Current Issues in Journalism

My mom is a huge Joni Mitchell fan, and when I was a kid we used to listen to a lot of her cassette tapes and later some of her CDs on our old stereo that we used to keep in the living room of our house. One of my favorite Joni songs was and still is today “Big Yellow Taxi,” which contains a very poignant line that I never really understood until long after I was a kid listening to an old cassette tape on that now broken down stereo – “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” That line from that old Joni song are the words that best summarize what it was like for me to go media free – I guess I really never knew how much I depended on my E-mail, my cell phone, and Facebook until I tried to go without them. I never knew how much those three media elements connected me to the world until, suddenly, they were gone.

On one hand it was great being media free – I guess you could say that I kind of felt like a dog who had finally been released from its leash and was able to run around freely with nothing standing in its way. With our world being as interconnected as it is, technology can make you feel like you’re on a leash and can be found and dragged in anywhere or anytime – after all, having E-mail, a cell phone, and Facebook makes you very easily accessible and makes it almost impossible for people to not be able to get a hold of you. Without the ball and chain of media dragging me down, I felt like a little bit of a weight had been lifted from my shoulders – like I was off of my leash and able to be free.

On the other hand, however, going from being so interconnected to being media free and feeling so alone can be extremely scary and frightening. I know I felt almost naked without the technology that I had grown so accustomed to being around me at all times. My cell phone is attached to my hand pretty much at all times, and to not depend on my cell phone to communicate with others through phone calls, text messages, or picture messages made me feel very lonely and, well, lost. I realized through this experience that I might actually be kind of addicted to my cell phone, which is a terrifying thought in and of itself.

The moral of the story? Like Joni used to sing from the speakers of our old stereo, when it came to modern media I really didn’t know what I had until it was gone. It was definitely an interesting experience, one that was freeing and liberating to an extent – but not an experiment that I would attempt to try again anytime soon.