destroying the argument that print media is the only means of accessing newspapers ect on the move.
RADIO MEDIA:I don’t really listen to the radio that much and when I do it is only on car journeys. I prefer to listen to my iPod as it has the music I enjoy rather than chart music or top 40 of what everyone else likes.
MUSIC INDUSTRY
I am constantly listening to music where ever I go really even when I’m walking around i will usually have my iPod with me. I don’t have one particular favourite genre because i enjoy listening to different types of music which ever genre suits my mood at the time. I do love to listen to Dub ,reggae, Jungle, dancehall ,drum and bass and hip hop. I don’t belong to a band, but I did learn to play guitar at first my dad taught me but because he wasn’t around too much I had lessons. I think that moving to high school changed my views on wanting to peruse playing guitar but I would like to learn again in the future. I access most of my music though the internet on sites like YouTube. Although recently my music album was deleted so I have started to look at some of the old CD’s I have in my house. Also in the past couple of months I have made friends with people like to play vinyl which I think is pretty sweet and makes me listen to the music more than if it was just being played off an iPod. Being young I obviously don’t have a lot of money so even though I know and appreciate that illegal downloading is bad I find myself still doing it anyway. I think this is because it is usually like 99p per song and when I had my iTunes music I had over 4,000 song that would be crazy the amount of money I would have spent if I brought every single one of those songs. The music industry might influence people dress because most bands have their own styles like in what they where and people may look up to them and try to copy the way they are dressing to look like their favourite artists. The music industry may also affect attitudes of some people as music can vary from setting a positive and negative atmosphere and examples of what is going on in the music videos they produce.
VIDEO GAMESI’m not really into playing video games but if I had to choose something it would be Tetris. I guess I like to play it because I get well into it and it keeps my concentration for ages which doesn’t usually happen. I used to like playing Sims I think because it just makes you feel so powerful as in you can create pretty much everything yourself, families, villages, houses. I find it pretty mad being able to control everything like what people look like ,how they act and where they live.
Video games may have negative effects on attitudes to the solution of conflicts because a vast majority of them are violence related ,where the only way to survive or get what you want it through beating other people up or killing them. This can have negative effects on society and the way some people think to sort their conflicts out. Small children playing these video games may see violence as the best way to sort out their real life problems as in the games they are playing it works so well.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
New technology has increased my understanding of the world by simply making new information more accessible through the internet. Just by writing anything into a search engine it comes up with millions of results. New television technology advances now allow users to access the very latest news reports just by pressing the red button. New technology has also increased my ability to communicate with others for example instead of writing a letter and having to wait days for a reply I can send a text of my mobile phone and get a reply almost instantly. We also now have social networking sites where you can communicate and keep in touch with millions of people from anywhere around the world from just chatting to sending photos, videos and sharing music. Although new technology is great and everything I think that it has slightly had a bad effect on some people like some teenagers will spend more time communicating via social networks instead of meting up for a talk. I think that new technology can be over used some times and when people use it to communicate constantly they are missing out on the depth of relationships that they could get from communicating face to face. Accessing films, television and the music industry has become very easy to do very quickly thanks to new technologies in the world. We can watch any film, listen to any music we want where ever we are in the world by just a click of a button. We can catch up on television programmes after almost 30 minutes of it being shown on live television. There isn’t any restrictions on creating your own media text until it is shown onto the internet so I would say that new technology has allowed me to create my own media texts on literally anything that I want to.
TELEVISIONI would have to say that my favourite TV channel would have to be e4. I has a huge variety of different shows changing in genres like reality TV shows, comedy and documentaries. On e4 I like to watch the Inbetweeners, Skins, Misfits and Made in Chelsea. I wouldn’t really say that I had a favourite TV genre because I like to watch a range of different things but if I had to choose my top 3 they would be comedy, documentaries and police shows. The television programmes that I consider memorable for me would be skins, shameless, waterloo road, Eastenders and all the documentaries on the 9/11 attack.
FEATURE FILMI think I would have to say that my favourite film genre is comedy just because I am a lot happier when somebody or something is making me laugh.
I think that Pulp Fiction is an outstanding film, it is one of my favourites. I find parts of the film really unexpected at times like when one of the main characters starts to over dose. The way it is filmed is pretty crazy as it doesn’t go in order and flips back on its self but still make sense in the end. Another film that find outstanding Pirates of the Caribbean. It has amazing special effects and includes some humour too. As each new film comes out I just find myself having to watch them to carry on the story. The last film I am going to talk about is Aunvahood purely because it is so funny! It shows a stereo typical London boy’s life but extremely exaggerated. I would say that its aimed at a younger generation and is really good film to watch with friends if you just want to have a laugh. Personally I prefer to consume film in my own house all warm on a sofa or round a friend’s house. I like to be able to talk about what’s happening in the film as its showing to get a better understanding which in cinemas you cannot do. I think that my favourite cinema to go to would be Cinema City I go there a lot with my mum, I think that I enjoy it there because you don’t have to queue for ages and there is nice places to sit whilst waiting . The cinema isn’t that big which I find pretty good as it means there is less people chatting. Also it quite posh so you don’t have any chavs shouting half way through or food being chucked everywhere. Generally I prefer to watch films with films with a few friends as its proper chilled out and you have someone to talk to if you don’t quite understand the movie. Also it’s always nice to have that chat after a films finish about what everyone thought of it and their opinions of it.
CONCLUSIONThe one piece of media that has most offended me would probably be the BBC documentary film by Louis Theroux called The most hated family in America. I found it offending and couldn’t really get my head around the programme. Its a about a family who belong to the Westboro Baptist Church where the members believe that the united states government is immoral due to its tolerance of homosexuality. In the documentary they protest at funerals of U.S. military killed in action with signs like “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”. I think I found this offending because I just think it is so disrespectful and these people are so into their religion they don’t care what is going on around them they don’t stop to think about the dead soldiers families and how it makes them feel. I think If I was asked to construct a media text then I would choose to make a music video because of the fact that I love music and could make it about whatever i wanted and could include my friends in it and have a laugh whilst making it.
I have media studies as an option because I wanted to choose a creative subject and all of my other subjects is more sitting at a desk writing. I think media is more hands on and I am more of a practical learning and think that I will find media quite fun and interesting.