Media Exhaustion
When I was in middle school and high school, so much of my identity depended upon what I surrounded myself with, including, and most importantly, my friends. I remember early days when I listened to “dangerous” music, filthy, corrupting, loud, and sacrilegious, a habit I adopted from various friends with a collection of industrial, punk, and alternative music. I watched anime because my friends watched anime; played Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games because my friends did. To a teenager, who affectively lives their life mimicry, identity does not exist. As I aged, I found my own footing, preserving on to some of the tastes that I developed as a teen, but also developing new ones, reflective of truer identity. Regardless, times were different in the nineties. Mobile phones were a relatively new phenomenon and certainly not the media devices they are today. Television shows had to be watched on a actual television, as well as media events. Information was controlled. Real