Question #2:How have commercial interests influenced your media use and experience?

The biggest annoyance when it comes to media use is the constant advertisements that pop up everywhere. Because commercials on TV weren’t enough, we now find them as a precursor to every YouTube video and interruptions to our Spotify playlists. I see more advertisements on my Facebook feed than I do posts from my friends. Thanks to the combining of media ownership, the advertisements that bother us on Facebook follow us to our Instagram feeds as well because they are owned by the same company. Facebook and Instagram actually track your activity in order to see what kind of products are up your alley and then they customize your advertisements to things that you are more like to spend money on. Because of this method, I feel like commercial interests violate my privacy in a way and that makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels like Facebook and Instagram are working together to trick me into emptying my bank account. 
I have to give advertisers credit though. They can be very sneaky in the ways that they increase the number of ads that we see on a daily basis. For example, my family and I are fans of the show Chopped on the Food Network and just before we find out who gets eliminated, the show cuts for a commercial break. They know that you’ll sit through all the commercials because you want to see who will get eliminated and they use this to their advantage. Every commercial break before the end of the episode gets a little bit longer because they know you’ll stick it out. 
My answer to how commercial interest effects my media experience is this: it makes the whole thing kind of annoying. How many times have I given up on finishing that episode of Chopped because the commercials were getting excessive? How many times have I abandoned my Spotify playlist because the ads were hindering me from enjoying the music? The truth is that advertisements encourage me to cut my media consumption time short.

 Hannah M.
CMNS 201
Athabasca University 

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