Data Plan Overload! - Media Mediation #3

From my past blog entry, you know all about my apartment renting troubles. Most recently I have listed my apartment on Craig's List. I really wasn't expecting a ton of responses, and I thought it would be a long and difficult road. I am still in the process, however, my expectations thus far have been exceeded. I received 30+ emails from people inquiring about the apartment. Normally, this would have been fantastic, however, I had just gotten a new phone and my very first data plan.


From the Motorola website, "The Motorola Karma QA1 combines texting and social media. IM-style texting provides conversational-style communication. The slide-out keyboard keeps the phone compact."

I had previously owned a Blackberry but since I'm cheap and still on Mommy and Daddy's plan, I never had a data plan. My Blackberry had an unfortunate accident and broke. My top priority in a new phone was a full keyboard. All the phones with full keyboards were smart phones. I decided I had better make the switch over from paperweight mode to full functioning smart phone and buy a data plan.

This is also happened to be the day before I made my Craig's List posting. I had the email function up and working but only received one or two junk emails, but was excited to be connected even away from a computer. When my listing went live, my phone was blowing up nonstop! I received a new email almost every 10 minutes and was feeling incredibly overwhelmed with how I was going to respond to all of them and make appointments for showings with that many people. If the emails hadn't been coming to my phone, I wouldn't have been notified everytime I got a new messages, but rather I'd see them when I asked to see them, by signing into my email from a computer.

This is an example of the technological shift -- from analog to digital. I took photos of my apartment with my digital camera, uploaded them to Craig's List with a description, people then viewed my Craig's List post and emailed me, I then received that email on my cell phone. The Media and Society text explains that, "The communication media are the different technological processes that facilitate communications between (and are in the 'middle' of) the sender of the message and the receiver of that message" (pg. 7). Not only did this facilitate the communcation, but it was dead in the middle of it, without it, the apartment renting process would have been extremely difficult.