College Dorms: A Media Sanctuary

Whenever I look around my room, I realize that every poster, every picture, and every object that I own is a reflection of myself. What we choose to put in our rooms and how  we decorate them can say a lot about us. I live in the ONE Tower (Keith B) and I have a single. Living with 14 other people who also have singles, I have made several observations about their rooms. The people who tend to be more sociable and creative tend to have a room that reflects that personality; and the people who tend to be a little more reserved have barely anything at all. This brings me to my point, that our dorm rooms serve a medium through which visitors can get a glimpse of our lifestyles. One can analyze so much just by taking a look at how a room is set up. When thinking about all of this, I realized that it ties into the concept that the medium is the message, and that a dorm room is a hot medium. It creates a sense of interaction with whoever enters the room for the first time. I know that whenever I go into someone's room for the first time, I can immediately draw several conclusions about their lifestyle and habits. Even living in a triple my freshman year, although we didn't have a lot of space, I knew the idiosyncrasies of both of my roommates just by the way they kept their things. Reflecting on the topic, I also realized that it ties into a concept that I learned in my introduction to consumer society class. We learned about the concept of conspicuous consumption, which is the purchasing of goods and services to show a certain level of social or economic status. After some thought, I realized that college students are purveyors of conspicuous consumption. You see this with huge TVs, expensive furniture, loud sound systems, and other items that students use to distinguish themselves. Although many of these items are not essential to a content lifestyle, they serve to show that we are not life everyone else. In essence, our rooms not only reflect our personalities, but also our spending habits and how we choose to distinguish ourselves from a socio-economic perspective.
Here are a few pictures of my room: