Post #1: My Unique College Transition

Since this is my first post on this blog, I decided to combine a media post with a little 'about me' theme. In other words, I'm going to describe my "unique" transition period from high school to college, and essentially how media affected all of this.

A map of my move.

I call my transition unique because I am an out-of-state student. Sure. That's not unique for this university (CU Boulder), but I'm unique since I am from the neighboring state to the northeast: Nebraska. Not many people at this institution are from said state, especially since this is a very liberal area and Nebraska is an extremely conservative state.

That basically led to the effect media had on me during this transition: liberalism versus conservatism. My hometown of Shelby, Nebraska is a very small "hick town," for lack of a better term. The majority of the population and the surrounding population are conservative, second amendment-loving, modernity-loathing farmers who would love to have the chance to drive their tractor to school. Yes, this is what I had to grow up with, so moving to Boulder, Colorado, known nationally for being a liberal area, was quite a change.

Throughout high school, I developed a somewhat liberal view on things, different than what most of my peers believed in. Having to accept liberal ideals was not a challenge to me, as I had already done so. What was the challenge was not having anyone to argue politics with; everyone agreed with me! It was a strange feeling. Since the media is often very influential of political ideals, it was easy to tell that the news outlets here typically have a liberal stand on issues.

One of the most significant issues affected by the media that was different for me was Amendment 64. Amendment 64 brought up the legalization of marijuana. Don't get me wrong; I was all for it. It was just an unusual feeling seeing this fueled by local media outlets as a positive thing. Back home in Nebraska, anything similar to this would result in angry farmers protesting in front of the state capital building, complaining that it breeched their "traditional values."

That was the thing. This transition took my life from a scratched CD that continuously skipped to a 64-gigabyte iPod, for lack of a better representation. Moving from a farm town with 700 people to a city with almost 100,000 put my life into fast forward. The moving wasn't necessarily the inertia that caused this. The media life here is significantly much more in fast forward than in Nebraska.

For example, when I moved here, the only social networking site I used was Facebook. It was the norm from where I was. But as I started transitioning into life here, I saw that more people were using both Facebook and Twitter. So naturally, I got myself a Twitter account. This is just one of many examples of how the new media life here affected me.

Moving to a completely different area than what I was adjusted to was definitely a life-changing event. Not only did I have to become accustomed to a different culture, I had to also adjust myself to the media as well. It simply proves that the media is a significant influence on our daily lives, and will continue to become a greater one in the future.