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Friday, January 23, 2015

Digital Media Usage

A full day's worth of media in my life would look something like this:

Apple Smartphone
Alarm
Maps
Messages accessed 14 times
Twitter x4
Instagram x2
Snapchat x3
Facebook x3
Google Chrome
            -Gmail

Apple Computer Laptop
Mail
Microsoft Word x2 (for homework)
Microsoft PowerPoint x2 (to follow along in lecture)
Spotify
iTunes
Adobe InDesign (for homework)
Google Chrome:
            -Blackboard x5
            -My.asu.edu x5
            -Gmail x3
            -Blogger x2
            -Bloglovin’ x2
            -YouTube x3
            -VEVO - Shut Up and Dance, Walk The Moon
            -UpWorthy – BeyoncĂ©’s human struggles
            -Medium – Last Call: The End of the Printed Newspaper, Clay Shirky
            -SFGATE – Crap Detection 101, Howard Rheingold
            -Newsgate – Spotlight on Casey Niestsat

In class today I experienced someone else’s use of:
Safari
            -My.asu.edu
            -Blackboard
PowerPoint

Television
Netflix
            -Gossip Girl x2

Radio
I spent a total of 1hour and 30 minutes flipping between two different radio stations for my daily commute to school and back (not a radio show per say but music is media nonetheless)

I contributed to online media on this day by:
-Liking 4 Facebook posts
-Privately posting to my Facebook page as a means of getting an image from my laptop to my mobile phone
-Posting the previously mentioned image to Instagram
-Liking 13 Instagram posts
-Leaving 1 Instagram comment
-Replying to one school related email
-Leaving 3 comments on various personal blogs and ‘upvoting’ one response to a previous comment of mine.



By keeping track of every time I accessed media yesterday (shown above in the order of incidence but divided by device), I realized just how much of an integral part of my life media actually is. It was a little difficult to keep track of everything because I would often forget that I was actually doing something involving a digital media source. Marking down everything I accessed, how I accessed, and how many times I intentionally accessed the particular media platform created the above listing. Though this list doesn’t say how long I spent on each platform or how many internal links I followed at each site (unless the article is directly stated, then none), it’s pretty clear just how much of my time is spent consuming media and creating it. A lot.  I do feel that some of my uses of media are time fillers (twitter while waiting for the crosswalk, or reading an article while waiting for InDesign to load) but some of those listings were purely accessed while falling down into the black hole of procrastination. I wish I wouldn’t do that but honestly, who doesn’t?

One thing about this listing that really sticks out to me is that the amount of consumed that was media created by others is not counter balanced with the amount I created. I wish I spent less time interacting with media for personal use (less casual Instagram browsing or meaningless Facebook liking) and more time creating but now I’m wondering why I don’t? It’s entirely possible to create and consume content in balanced proportions and I would feel so much better about my productivity levels.

I can’t help but wonder if other people spend as much of their life creating, viewing, or interpreting digital media as I do. I’m sure that some people do it even more often than I do but the above list seems like more than the average. Part, if not most, of the time I spend interacting with media can be attributed to school so, I must fall in the ‘more than average media consumption category’ (especially if that statistic includes the media illiterate). The truth is that I’d rather spend my free time on the Internet than anywhere else.

Notice the lack of books, newspapers, magazines, and a general print category from the above list? The commercials deter me from watching television and anything worth learning by watching television would be shared online anyways. I am guilty of playing Gossip Girl via Netflix for background noise though. Newspapers don’t even deliver to my house except for the Sunday edition but if I don’t have time for 5minutes of visual ads on the TV why would I pay attention to my mom’s Sunday paper? I only ever read magazines on airplanes for some reason. Talk Radio shows are just as lackluster as television because they can only engage 50% of my attention at a time (I don’t need to physically attentive just mentally). While driving I sometimes listen to a radio show or podcast but the occasion is rare because what I want to listen to and the time’s I’m driving do not often align.

The only other statistic that I can think to draw from the media use listing is that I don’t text very often. What can I say; I’m a pretty independent person.


All my love,
kpeterr


P.S. If the government taxed wifi, how much money would they make off of you? 

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