I started this assignment in an effort to make a real timeline out of my media consumption. I knew I wanted to track my reading speed and volume, not in some cruel optimization of reading efficiency, but rather just to see what I find. It turns out that, at least when I’m busy, I consume articles in chunks: several in a sitting, possibly with a long piece thrown in that I had been waiting to read. And I seem to read opinion, essays, and features much more slowly.

Here is the link to the animation: http://austinhess.github.io/media/

As many other members of the class did, I began this assignment by using RescueTime to track my computer activities over the course of the last few weeks.  Before I launch into my analysis of the statistics that the app collected for me, I’d like to mention a few caveats:

1. RescueTime did not account for my phone usage, which (unfortunately) accounts for a huge amount of my “distracted” time.  However, through this activity, I also discovered that this is where I read the majority of my news (the BBC mobile app, for instance) and listened to news broadcasts or informative podcasts.  Thus, my RescueTime statistics lack some of my most positive and negative uses of technology (though positive and negative are potentially extremely subjective here).
2. The app has no way of tracking time I spent reading or consuming physical media. I go through the majority of my (self-proclaimed) important readings on paper.  I typically have spotify or email up while I engage in physical reading, which (partially) accounts for the massive gmail numbers in the following graphs.
3. Also, I felt a need to cheat when I knew that RescueTime was monitoring my activities.  This meant that I switched some of my Facebook time to my phone, or tried to more actively visit news sites during this period.  You will note, however, that news does not even show up as one of my categories.  This is both disappointing and unsurprising news.  It confirmed my theory that I only read news in small chunks when in transit, when procrastinating, or when engaging in distractions during meetings.
4. Some of the categorization seems arbitrary.  For instance, time spent in Evernote goes under “productivity,” even if I was using Evernote to collect fuzzy animal links (I have not yet done this, but now maybe I will).

Alright, caveats aside, here is what RescueTime revealed:

Perhaps the most important line:

For the first few days, I tried to manually log some of my news sources:

2/5/15:

• NYT (15 mins)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• word of mouth

2/6/15

• 99 percent invisible on commute
• NYT before recitation

(end of my attention span when it comes to manually logging this information)

I started using Pocket to avoid having three hundred tabs open at any given moment, but quickly discovered that for me, out of sight pretty much meant out of mind, and I rarely came back to those news articles.

The bottom line here: I spend a gross amount of time on gmail and Facebook, and my computer usage is highly unproductive.  None of this is really a surprise to me. It basically revealed a massive underlying level of media distraction in my life.

I have recently been spending a lot of time thinking about attention, focus, productivity, and cognitive space – mainly because my first semester has passed and now I feel a lot more pressure to accomplish significant things (blah blah blah). Part of this has led me to think more about making space to write, reflect, explore, and think.  One of the themes that keeps coming up in my explorations is the idea of crafting physical space to promote (or prevent) certain actions.  With that in mind, I decided to create a type of “map of my desk space” to further unpack my media consumption.

It ended up looking a lot less a desk and more like a 3D bar chart: the diameter represents the frequency of visits to the site/medium, and the height represents the amount of time I spend per visit/use of the medium, so the volume represents approximate total time spent engaging in the medium.  I collected this information through a combination of RescueTime, estimation, and timers.

Here is the key (unfortunately, the colors did not come out super well):

Laying out my “desk” space forced me to think about how I mentally organize my sources of information.  Ultimately, I realized that I understand and focus on concepts better when I see them on paper, but that for things like news, things that are temporary, I typically need to use digital media.  I attribute this to the rapid turnaround rate – physical versions of these would pile up incredibly rapidly.  Based on this understanding, I separated the categories into “static” (i.e. textbooks, papers, books read for fun, patents, etc.) and “dynamic” (Facebook, Twitter, email, websites/blogs, NYT, BBC, Snapchat News, Messaging).

 (top view)

 (side view)

Gmail (the green blob), was my most frequented site (large diameter), but I used it for relatively short spurts each time (so it is a short bar).  Similarly, the Facebook bar is almost flat as I only ever briefly scan through Facebook, but I do so incredibly frequently.  Conversely, the papers bar is very tall, but has a small diameter- I only sit down to read papers once or twice a day, but when I do, I spend hours on that task.

Looking at this arrangement, I was curious about the sources of my information.  I already know that I receive an alarming amount of my news from messages, word of mouth, or Facebook, but I wanted to further explore my influencers.  I arranged my bars into a venn diagram:

I am, by nature, a highly social and socially influenced individual, so it was not entirely shocking to see how much of my media came from friends and outside sources.  It is interesting to note that the things I spent the most time on originated from a combination of my friends and my own investigations. I found this to be both reassuring and logical – that is the most interactive and dynamic space.

One aspect of my media consumption that was not captured with this framework was that I read much faster when read on paper.  I’m not entirely sure how this factors into my scaling plan, but it certainly impacts how much information I process.  It also does not account for the difference between time periods: I happen to be a morning person, so for me, not all hours are equivalent.  I’m much more efficient in the morning, so it takes me less time to get through content and effectively process it than it would at night. Based on my RescueTime stats, I’m trying to consolidate my email time rather than spreading it throughout the day, but it’s sometimes difficult to find the appropriate space to conduct email sifting.

The final aspect of my media consumption that I did not examine was the location of engagement.  For instance, do I read most of my papers at my desk? Do I read the news on the T? I know I mostly listen to podcasts on the way to work, and I mostly read for fun on my couch, but in the future it may be interesting to explore any correlations between location and type of media.

Overall, I learned that I am easily distracted and potentially very unproductive.  There is a lot of room for stream-lining, and it might be worth reconsidering my (lack of) consumption of traditional news sources.

As an editor, I consume a lot of media for work. I tried a few different ways to slice the seemingly mundane data that I collected in my media log and found myself focusing again and again on voices and who they belong to. Who is the author? Where is she from? Where are her sources from? Has she ever met them face-to-face? These questions I found myself asking again and again as I jotted down my daily tangle of tech and international news, NPR podcasts, and even late night “fake” news shows.

Perhaps more interesting than what I found in static (i.e. not evolving during the time of consumption) media was the information that I gathered on email lists. Global Voices is known as a community of bloggers and activists around the world – while we’re best known publicly by our site, if it wasn’t for our email lists, I’m not sure how we would have become a community to begin with.

During the first week of February, a really moving discussion played out on one of our community lists. A contributor from Tunisia wrote to the group and shared a link to a press release from the Kingdom of Bahrain that enumerated 72 people whose citizenship it had elected to revoke. Among these people was another contributor of ours, Ali Abdulemam, who now has political asylum in the UK. I learned a lot in that week from the conversation that played out over the list. Here is a colored pencil rendition of the conversation:

The increase of knowledge over time in a GV list discussion.

Each dot represents a message sent to the group. The color of the dot denotes the country that the sender identifies as his or her home. For each message, I made a rough (highly subjective) calculation of how much new information it contributed to the conversation. The line at the top of the graph indicates the total amount of information accumulated over time. In the end, we all learned about Ali’s story, but also heard stories from contributors in Egypt and Azerbaijan who had taken exile from their countries under similar circumstances. Towards the end of this record of the conversation, we decided to produce a series of stories on Global Voices focusing on citizenship and border crossing in the world of digital activism.

The second graphic hones in on question of voice and sources. While editing stories on all of the countries listed below, I read multiple stories and pieces of research focused on each the relevant issues in each place.

Percentage of stories that quoted a source in the country.

A few noteworthy findings:

Cuba: During this week, Netflix declared their aspirations to begin offering service in Cuba. Most English language media reporting on the story quoted only a press release from Netflix, which of course failed to acknowledge the fact that almost no Cubans have enough Internet connectivity to watch video online, nor do they have the credit cards with which to pay for the service. I edited a story by fellow classmate Elaine Díaz on the topic, which of course illuminated these facts.

Bahrain: I edited two stories that week on Bahrain, both of which focused on the stories of individual activists and bloggers, and both of which drew heavily on sources from those peoples’ friends and relatives.

Russia: Global Voices coverage of Russia consistently draws from social media commentary from users in the country. I read several of our previous articles in order to edit one that offered new information on a series of social-media related arrests. I should note that while all of these pieces quoted local voices, their authors are not Russian, nor do they reside in the country.