The Original This & That Website Cover Letter: A Guide to Superior Media Consumption

-- Substack -- The Brand Explained

-- The Website Cover Letter

-- Cover Art Montage

-- TikTok

***

This & That – The Website & Social Media

A Guide to Superior Media Consumption

I am a constant learner + analyzer, always trying to discern objective reality apart from misinformation and avoid the abyss of indoctrination + self-inflicted biases that many fall into. By being cognizant of these psychological weapons of mass destruction (confirmation bias, groupthink, availability heuristic, etc), and through a diverse array of media intakes, I have built a multidimensional & balanced perspective about the world. Presumably, I am enthralled by the various streams of media & seemingly infinite content that sculpt our worldviews in this exponentially evolving digital age. By this token, I’ve always been an avid movie + documentary watcher, podcast listener, book reader, stand-up comedy aficionado and social media browser, especially in this new era of enlightening bite-sized information and 3rd party media; but, we must actively engage with the content we consume in order to learn and grow, rather than getting caught in a cycle of brainless scrolling, passive watching and wasting time. My ideas for the website I am in the midst of creating are based on the notion that purposeful media consumption is integral to our cognitive development and absorbing content from both sides of the political aisle and all walks of life is key to analyzing the world from an objective point of view, behind our Veil of Ignorance.

A few years ago, I started to take notes on podcasts and rank my favorite movies, shows, stand-up comics, books and social media brands. Because of my infatuation with these sources of media, and belief that our perceptions are a direct result of our media consumption, I contend that it is of the utmost importance to be able to decipher unbiased news from narrative-driven hype, the interesting from the boring, the intellectually stimulating from the mind-numbing, the entertaining from the mediocre. The past few years, my ideas have been building off of one another and I have been crafting various media rankings, compiling those from other platforms and writing reviews in the realms of movies, shows, books, documentaries, comedy and social media profiles, creatively analyzing the magnum opuses of many brilliant thinkers and artists. I am now the spearhead of a google drive, shared with 20+ co-workers/friends, filled with hundreds of pages of deliverable content that will serve as the foundation for my website upon its launch, hopefully within the next year or so. With content ranging from a 25 page Game of Thrones and 10 page Dave Chappelle review, to a long-form analysis on the benefits + pitfalls of psychedelics and an extensive research paper on the effects of socioeconomic status on cognitive development to dissertations about the UFO phenomena, covert American intelligence agency operations, the potential of artificial intelligence, ancient civilizations, quantum physics and the dark web, I am optimistic that my work will fit the description of my slogan: “A goldmine for content and a guide to superior media consumption”.

My ambitions are not limited to my website as I have already taken steps to creating a podcast of my own and building a social media-ized app version of This&That in which people will be able to create a profile, ranking their favorite sources of media and viewing those of others. Additionally, I have been creating databases for these streams of content to be published on my website, providing organized links to the best clips, websites, review articles, blog posts, merch and more. This feature essentially colonizes the best content from all across the internet and puts it all in one place for the viewer’s convenience.

The name of my brand, This and That, is especially significant in these times of political polarization and divisive mainstream media sources, as I urge people to open their minds by engaging with content contrary to their preconceived notions of the truth. We mustn’t limit our sources and thus beliefs to just one side of ambiguous topics, but rather we must absorb all types of media in order to garner a truly multidimensional understanding of concepts that are deeper than they may seem at the surface. While none of this work is published yet, I am extremely confident moving forward as I have already planted the nuanced seeds for my media brand’s inevitable growth.

With Regards,

Matthew Tepedino