The Me and Media

To make this a bit more reader friendly I'll try to refrain from just listing stuff from top to bottom and instead write a bit of a biography (in lack of a better word) of how I use and partake in different kinds of media. Mostly because I personally think it's more interesting to read it like that.

So where to start? Well I'm older than most people studying so lets start there.

As most people older than the internet I grew up reading comics, books and newspapers. I watched TV a few hours every day (which during the 80s was considered a lot for a Swede) and listen to radio about an hour or so a day. I bought LPs and listen to those and when the CD player started to become a big thing in Sweden me and my bro bought one together. I like all my friends borrowed and copied CDs and LPs of each other like crazy (something that is fully legal in Sweden I might add) when I was younger.

When I was about 12 years old I got an interest for computers or more precisely computer games. It started with text based games on a friends ABC 80 and pretty soon after that I got a NES (the first Nintendo console). During my early teens I bought a Commondore 64 (a computer) and while I mostly played games on it I also did a bit of programming in Basic. In my late teens I got other interests (girls and beer anybody?) but my interest for computers stuck with me in some ways and when I was in my early 20s I bought my first PC, a 486. This time my main reason for getting a computer was not to game on it but to learn about computers and to program. I took a couple of computer hardware courses and software developing process courses. Of course I ended up playing more games than doing anything else in the end though.

I didn't get an internet connection at home until 2001 so I'm actually fairly new to the whole internet thing considering I could have been much more involved with it. I was "online" for the first time back in 95 or possibly 96 (memory fails with age and so on ... ). Before that I had connected to various bulletin boards with a modem together with a mate during the late 80s. During those days they were pretty much a substitute to heta linjen (sorry if you don't speak Swedish but I'm not really sure what it compares to in other countries), a place that people connected to to communicate in a very childish manner (typical for teens). Anyway, my point is that when I finally got a connection from home my interaction with people and activities almost took over my life. I got involved in several game oriented communities and I spent a lot of time online playing various games.

So today I use my computer for most of my social interaction be it via phpbbs forums, Google Talk, MSN (or actually WLM), Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Facebook or what ever. In some instances it's actually gone so far that I interact with people that live in the same town as me over the internet instead of meeting them in person. Of course I still go out and meet people face to face and talk about things that has nothing to do with media, games or computers. Actually it happens fairly often that I do that. But the majority of my time is spent in front of some kind of screen, be it the computer screen or the TV. My TV is today hooked up to my computer to enable me to watch videos on my telly and also to listen to music while I do other things on the computer.

I also use my computer for studying and some web coding. When I code I use a lot of the knowledge that people have gathered on the internet in different places. Most places I find good tips and tricks are actually in blogs. There are tons and tons of blogs dedicated to web programming in different ways out there so because of that I read quite a lot of blogs but very rarely the same one. My internet use is based around my game communities (links to them can be found on this site to the right) and those I visit daily (many times). Some other places I visit regularly can be found here, just don't look at the rest of that horrible thing of a site. To my defence it's only a skeleton of what I'm currently working.

Internet has also given me the chance to interact with people from all over he world, though they are mainly situated in English speaking nations but I have friends both in Australia, Japan, USA and people spread out through EU. These people I mostly interact with via the for mentioned methods but mostly through forums because of time difference.

Except the computer and TV I also interact with people through my cell phone mostly by calling. I actually avoid using text messages as I don't like it as much as using my voice to communicate but it happens every now and then that I both receive and write text messages on my cell. The most use my cell see today though is it's mp3 function. I will dive deeper into the usage of my cell in an other post on this site.

Other types of media, such as those I mentioned in the beginning, has almost vanished from my world. I still watch TV occasionally and I actually listen to quite a lot of Radio today but it's all web radio stations (I use Screamer and my favourite station is one of SomaFM's stations). I read the occasional web comic and rarely open a newspaper (except for a tech paper I get delivered at home every week NyTeknik) but I actually do still read books. Probably much more today than I did when I was younger. I'm currently reading Steven Erikson's Garden of the Moon and Stephen R. Donaldson's Fatal Revenant, which will probably lead you to make an incorrect guess about what genre I'm most interested in.

Well, that should be it. I think that explains what the me in media is. Oh, one more thing. To people without the knowledge of me taking a course called "Information Retrieval and New New Media" this whole topic and post might seem very odd. But read the information about that course and you might get an idea to reason behind this post.