Media Talk 101 - Captivated Review

Do you find yourself sitting in front of the tv but not really paying attention, aimlessly changing the channels?

Are you becoming obsessed with social media like Facebook?

Then this is a movie you need to watch!

For our latest review, we were asked to watch

Captivated: Finding Freedom in a Media Captive Culture, a dvd by Media Talk 101.

Captivated is a documentary by Media Talk 101 where Philip Telfer, the writer, producer and co-director, demonstrates the problems of living in a techno-media society and how we are able to find freedom in this media captive culture. It addresses issues about the physical, moral, spiritual, mental and emotional impact of all this media and how it is distracting us from our spiritual walk with God and our relationships with others.

This multi-award winning movie runs for 107 minutes and contains over 2 hours of extras including extended interviews and words from the Producer and is broken up into 5 sections: These are: consumption, content, captivity, battleground, and freedom.

What is so great about this movie, are the personal stories of everyday people like us. Philip has done a great job with interviewing such a wide variety of experts, individuals and families. These real life stories made us stop and think about how we are living our lives and how we were really getting caught up in watching screens. We have found that our boys could easily get held hostage by the television, video games and iPads if we didn’t put limits on them.

Before watching this documentary, we did have time limits on things such as the computer and iPad but we are now looking at changing those limits, adding limits to the television and making sure we stick to those limits.

During the documentary, you are shown ways in which you can spend media-free time with your family by regularly including Bible reading and praying together. At the moment, we do a small devotion and prayer with the boys before they go to bed, but now we are looking at maybe increasing this to a small devotion, Bible reading and prayer time in the mornings as well.

Overall, this was an excellent and very informative documentary that will challenge everyone about how much we use technology and how we need to unplug ourselves and be captivated by more important things, such as relationships with our family, friends and most importantly Jesus Christ.

I do think there was a little too much time spent focusing on the negatives of technology and media fasting. I do appreciate that these areas are important, but it would have been nice if they could have said a few more words on the positives as well. Children need to know how to use computers and iPads when they join the workforce as they are used by so many businesses. There was some talk of the positives in the extra interviews, maybe some of this could have been added to the main documentary.

Details At a Glance!!

Name: Media Talk 101
Website: Media Talk 101
Product: Captivated DVD
Price: $16.95 US for one
Ages: Intended for adults, though has been approved for children

There are 17 short clips from the movie that you are able to watch before purchasing.