Changing Media Ideology

As I’ve mentioned in class, I work in a research laboratory. At first, all communication between me and my mentor was strictly through email. And I felt very comfortable with this form of communication because to me, email is very formal and is a medium of communication for situations and relationships that require some kind of formality, like a job or a teacher-student relationship. Communication through email, for me, was serious enough for my job and got the information my mentor and I needed to relay to each other through just fine.

However, soon afterwards, my mentor started using texts to get in touch with me. This was more for practical reasons since texting is faster when trying to send and receive messages. But I remember when this first happened, I felt awkward and uncomfortable because according to my “media ideology” texting was a medium through which I only had casual conversations with friends, not a medium where I had to communicate formally (i.e. using actual grammar instead of texting language) with my mentor. Now more than a year later, I realize that using texts to communicate with your mentor/boss is actually pretty common, but as someone working her first formal, official job, texting my mentor seemed like something I wasn’t supposed to be doing even though the content of our texts were the same as they would be in an email. The situation just didn’t fit the stereotype that I envisioned as texting. Now, my media ideology on texting has expanded to include more formal situations—it has gone from just texting friends to now my mentor and even colleagues. However, if I have to ask my mentor about more formal things, such as writing a grant or discussions about my future in the lab, I still stick to email to ask those questions. 

I know this was the topic from our last class, but I was just reminded of my own media ideology and how it has changed as I was texting my mentor about some questions about an experiment I was conducting this week. It was interesting to me because this work experience helped newly shape my media ideology on texting.