The Great Cell Phone Debate - Week One

Ahhh the first week of Fall classes, nothing else can really be compared to this time of year, campus is a mess of masses of people with a diverse range of emotions floating along for the ride. As for this student right here while navigating through the sea of students, I make stops to 4 different COMM courses. Needless to say Communications and Media are probably the 2 most heard words in any given day, that said with the following blog I will be providing MY personal experience with this course amongst the competition of fellow courses 405, 320, and 100, this may actually prove to be an exciting way to find distinctions in the concepts of each one. Let's not waste time and start at the very beginning.....

Week One: 

Who doesn't love a good syllabus day??? *crickets* Okay so there is generally nothing fun and exciting about this day-- however listening to the student responses from the pre class survey were a rather entertaining and innovative touch. But let's move on the the meat of this week: Day 2. I found it kind of interesting how many elements of past COMM courses were referenced on this day. We discussed many things that were relative to COMM 118 Media Effects especially when we talked about the 3 different research approaches. These are not completely new ideas, more so an extension or new perspective on old ones. Then we came across a questionable chart... the bar graphs depicting minutes spent on different forms of media and percent of people reached through the same forms of media. I have to agree with the girl in the front who was skeptical of the accuracy in the cell phone percent of people reached each day; I can even go one step further and say that I was skeptical of the minutes used as well. My reasoning comes from personal experience, on a daily basis on our campus alone I see more people interacting with a phone than possibly even interacting with other people! I also am applying information from previous and current courses as well, and I must say this number seems much lower than the reality. So I did a little research of my own an found a website with a plethora of charts and information from some very accredited sources that may actually contradict what we discussed in class. I'm not the one with the Ph.D though so a second opinion on the site may be helpful. Whatever the case I was pleased to find myself engaged in thoughts of a class well after lecture ended... that's a good sign especially from someone like me. Till next time..... 

Works Cited :

Website: http://www.frankwbaker.com/mediause.htm

Author: Unknown 

Title: Media Use Statistics 

Accessed: 26. Aug. 2011