Mag’s Media Diary

While exploring ways to log my media intake, I played with a few ideas of visual representation. Perhaps collection of photographs of every piece of media I consumed, or short, 1 second videos. Quickly overwhelmed by the vast amount of media consumed, with 30 new videos and photos over the course of just a few hours, I decided too comprehensive a log would prove unmanageable and unsustainable for the week. In an effort to simplify, I began exploring the idea of graphically portraying that intake. While beginning some graph development, I checked my second most used app behind gmail, Google Calendar.

What a simple design. What clean colors. What a nice way to map how I distribute my time.

And so I began to log my media intake on the calendar. Again, the media log quickly overcame me and my calendar began to flood and overwhelm, so I decided to stick with the structure but move away from the platform. And voila, a visualization was born!

I intended to show one orientation of the image to be portrait and the visualization to scroll and allow the user to hover over each block. I used Adobe XD and was struggling to get the sample video to upload to WordPress. In the meantime, I’ve shown the still shots with the image in landscape.

The x axis is time, the y axis my attention. For each section, my attention is distributed between 1. people and human interaction (white) 2. Spotify, music, and podcasts (green) 3. ads (yellow) 4. entertainment, such as a Cherry Glazer concert or Brooklyn Nine-Nine (blue/purple) 5. class lectures, videos, and workshops (teal) 6. Instagram and Reddit (red) 7. work media such as readings for courses, research, and media content I produce (pink). For many chunks of time, my attention is split between people and media, or Spotify and readings.

Blacked out to see the contrast in media versus non media attention, overall you can see about 50% of my time is devoted to media intake, be it the only thing holding my attention or just music running in the background. A dip in media consumption over the weekend in the middle of the graph comes from a visit to a friend’s family in Western Mass. During that time, spent little to no time consuming media until, only chatting, playing games, and watching a little brother’s basketball tournament until the All Star game that night. I included an all day workshop on Saturday, the two teal half tall chunks, where we needed to both read and consume content produced by community organizers, but also engage with people consistently throughout the day.

Work
Fun

Finally, I separated out work from fun. Instagram, Reddit, Spotify, Podcasts, and some news fell into my entertainment or fun graph, the second of this set. While the blue shows concerts and tv shows and is somewhat irregular, taking up almost all of my attention at one time for an extended period of time somewhat irregularly, the green of music and podcasts and the red of instagram and reddit were regular and somewhat constant throughout my week, but took up much less attention space. I get my news sometimes through podcasts, but often spend little time diving into it.

Something that was difficult to track was non-work article consumption. I read news articles and watch videos, but for quite short periods of time regularly and often. I am not a news junky, but get updates from the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and a few other news outlets. While some articles I will read, I rarely anymore spend extended time on the sites themselves or sifting through stories.

Work was much more difficult to separate out. In classes and research, I read many stories and news stories for work and research, but that have an entertaining quality to them. It was a much more difficult to make labels for the work, and different media started clumping together to form just two groups: out of class work and in class work.

A few takeaways: I listen to podcasts or music frequently throughout the day as background or while doing other work. I have worried I spent too much time on social media apps and entertainment and have put an effort to calm it down, but see the cycle of low work, high work that naturally occurs throughout the week and weekend and find it healthier than I anticipated. I am a bit surprised about how little news I consume. Because the articles I read in work are old but politically minded, it often feels as if I am in touch with what is going on in the world currently. Many of the meme accounts, instagram accounts, and subreddits I follow are feminist, socialist, political, etc. and touch on a lot of news. But I do not go on NYT or WaPo like I used to. I believe it is pretty intentional, but I wonder if it is helpful or constructive to the public sphere.