Media Autobiography

If I have to arrange the eight media according to my first encounter from my life, I would arrange it this way: Recordings, Radio, Television, Newspapers, Books, Magazines, Movies and Internet.

I was introduced to music from Recordings when I was a little girl. I remember playing children cassettes, rewinding it and fast-forwarding it to replay the song that I like best. Those were the times when CDs was not invented yet. Cassettes tapes are more inconvenient than CDs when we want to replay the same song over again. It takes time for me to rewind or fast-forward to the particular track that we want to hear. Whereas CDs, with a click of a button, it will be at the beginning of the track that we desire to listen. Radio and television are my everyday entertainment when I was a little girl apart from the recordings.

I was born in Indonesia and had my early education in Singapore. Therefore, English is not my primary language. My parents never read bedtime stories to me before I start school. I never learn to read until I was in school. How I get into Newspapers and Books were by force. My elementary school teacher wants us to read, write and learn better English by having us read the newspapers everyday as part of our homework. She had us read a story book every week and make comments about the book that we read. I remember the books were by Ladybird, short stories for children. I enjoyed our reading sessions but not our text books. I came to finish reading a novel only when I was in high school, which I find that to be pretty late, as all of my friends had read many novels at that time. Sometimes, I would think that perhaps, English was difficult for me to understand which prevented me from wanting to finish a story book.

Magazines and movies were only allowed by my parents when I was in high school. They were afraid that it would have a bad influence on my behavior as an adolescent. Not to mentioned internet. They were afraid that internet would corrupt my mind. It is a privilege for me to be able to surf the internet, even for my school work back in those days; when they were first introduced to the public and it was still expensive to even own a computer.