Five Minutes with Hayden

Hayden Curtis, a Twitter obsessed sixteen year old boy is a big user of the media. If he isn't sending tweets, he's listening to music or playing video games. Here are the questions I asked Hayden along with the interesting things he had to say in response.


I: So, what different types of Media do you use and how often do you use them?

H: I use Twitter and play video games, and I do that pretty much every day.

I: What kind of video games do you play?

H: I play the older video games which I grew up playing, and I just find them more enjoyable

I: Cool, so how has the media affected you? Has it made you more or less sociable and has it changed the way you think and feel about certain things?

H: Well I'm really sociable online because I don't actually have to talk to these people face to face so it's really easy to talk to them, but then when it does come to talking to them in real life it's quite awkward, so it's had an impact on my offline social life. It hasn't changed the way I think or feel about certain things though.

I: Fair enough, well is your cellphone or another hand held device a big part of you using the Media frequently? Do you get tweets or emails etc. sent to them?


H: Well I don't have a cell phone because I accidentally trod on it, but yeah my iPod's a big reason I use the media. Uh, I get a lot of tweets and emails and Facebook notifications which gets kinda annoying because the noise goes off like ooh you've got an email and I feel like I've got to check it.

I: Do you use Social Networking - if so what different types do you use, how often do you use these types and for what reason?

H:  Well I hardly use Facebook but I do use it to catch up with friends and see what they're doing, and I use Twitter every day because I like it and find it interesting. Oh, and YouTube too, I use that most days just to listen to music that I don't already have on my iPod.

I: What kind of music are you interested in?

H: Basically anything really, I listen to a wide range of music.

I: So do you listen to the radio? If you do, what stations do you listen to and for what reasons do you like those certain stations over others?

H: No I never really have the chance too, and they don't play particularly good music. The DJ's are usually quite annoying and so are the ads so I don't tend to listen to the radio.

I: What genres of movies are you interested in and watch often?

H: Uh well I like comedies because they make me laugh and make me quite happy, but I also really like horrors. Some of them are really bad which is quite funny.

I: Do you have a favourite actor? Like, would you watch a certain movie just because it had that actor in it?

H: Not Nicolas Cage that's for sure [laughs] uh Tom Hanks, yeah.

I: Do you like watching advertising like TV ads and infomercials? If so, why?

H: I try not to, I find them quite annoying really. The songs in them get stuck in my head and I just end up singing them, they're really over the top too. They just annoy me.

I: That's fair enough, so do you use print media like newspapers and magazines?

H: I don't read newspapers I find them really boring and they just don't appeal to me, but I do read music magazines because they're interesting and have stuff I'm into in them. 

I: Finally we made it to the last question, how do you think the Media is affecting us as a society and do you think it's in a negative or a positive way?

H: Well, a lot more people are constantly expecting updates to do with Media and Media sources and a lot of people basically live off of it, which I wouldn't say is a positive thing.