Not so bad at last

So I spent some time thinking about what a good topic for this weeks blog post could be... something with media.
Media. The word media is often mentioned in a negative sentence. "The media makes a hype out of this." "The media adulterates the story." "You can't trust the media."

I don't want to get too deep into this subject - it would overdraw a simple blog post. I rather pick a specific little niche that affected me today.

As mentioned before, I'm an international student from Switzerland. This makes a distance of some 4900 miles or so between me and my family, my friends and practically my former life.
Ten years ago, I was an exchange student up in Minnesota. The distance then to Switzerland was - of course - the same. But then, one minute of a phone call back home cost about $2.-. So I got to talk to my family about once a month and even then for only 20 minutes or less. This was just expensive! So we worte lots of letters and sent faxes which were pretty convenient then.

Today, the distance between Switzerland and me seems to have decreases. Not by distance - but by reachability. I talked to my parents today over Skype, like I do pretty much every other day. I got a few e-mails from my best friend, former co-worker, one from my brother and some from buddys back home. None of them was important in its content - but it was important to me to get them.

Skype is one of the greatest inventions of the last couple of years - at least in my opinion. Not to mention e-mail...!

To support the positive influences and aspects media can have, I want to add another example; this time it doesn't affect me that much.

You might have heard or read about the $100.- Computer or the project called "One Laptop per Child" . Briefly summarized it's the vision to make the Internet and the knowledge and source of information that comes with it accessable to everyone, especially in third world countries. The motivation: If poor, underdeveloped countries have access to the Internet, they can use the data autobahn to look up information about sickness, health, prevention, learn languages, get education, get in touch with the rest of the world... You name it!

Imagine this would work someday. Thanks to the Internet. And therefore thanks to the media.
Frankly: Media is not all bad, evil and negative influence. It depends on what you make of it, how, when and what you consume. So actually if you have a bad media experience, you might just have made a bad choice.