Media, Audience and Bad Mothers

The question that we always need to ask about the media is this: what is the role that it plays in people’s lives? However, we also need to ask not just the role that it takes place, but where it is taking place. Location is an extremely important aspect of media, especially since we all carry around mobile phones and laptops and mp3s on a daily basis – we take the media with us! We change the places and audiences of the media by simply hopping on a train and listening to music or watching a movie on a laptop in a park.

This week I attempted to find my very own example of media and space, which, although easy to find, is very difficult to photograph – especially if you find a perfect example but its a stranger and the stranger appears to be slightly insane and you’re no good at taking sneaky snaps.

And in a desperate attempt to find a photo for this post I realised I had one right in front of me as I scrolled through my camera roll on my phone. Earlier this week, a couple of friends and I went out for breakfast and, you know, I just had to Instagram it.

And I recalled what I had noted about my own Instagram photo – I had captured my friend Instagramming her own breakfast with her phone. Therefore, I had documented someone using media in a space at the same time as I was. We both had gone from having been in a social situation, eating breakfast with friends, and then created our own private space while we photographed, edited, added filters, added a description, some hashtags, the location, and shared our photographs on a social networking platform.

No one had any problem with either of us being on our phones, for they knew that we would return to ‘the real world’ once we had posted our photos. In fact many of us went in and out of the social setting to have our own private conversations on our phones at the same time, and this has become a socially acceptable act. You can even note that in my Instagram photo, there is another phone on the table belonging to my other friend – for the frequency we use our phones nowadays, it is pretty much socially acceptable to leave your phone on the table in front of you too!

And just to add to this: while my friend and I had left the social place and ended up in a private place to post these photos, by sharing these to the internet we had actually turned our private social gathering into something increasingly more public. With 362 followers and 38 likes on that photo, this private scenario which should have not had an audience at all, suddenly had a much bigger Invisible Audience online. Just thought that was quite interesting, that we had created ourselves an audience. Livingstone (1999, pp.62) points out that the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ primarily involves the social contexts that are created because of such media.

Later this week I also witnessed something in my own home town. A mother was on the side of a main road with her toddler. The mother was on her phone, distracted by something. The toddler was running along the side of the road until he tripped and fell into the gutter and started crying, as toddlers do. And the mother didn’t look up from her phone. At all. Didn’t even react. Didn’t know where her child had fallen. And continued to stare at her phone.

She was in her own little private place where Candy Crush was more important than Toddler’s Head on Side of the Road Crushed. Here is a visual representation I drew later.

Adios.

REFERENCES

Livingstone, S 1999, ‘New media, new audiences?’, New Media & Society, pp.59-66.

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