News Junkie

To track my media use, several tools have been employed. For the internet, the tools used include history trends and history stats. For non online media, I have been updating a spreadsheet daily with the average hours spent in class and other non online activities. The following is an analysis of my media use.

African Centric media

On a quick screenshot, most of the media I consume online has Africa as one of the mentions or is centered around Africa. Does this mean, I do not consume global content? Nay on the contrary, I consume different forms/types of media. I view more American video content which is indeed sad for the Nollywood. Perhaps the other reason could be that African-centric media is not as central on the internet, presenting different challenges.

On a weekly analysis days Wednesday seems to be the busiest day I spend online. This is indeed strange given that Wednesday are usually my busiest.  Saturday and Sunday also seem not to have a lot of media consumption.

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Ubiquitous computing has become an integral part of our lives. In the past week, I spent, on an average, about 13 hours everyday using some sort of computing device.  I spent a great chunk of my time reading theory on the subjects of security, territory, population and topic modeling. I also devoted a decent amount of time to topic modeling modules that I am developing as part of my research.  The charts below depict my daily media usage from Feb. 5 to Feb. 11.

Marshall Mcluhan defines media as “artificial extensions of sensory experience.”  But a talk about the media, as defined by Mcluhan, is impossible without bringing into discussion the ideas from the physical world because we experience the interaction of media and the physical world in the form of resemblances and analogies. While tracking all media that I encountered in the past week, I realized how media shapes and paces my day-to-day conduct. To say that I experience media in various modalities assigns a passive role to the media in my life. I would rather say that I encounter the world through the media. Below are three analogies that I found useful in understanding some aspects of this encounter.

Twitter and Facebook as town squares

The town square is a public space where communities gather and interact. The function of a typical town square in pre-Renaissance Europe revolved around community interaction rather than mercantilism.  People traveled to town square to know what was going on in the community. Their arrival and departure was constrained by physical mobility— i.e. they had to move from one place to another. Both Twitter and Facebook are analogous to traditional town squares, except that they are frequented more often because there are virtually no physical barriers. When I say that “I am going on Twitter or Facebook”, I am defining my relationship to these media artifacts in terms of space. Both Twitter and Facebook are ‘places’ where I find what’s going on in the communities that I am part of. I can interact with people in these places, or I can choose to be a passive observer. This is why I think that the metaphor of town square appropriately fits these virtual places. In the last week, I spent, on a daily basis, about 15 minutes using Twitter and about 9 minutes using Facebook. What was remarkable about my interaction with Facebook and Twitter was the daily frequency of visiting these sites: I visited Facebook about 17 times and Twitter about 30 times. So even though I was spending less than a minute on each visit on these sites, I was visiting these sites more than two times in an hour on an average.

News and the art of scrying

The art of scrying is an archaic idea, but we can also say that it is completely contemporary, since the art of scrying basically involves revealing the unknown. To that extent we can say that the practice of scrying is a dream of our contemporary news needs: to reveal what is happening and to predict what will happen. Technology has delimited our visible space like a scrying crystal ball. I am able to gaze at things and regions that hitherto seemed obscure. I follow news as it is happening, I analyze what has happened, and I look for indicators that are predicting what is to come. In addition, I look at news not from the perspective of a nation-state’s subject, but rather from the perspective of a world citizen who belongs to multiple polities and communities.  The desire to know things in real-time now is reflected in my continual attentiveness toward news websites. The chart below shows the daily frequency breakdown for my preferred news sites. 

Gmail and Skype as rhizome roots

Rhizome: www.nomadology.com/rhizome.jpg

The idea that any point can be connected to another point is contained in the metaphor of rhizome. It is a metaphor that apprehends multiplicities. My world on the Internet extends my physical world. In other words, the world on the Internet, which is hyperreal, is very much part of my territorial locus. Both Gmail and Skype allow me to interact in a rhizome reality that exists at the intersection of the real and the hyperreal. Gmail and Skype are the main means of communication and scheduling for me. Even my off-line encounters are organized by these tools. In the past week, I spent about 70 minutes using Gmail and about 15 minutes using Skype on a daily basis. These interactions, like my news usage, permeated my daily schedule on a continual basis.

Consciously examining my media consumption over the past week has been a revealing exercise. In addition to looking at the breakdown of what media I consume in a week, I wanted to document what form of media I spend the most time on, how I get to it, and what times of day I spend on different platforms.

The simple answer: Gmail, all day.

In the las week I spent more than 9 hours on Gmail and scheduling tasks out of the 39 hours I logged on my computer, documented with RescueTime. A close second was writing (time spent on Microsoft Word), followed by social networking sites and news/opinion.

My week looked like this according to RescueTime (w/ hours logged along the vertical axis, day of the week on the horizontal axis, and a key for activity below):

But in reality, my week looked a lot more like this: my daily schedule with activity color coded on top by four categories (red = email, yellow = entertainment, orange = news, pink = social media):

Combining the data from RescueTime with a notebook log I kept of my media consumption throughout the week, I found that my news consumption tends to happen in the mornings, while I consume more topical/class-related material during the days, and I tend towards entertainment (buzzfeed, netflix) in the evenings.

I had three additional takeaways from this exercise:

1. My media consumption is socially driven

I found that I spent a lot more time browsing Facebook and Twitter than I expected. I’m starting to realize that the reason is largely because I pick and choose to read things that my friends share on social networks. For instance, this story on NPR (Facebook link pictured above) was done by a friend of mine and shared by a lot of my friends in the Beirut journalism network. Via social media I am steered towards consuming the stories written or shared by my friends, many of whom share an interest in the Middle East. Not only do I click on these links, but, after examining the open tabs on my browser at the end of the day, I found that I am more likely to go back and actually read/listen to/consume stories shared on my social networks over other links. This concerns me that I may be stuck in a news echo chamber of sorts, dictated by my online social networks.

2. I am a more engaged media consumer in the mornings

By the end of the day, my browser looks like this:

I am much more likely to fully consume and repost or share a story if I encounter it in the morning. By the end of the day, I’m usually operating at information capacity and I’m less likely to read an article to the end.

3. I consume a lot of offline media

My coursework at Fletcher keeps me reading hard copies. I spent approximately 8 hours on offline texts (I’m including my Kindle in this, but that might be a stretch). This material is predominately made up of books and journal articles related to my research and coursework at Fletcher. I’m not sure if this offline consumption is driven by the environment of being in graduate school, but it certainly cuts into the news consumption time that I spend online and on current events. It’s interesting that while I do consume offline media, very little of that media is news; rather, it is longer magazine or academic articles or books.

What would your life look like if you didn’t have a smartphone? Or an iPad? Would you consume less news? Or just get it in a different way?

This week I tried to answer some of these questions by logging my activities online and offline. I recently stopped using my iPhone (on purpose) and my iPad (not on purpose–it got dropped), and our assignment this week allowed me track how I do—and don’t—consume media in my current low-tech environment. My tools at hand were a MacBook Pro, a Kindle, and good ol’ pencil and paper.

Even before I began, I knew that I was consuming less media that I used to back in the days when I carried an iPhone and a Blackberry at all times and immersed myself in a constant news stream, day and night.

But it really surprised me to quantify exactly how little news I read this week. I hardly consumed any breaking news media–just 114 minutes. I barely wrote any emails, averaging 46 minutes a day on gmail. And I spent only three minutes on Facebook.

Partly, this was due to circumstances—I happened to spent a lot of time travelling and a lot of time trying to write code during this period. Over a five-day period, my activity chart looked something like this. I tracked my hours using RescueTime for computer-based activities and a notebook for everything else, and compiled the results in Excel:

My most frequent activities were programming (369 mins), attending class (255 mins), and writing emails (231 mins). In fourth place was reading long-form journalism, which brings me to my next chart: media consumption. I’ve defined media in three categories—books, long-form and news.  This week I spent time reading long-form journalism for my narrative nonfiction class, which was my top category in terms of hours spent:

The news that I read was a bit of a jumble. Here are my top news sites by time spent (for short news stories):

I also tracked what devices I used to consume media, and the result surprised me: I read a lot more on my kindle than on my computer.

Here is the breakdown for what devices I used when reading books, news and long form, by minutes spent. I suspect this would have been pretty different if I was using an iPhone or an iPad:

By comparison when I did the same breakdown for my activities overall, my computer was dominant, accounting for 81% of my time logged. It seems like life without a smartphone has me spending more time on my kindle, and more time reading long-form journalism instead of news stories.

So is it worth living without an iPhone or an iPad? For the time being, absolutely.

I consume medias mainly on PC, Kindle,Mobile phone,TV,printed media and organic relation (oral:talking with people, physical:dance workshop). I used “Rescue Time” for my PC, and as for other medias, I took notes and summed them up.

While setting up my PC for Rescue Time, I encountered something very surprising.

On Rescue Time, you categorize your activity on PC either as “distractive” or as  “productive”. Checking news is part of my work life for more than 20 years. So I categorized “News & Opinion” as “productive”. There came an alert “Most people categorize this as “distracting time”.

WHAAAAAT!! When I was on shift as a page editor, I had to read all 5 national newspapers from top to end  for 3 hours in early morning before go to work. And you call it “distracting time”!  (Of course you can persist and set it up as “productive” in Rescue Time)

OK! Calm down. Here is a very important key for news industry. People want to be productive. But most people think reading news or opinion as distracitve, because it’s passive, I guess. If we can let people consume news in productive way, there could be a break through for the future.

Let’s go back to homework. Here is the summary of the time I spent for the different media.(numbers are minutes I spent)

I spent702 min. for mail. Half of them are for the report and message sent back to Japan, so that is for business. “Oral” does not include chatting at the lunch, but group meeting.”Physical” refers to dance lesson and dance workshop.

As I have been working in the media industry, I tend to use both old and new media. If I put them on timeline, you can see different aspect.

I use mobile phone as an alarm clock. So I sleep with mobile and Kindle. Whenever I wake up at night, I check my mobile for news. When earthquake happen while I am sleeping , I usually wake up at the primary wave and check the data and news on mobile. If it is bigger than M5, I turn on TV and PC.Thus the first screen I see in the morning is mobile.

Then I check TV news. First CNN, surfing through big networks then lands on CNN again.

During daytime, I use mainly PC, but also mobile when I am on move.The evening time is for printed media and Kindle. The last screen I see is mobile again.

This pattern is created after a long time of experience. If anything big happens, I have to go to the newsroom, I have to make phone calls.

How do I choose the media I consume?

I spent 140 minutes, which is almost a quarter of time I spent for media, at the media introduced through social media. They are mainly technology and business information.

There are several news sites and data site which I constantly check. It is like police car checking several points on patrol. There I check top stories and then shop around. It is like “Things to do ” list.  This patter must be quite different from young people, but having several media which I need to check for work, I cannot help.