Millennials (college-aged students) are constantly bombarded with media. It seems to dictate our lives more than any other generation. Technology has made being a consumer so much easier. Our phones have become our lifelines to not only our friends, but also how we understand the world.

Due to the Internet, that world seems to be getting smaller and harder to operate ethically in every day. Then the question becomes, “Should we have to think about the ethics of our own media?”

If we don’t start engaging ethically with media, it would seem that most companies with enough money believe they can shove something in front of us enough that we will like it, buy it and eventually get our friends to do the same. This can be seen by more and more companies purchasing YouTube ads, Facebook ads, promoted tweets, game ads, television commercials, sponsored Tumblr posts — the list goes on and on.

Recently, groups of college-aged people have been fighting back against this idea of blindly consuming media without understanding the implications. It can be seen in the reaction to two recent and specific movies: “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “American Sniper.”

For different reasons, each movie has inspired its own sort of grassroots boycott and commentary. The range of moral ambiguities for each movie is in stark contrast to the others.  

“Fifty Shades of Grey” is said to glamorize sexual abuse and the use of #50DollarsNot50Shades is being used to promote donating to domestic violence centers instead of seeing the movie. Wichita State sophomore Marilyn Morton did research on the film and learned about its completely wrong take on BDSM.

“It just promotes heterosexual sexual abuse, while a movie with a homosexual romantic plot is still considered controversial,” Morton said. “And from the interviews I’ve seen, the actors didn’t even like shooting the movie because they knew it was wrong.”

“American Sniper” is seen as a movie to promote nationalistic pride, but has also been accused of increasing Islamophobia. Kiah Duggins, also a WSU sophomore, acknowledged that both sides of the political spectrum have drawn conclusions about the movie.

“I think the country’s conversations about the film would be more productive if they focused on the movie’s exploration of abstract concepts such as war, honor, death and conviction,” Duggins said.

Other generations might share the same opinions as millennials, but we are the ones constantly being directly marketed to. The juries are still mostly out on the movies listed above, and millennials themselves are still split in whether they saw the movie and loved it or if they are boycotting the movie altogether.

The point lies in the active decision to do either. Most of the time, millennials are passive observers, constantly being sold to. As a generation, we need to become active, more vocal members in what we like, don’t like, are offended by and what we are not offended by.

Eventually, it will not be movies they are selling us, but our own futures.