Looking Back (And Left and Right and Up and Down, Because I am Afraid)

First off, I'd like to say that I have no intentions of shutting this thing down. Snoop Blogg was born of this semester, but it will not die with it. Still, much has transpired these past few months, and one can always reflect without ceasing to move forward. You can check your rearview mirror without breaking, can you not?
Undoubtedly, critical thinking has changed my outlook on the world. My initial expectation was that the class would make me more skeptical of digital media. And while it has, in a larger sense critical thinking has opened my eyes to the ubiquity of media messages. I assumed media was something that could be silenced by turning off a screen. You can tell by looking at my first blog post. I considered media to be only what's seen on digital devices. But I now see its influences in places I'd never even thought to look. Cereal boxes? Lego movies? Who'd have guessed. The fact that I recognize even such unassuming things as having been carefully tailored by media agencies to send specific messages shows the extent to which my perception has changed.
While I've been enlightened to media's offline presence, I believe that a worthwhile class changes the way you think as well as what you know. A class about thinking certainly had better, anyways. And besides a better understanding of what media is, critical thinking has made me less trusting. I now see marketing strategies everywhere. This revelation has led me to stop seeing the world at face value. I can't look at a thing without trying to figure out how marketers tried to subtly influence me through it. Which appeals are being used here? How am I being seduced? The same goes for words. When I read or listen, I'm combing each sentences for fallacies and various persuasive techniques. I pay attention to how authors and speakers choose words for their connotative implications. Such paranoia shows that I've become aware of the fact that someone is trying to change my thoughts about something. I guess it's fair to say that critical thinking has made me somewhat of a well-grounded conspiracy theorist. Any sensory input is fully analyzed, because someone's out to manipulate me - I just know it. This certainly isn't a bad mindset to have. After all, we will all soon forget the list of logical fallacies, advertising's 15 basic appeals, and Ben Affleck's ethical dilemmas in Changing Lanes. These are all just pieces of information. However, a healthily skeptical mindset is something we can keep with us. Even if we don't remember the name of the appeal being used on us, we will be conscious of the fact that there is one being used on us at all. We will not be mindless consumers. Rather, we will be our own little community of tinfoil-hat-wearers, and we sure as hell won't be anybody's fool.

So I'll see you all soon, unless the media villains from Mars get me first. I know they're here.