This assignment came at the perfect time – it’s a very very busy month and I really need to improve my media diet. The goal of my media diary is to determine a media consumption routine that is the most productive(towards dissertation research).

Diary:  see screenshots below or see interactive diary here

the key: to mimic a hand-drawn feel, I used hatch marks. The messier the mark, the less productive.

total days: 1 – 7, from last Wednesday, I went on a ill-timed vacation

productivity is highest in early – mid morning

overall I am not productive 🙁

I work at the lab or on the train

Parameters: The media I measured are what inputs I get, not what I make(those are tracked in a spreadsheet already).

Collection: After using rescuetime for a few days, I decided against it because it’s automatic recordings didn’t allow me to reflect on what I consumed. The method I found most helpful was to hand record as I go throughout the day. After the first few days, I adapted my notes into a google form(left) so that I can input directly from my phone into a standard format.

The format of my recording results in a spreadsheet with columns for date, time, media, productivity, who I am with, part of day, duration, place, and a short description.

Visualization: I chose this assignment to write a simple reusable visualization module and experiment with opening up visualizations to others on github. Inspired by “Dear Data”, I made a simple spreadsheet to sortable hatch marks visualization.

It is really still a work in progress.

Conclusions: I am pretty predicable. I look at Instagram and online shop throughout the day. I am most productive in the lab, on the train, and in the early mornings.

There is so much I want to do for this visualization. Changing the labels, adding more notes, increasing the clarity with some modifications, and using google spreadsheets directly instead of a downloaded spreadsheet. This repo I made for code in the project is working. (without the key panel)

the entered data, the input form

“Ha, I have to write about my media consumption for last week? Big Deal, I know what I spend my time on.” My impression went roughly in this line when I found out that I had to embark on this crazy self-monitoring endeavor. Little did I know that self-monitoring in this digital age can be strangely cathartic.

My journey started with installing RescueTime in my borrowed MacBook Pro. First warning sign came to me when RescueTime asked me, rather incredulously, if I was in my senses when I marked News and Opinion category as productive. “Really? Most people mark it as distracting” was the website’s wisdom. But what would an impersonal website know about our priorities, we know better right? But the power of perceived monitoring became apparent when I started navigating through my digital life.

Here are some of the insights I got from my three-day digital surveillance: I may have been devouring media, both traditional and social, in my earlier life as a journalist, but as a grad student for last two years, my media consumption went downhill and I may have retracted into my metaphorical cave filled with library books and articles. A.T. Mahan, Halford Mackinder, and other luminaries took the place of Media glitterati in my life. Consequently, the most amount of time I spend either online or offline is devoted to these readings. But self-monitoring proved that this could be a far cry from the truth. I do spend a fair amount of resources (both data and battery power) on both ‘productive activities like checking news sites and ‘distracting’ activities like listening to online music (we certainly have to be current with the Grammys right?) or checking TweetDeck ever-so-often.

It was revealing to me that when time became a precious commodity, Facebook quickly went into the back-burner but twitter remained in the focus. Another information I found about my browsing habits is that I tend to hop from one website to another. I start off with an interesting tweet or article and start reading all the related stories or the hyperlinks present in the stories. Hyperlinks can be distracting, and addictive as well…

While it was interesting to see that I was following a pattern and unknowingly was being led from one article to another, the most interesting aspect I found is the time slots that I am online.

I tend to squeeze my Digital time between the classes and other sacred Grad School rituals, like realtime socialization. While this pattern is most visible during the weekdays, I do operate on identifiable time slots during the weekends as well.

Before the start of monitoring I was of the impression that I was doing a lot of work and that as a grad student, I was under enough workload. It was only after I started monitoring my own activity that I realized there is always enough time, we just need to look deeper into our own time consumption.

RescueTime isn’t the most amazing of tools, especially the free version, but I appreciated the aggregated data coming off my laptop, and added in another sizeable chunk of time regarding my cell.

I’m not totally cyborg, but in the last week I spent about 60% of my time connecting to some kind of machine/online media source.  I thought as a fun form of data vis, I’d glitch my face as a quantitative measurement of my computer usage in true Neuromancer art fashion.  With soft massaging of data:

60% online/computer usage, 40% other (reading, painting, working out, you know, living). The glitch me versus the real me.  Yep, 60/40….

“Glitch me” breaks down to be 70/30% software development to OMG FB and social media.  Horrifying.  The larger pixelations vs the smaller pixelations represent this ratio.

glitch software from https://getmosh.io/   I wish i had more time to do a live visualization/API feed but this is my analog estimation of how cyborgian I truly am.

My media journal started off with me meticulously detailing when, where, and what I was consuming, as I consumed it. I was idealistic in assuming I could do this for a full week with no problems — by the weekend, I found myself consuming media left, right and center and forgetting to record it.

Luckily, I had my browser history to pull from to fill in the gaps and I found some interesting — although not entirely surprising — results. Yes, I spend more time than I should on Facebook. I also spent an extraordinary amount of time on LinkedIn and GitHub this week, which I thought was interesting. Upon reflection, though, this makes sense: 1) I’m job-hunting and 2) I use GitHub for one of my other classes.

I also found my media consumption to center around a few events — I tend to find a subject and read lots about it, rather than read about a large breadth of topics. This week’s topics were dominated by Kanye West and Gilmore Girls (as tempted as I was to hide certain browsing details, I kept them in).

I combed through my Chrome browser history, taking a look at the history file on my computer, which is stored in sqlite format. I ran a few simple queries, like the one below to get the percentage of my browser history that was social media related:

select *
from "urls"
where "last_visit_time" > 13099253131722513 #timestamp from a week ago
and "url" like "%facebook%"
or "url" like "%twitter"
or "url" like "%github%"
or "url" like "%linkedin%"

From this, I was able to get the percentage of links that were Facebook, Twitter, etc. You’ll notice that this doesn’t measure time spent on each page. I actually thought that this was fine, as throughout the week, I noticed I’m not one to scroll through Facebook too much – I just take a look at the top stories on my feed and then exit out — and probably don’t spend longer than 2-3 minutes per visit unless I’m messaging a friend. If I really wanted to, I could estimate the time by calculating the number of times I hit Facebook in the past week multiplied by my average time spent per visit (e.g. 401 visits to Facebook –> 16 hours, which is terrifying to think about).

Another aspect of media consumption I looked into this week was seeing where I found the articles I read. Did they come from Facebook? Twitter? I found that most of them came from Twitter and links shared from a friend through Slack.

Interestingly, I found that beyond my social media consumption, my media consumption is largely driven by email. About 50% of my media consumption came from email! Related, but not necessarily media (which, by my definition, was communication for an audience that wasn’t private) was that I spent a lot of time on my calendar, organizing and adding appointments with peers.

To track my mobile phone usage, I ended up conceding to phone battery to determine which apps I used to consume media. This is obviously a skewed metric — Snapchat uses much more data to transmit photos/videos compared to Twitter, which is much more text based. I found that I used Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter and Facebook the most on my phone, which is consistent with what I thought my mobile media consumption would look like. I also read about 75% of articles on my phone compared to the 25% I read on my computer. Because I tend to use my computer to either code or write extensively (and use my phone in almost all other cases), this also makes sense.

But enough of SQL code and words — I wanted to try my hand at infographics, so I decided to put together a couple of short ones: one for my computer media usage, the other for my mobile media usage.

Notably, these graphics and my earlier discussion doesn’t track any media that wasn’t consumed on my phone or the computer. I did read one print publication this week, which was my school newspaper, The Wellesley News. I also listened to roughly 150 tracks on Spotify, 50 tracks on SoundCloud. With regards to TV consumption, I watched a couple episodes of Mozart in the Jungle and the first four episodes of Billions. 

When I started my media journal, I had a hunch of what I would find: lots and lots of time on Facebook. I never really got into Twitter and Snapchat, but Facebook has become a big problem for me in recent years. It started as a convenient way to keep in touch with friends I wasn’t seeing and networking with other journalists, activists and interesting people – many stories I wrote started with my feed. It also seemed like a good way to gauge zeitgeist, which is important for a journalist.

But over the past 2-3 years, it has evolved into an addiction. Clicking on Facebook and scrolling down my feed became something I either do all the time, or want to do all the time, like the smoker who starts craving a cigarette even as she’s still smoking one. It’s not that my feed is so interesting: more often it’s either boring or depressing (Unlike other people who get depressed by seeing other people’s photogenic lives, my depression derives mainly from having so many lefty Israeli friends who are disgruntled about the way things are in Israel). Furthermore, I don’t trust Facebook. I know they’re selling me to advertisers, that they are a useful tracking and monitoring tool for governments, and that Facebook keeps me from reading and writing stuff I really want to read and write, from really being with my kids, even when I’m physically there and that it turns me into a “like” junkie.

So why do I keep at it? I think that it’s the useful distraction from anxiety, combined with a slight ADHD. And, it’s so easy. Facebook is always there. It has gotten so bad, that when I have something important to do – an assignment or just an afternoon with my children – I have taken to deleting the Facebook app from my phone. The problem is, I always re-download it.

Examining the battery percentage report on my phone revealed that my suspicions were founded: On a daily basis and also on a weekly basis, I was spending around 50% of my battery (i.e. of my time) on Facebook.

Some insights about my usage of Facebook:

Another interesting insight is that I now consume most of my media through Facebook. I rarely go to the New York Times website anymore – I just “like” them, get updates and read what I want to read through Instant Articles. It’s the same with Haaretz, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, but also silly quiz websites and slideshows. 

The defining feature of my consumption is that it is seemingly random: I don’t start out saying, “I’d like to see a slideshow about the longest-lasting celebrity marriages! where can I find that?” I am distracted into clicking on the link when it appears on my feed. Of course, there is really nothing random about it, because it is all dictated by the Facebook algorithm in ways that I will never understand. But the point is that it is not dictated by me. I’m no longer in charge of my media consumption: Mark Zuckerberg is.