I have always had a love/hate relationship with media, and I think it traces back to my mother’s obsession with picture taking. I’ll explain. Mixed in with the best memories of my childhood is the image of my mother with a camera pressed to her face, yelling “Look here!…Smile!…Okay guys, just one more picture, I promise!” She went through 3 cameras last year, and there’s a room in my parents’ house that is dedicated solely to scrapbooks.

When I was reading Peggy Orenstein’s article, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” I thought about this room in my parents’ house, and I cringed.  For me, the newest advances in media always start out this way. I complain about the latest updates to Facebook, I roll my eyes at the people who use their statues as a diary, and I avoid changing my email address until I realize that the one I made in fifth grade may come off as a bit “unprofessional.” I don’t have a smart phone, or a laptop, and I’d even held off on Twitter until this class.

There’s another part of me, though, that loves social networking. I am greatly amused by the fact that important information always hits Facebook and Twitter hours before it is reported by the news. I love that we can talk to people anywhere, at any time. I can spend hours chatting with friends in other states, keep updated with family members’ weddings and kids that I haven’t seen yet, and even watch people make (and document) dumb decisions for my entertainment––all from the comfort of my bedroom!

Then one day, it seems, I just get fed up with media, log out of any social networking sites, and ignore them––often for weeks at a time. Eventually though, I decide to look up an old friend, my jaded outlook on social media returns, I get used to living on the web, and I’m hooked again. It’s a vicious cycle.

I think that media is, for the most part, a really great thing.  But still, a part of me feels like social networking holds the same flaw as my picture filled childhood: the feeling that the way something is perceived by others is more important than the experience of perceiving it yourself.  Whether I was giving a fake smile for the thousandth picture, or thinking too hard about a wall post, it somehow made the moment less real. The instance Orenstein described as being disconnected from a special moment with her daughter was all too familiar. I related to a quote she used by Sherry Turkle, which said, “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more.” Orenstein described it as the difference between a person and persona.

I guess I’m still trying to feel the authentic aspects of media. While I think there is still something inherently nice about seeing people face to face, or reading a book printed on paper, I’m realizing that media can be genuine, too.  It can be a wonderful way to document and share my life, as long as I don’t forget to live it.