Week 14 StoryLab

For this week I again choose to look into the TV tropes website to see what kind of genre staples I could find that I didn’t even know existed (or had a name for). In the past, one of the things I noticed the most was how the most basic of information had a trope surrounding it, things I didn’t even realize were tropes.

This week, I choose to look into Media and what tropes exist there. More specifically, I choose to look into “New Media”. What I found there was highly interesting. The first one that I saw (and that annoyed me the most that it exists) was the ‘New Media Are Evil’ trope. Where it’s basically the Ok, Boomer of TV tropes, where the older generation will always be opposed to certain aspects of media/technology that is advancing forward. It’ll happen with our generation too, there’s always going to be people who are somewhat afraid of progress/too stubborn to move forward with it. In modern society, especially, we like to demonize media today (sometimes for good reason) because a lot of people feel like media is just owned by corporations, so they just say what those corporations “paying” them to say. While this is certainly true of most TV media sources, online papers/sources have less money motivation. Again, this is why one person shouldn’t put all of their eggs in one media basket – they should have multitude of places to go for their news. That way, you aren’t misled by watching only one channel or reading only one source of information. With all of the information available in the world, what is stopping people from spending an extra few minutes on the way to work to hear a differing opinion/standpoint? Overall, this week I delved more into the motivation as to why people are afraid of new media instead of looking at a bunch of different tropes.