Disturbing Media

Media is around us every minute of every day, especially when we least expect it. It comes from our television, our computers, our radios, our cellphones, in public places, everywhere imaginable. When I was told to write about the source of media that disturbs  or upsets me the most, my mind went rolling and the gears started moving. At first I thought media from the internet is pretty disturbing, but I don’t know if it is the most disturbing. Then I thought about the music that I listen to and how some might say that it is very disturbing. Considering that music is a form of art and that one of the beauties of art is that it disturbs the comfortable while comforting the disturbed, I realized that a lot of disturbing medias are forms of art. This logic pretty much ruled out music, movies and video games right off of the bat as not disturbing. But what other sorts of media can be considered art by the person witnessing it? I think that blogging and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and Tumblr could fall under the category of art, therefore ruling them out of the disturbing category. Though that is not to say that there are not some extremely disturbing things that can be found on any of the social media sites listed above. I know for a fact that some very disturbing things can be viewed especially on Vine, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, yet these disturbing things have to be discovered. They are not shoved in your face like advertisements on google searches or Facebook ads are. These social networking sites are all based online so truly if you’re going to blame the sites for being disturbing, you might as well blame the entire internet for its lack of censorship. But this isn’t communist China, we have freedom to explore the world wide web without limitations. The point I am trying to make is that though there are disturbing things online, in music, movies, television, and video games, the only people to blame for the disturbing parts, are the ones who go searching for them. It is all in the users perspective to find disturbing facts, images, animations, videos, or literature. The truly disturbing form of media, as far as I can tell, is Snapchat. Snapchat is a peer to peer picture or video messaging application that is used through mobile devices such as iPhones or Androids. The brilliance and reason for popularity of snapchat is the fact that once the video or photo is viewed and the time limit has passed, the media cannot be viewed ever again by the receiver. This gives the sender a false sense of security which can and has lead to explicit images being sent to other Snapchat users. Although once the video or photo has been opened and seen, and cannot be reopened, the media is however saved for a certain amount of time on the Google Drive server before being flushed through Snapchat’s system.  This server can and has been hacked to expose photos and videos that were not intended to be publicized nor should they have been. To me the disturbing part about Snapchat is that the naked photo a girl may send to her friend could potentially be viewed world wide without the young girls knowledge, through the window of the internet. The bottom line is that for something to be disturbing it has to be perceived as disturbing by the personal perspective of the viewer of the media. Thus qualifying it as disturbing.