MEDIA EXPERIMENT: GROUP #2: SELF-SURVEILLED

24 hours: Thursday night 4/29/10- Others Surveying You

I drove to Los Angeles this weekend, and noticed just how much as a driver I was being “watched”. While driving I noticed the multiple cameras on stop lights and at major intersections. My FasTrak was also a way of being tracked, and at the Starbucks drive thru’s (which I went to twice), the Taco Bell drive thru, and at the gas station with all their cameras, as well as using my debit card. I also used the internet on my phone to look at directions and check my email.

48 hours: Friday 4/30/10- Survey Yourself

Once being home I spent time alone in my room doing homework, browsing the internet, and eating (a Rite Aid ice cream cone). I also watched TV, read a magazine, made mash potatoes, and made my bed. Most of the remaining time I was with my friends and family, and wasn’t alone.

1. I realized from this exercise that my privacy in relationship to media has a blurred boundary. Until I consciously was trying to be aware of my privacy while driving I never noticed how much I was being watched, and tracked. Everywhere from me stopping to getting something to eat, from driving over a bridge was tracked in a system somewhere.
2. Being in public changed my actions from being politically correct in terms of the way I acted rather then being alone. For example while I was in my room I was in pajamas and had my ice cream fall on my shirt, I let it sit there until I was done before I changed it, but if I was in public I would not have done this, nor been in pajamas. I had a hard time with this exercise because I was mainly driving for the beginning and it was hard to take pictures.
3. Media plays a role in my sense of private life by the TV shows I watch, what I choose to wear, the magazines I read, etc. In my public life it is shown through possibly where I choose to eat, how I use my cell phone, and the music I listen to. A public persona/ lack of a private persona might be useful to a celebrity, therefore their personal lives, children, etc. would not be plastered across magazines, and they could live a more “normal life” by just having their public persona (their work) be put on display.