Late Blog Post - Media

          My family didn’t have television service until I was probably seven or eight, at which point we got “rabbit ears,” which is the colloquial term for a set-top TV dipole antenna.  The only stations that I ever remember watching were PBS (channel 10) and Saturday morning cartoons (channel 9, the WB).  We probably only received several other channels, maybe 4 or 5.  Eventually, and I can’t remember when (but it must’ve been before junior high) we got the cheapest available cable, adding to my diverse viewing options two Christian channels, Univisión, a fuzzy BET, a station that seemed to only play B-movies from the eighties and provide weather reports for Chicago called WGN, along with lucky number 13 which let me know what was playing on all the stations I didn’t have.  This was a veritable heaven for an agnostic, white, English-speaking child living east of Cleveland.
The reason for this sardonic commentary is that television and radio were and are patriarchal media, information filtered through a lens fixed by the preceding generation’s will and commercialism.  They are nothing compared to the anarchic Internet.  First we had dial-up, and eventually the sounds of the mangled evil-robot in its death throes emanating from the computer tower became a welcome reveille for the beginning of a new knowledge devouring session at a speedy 20kb/s.  I had not yet discovered Wikipedia and internet searching never really went further than video-game walkthroughs.  Soon, my brother Glenn found a way to steal internet connection from nearby wireless sources during the advent of DSL connections.  He stuck a wireless receiver in a Folger’s coffee tin and hid it in a rhododendron bush in our front yard, a camouflaged cantenna.  We used this for a long time until we started to siphon internet access off of our neighbor’s AT&T line.  We split the bill with our neighbors and used it for years.  We finally bit the bullet and got our own cable internet line and can now search Wikipedia in the range of dozens of Mb/s, thousands of times faster than our original dial-up.  This is why I am an information junkie, a term my dad describes me with.

(This is part of the piece I am working on for our pop culture essay that was due.  It will be very late but I'll have it on Wednesday.  It incorporates both pop culture and media because I was unable to succesfully separate the two as influences in my life)