Primavera’s Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Primavera

For a more detailed overview of my media consumption, click here !

After trying to figure out which tool I could use to track my media consumption, I immediately encountered a problem: I have 3 different computers that I use regularly depending on my location (my old computer which always stays home, my new computer which resides at the Berkman center, and my netbook which always follows me along), 2 phones which I often use to check my emails or skype, and I sometimes rely on analog media, just as books. I could therefore not figure out a single application that would collect data about my media consumption simultaneously on all devices.. so I decided to keep track of it myself. Here is the spreadsheet that came out of it.
In addition to measuring my media consumption, my curiosity brought me to also collect the main topics of consumption. I tried to classify every piece of information that I gathered from media into broad categories, so as to be able to subsequently assess the correlation existing between the media I consume and the type of content or information I get exposed to.
After fiddling with various tools for datavisualisation, I ended up picking up d3.js – a very powerful tool for creativing beautiful data visualisations in (almost) no time – at least once you’ve figured out how to use it.. The current visualisations are not that exciting, of course, but that’s all I managed to get done for this first attempt at learning the tool.
The result was quite surprising as I realised that my media consumption during the week was limited to a very small number of very specific topics, which are not in fact at all representative of how I perceived my interested to be:

Art was the great winner, with over 26 hours over the whole week. Of course, this was greatly related to the fact that I spent most of my week working with colleagues on our Burning Man proposal whose deadline is next week, so a large part of my “Conversations” this week were related to “Art”.
Programming was (surprisingly) the second, with over 10 hours of exposure. This is, in reality, not so surprising, considering that I was actually learning how to use d3 for this very assignment, so I had to spend many hours browsing the web in order to figure out how to achieve my goals.
Science-Fiction was third, also over 10 hours of exposure. I did not expect it at all, since I’m actually not a Science fiction freak, but then again I am currently reading a science fiction book and I’ve been watching various Sci-Fi movies that week, so it probably makes sense.
The rest basically amounts to my research topics: surveillance, antitrust, bitcoin, copyright, privacy and mesh networking, which when summed together amount to over 40 hours of exposure during the whole week. A result that did not surprise me at all.

The other interesting result of this analysis was derived the relative proportion of media I have been consuming over the week. Web is naturally the number one (with over 36 hours of consumption), which is not surprising since most of the information I seek comes from the web – although I did in fact expect my weekly exposure to the Web to be even higher than 36 hours. But what was highly surprising to me was to realize that the “Web” medium was so closely followed by “Conversation” (with over 33 hours of exposure). Of course, one might argue that “conversation” is not a medium in itself.. yet, as I compiled the spreadsheet, I carefully marked down only these conversation that were actually exposing me to new information, or that involved some kind of collaborative information construction.
This made me reflect upon the actual definition of “media”. I personally never really thought about what is or is not a medium, in fact, I consider myself to be extremely ignorant as regards media. So this is probably not the proper definition of “media”, but according to my personal view, “media” is whatever convey information or allow someone to communicate – which is why I decided to include “conversations” whithin the media category.
Overall, I think this was an extremely interesting exercise, which allowed me to become more aware, and to pay more attention to my media consumption. While I think the weekly “topics” were slightly biased or contaminated by circumstancial factors, I was happy to discover that “conversations” play such an important role in my media consumption. Since I arrived in Boston 3 months ago, I have found myself complaining about how difficult it is to get any work done in such a mentally stimulating environment such as the Berkman Center and the MIT Medialab. Now, I can finally justify it on being one of my main sources of information ;).
I also really enjoyed the process of figuring out how to transform a basic spreadsheet into something meaningful and visually enticing – which allowed me to discover the potential of d3 as a datavisualisaton tool, and to come back to my somewhat rusty programming skills.

Julia’s Media Diary: An American Affair

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Julia

As a journalist, I was interested in learning about the kinds of news media I generally consume: where it’s from, the sources I tend to go to, whether information is pushed to me (via social media or e-newsletters) or I actively seek it out. I used RescueTime and a media log to figure out how and where I was getting my news.

An American Affair

I was surprised to learn that almost all of my top news media sources were American. In fact, US-based news sources far outstripped my media from any other country, with Canada and the UK trailing behind. Mainstream media sources—NPR, the New Yorker, the New York Times—represented the bulk of my media diet. I also spent a lot of time reading about the changes in the media industry these past few days. (General news stories were the main focus, followed by science-related stories, and then media-related stories.)

Push vs. Pull

As well, I found that I spent almost as much time wading through news information that is pushed to me as I do seeking out news.

The Sadness of Endless Scroll

When it comes to news media, I mostly gathered information online (using my computer and my iPhone), though I also got a healthy portion of news through the radio or podcasts. What didn’t make it on to my graph was the vast number of websites I had visited for only minutes or even seconds, according to RescueTime. Of my top news sources, Twitter and Feedly represented a large proportion of the time I spent consuming media, which suggests I was scrolling through stories and reading tweets and snippets of stories instead of diving deep.

The Tyranny of Gmail

Finally, I was distressed by the amount of time I dedicated to Gmail. Nearly seven hours in five days, and two of those days fell on a weekend when I tend to use email less than during weekdays.

Reading books—for classes and pleasure—was my third most popular media activity, after creating content on Microsoft word. This was somewhat comforting, though I am not sure it represents my typical media diet. Since I’m on leave from work at the moment and back at school, my sources of news and the way I use them differ quite a bit from the usual. Still, I would like to offer these media diet resolutions:

1) Cut the Gmail habit.
2) Dedicate more time to reading alternative news sources.
3) Seek out news sources from countries other than the US, UK, and Canada.
4) Spend less time with information that is pushed at me on the endless social media scroll and more time lingering on stories I seek out.

Reflections On A Weeklong Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Julia

Summary:
While this class approaches media consumption with an open mind, I hold personal opinions about what kind of media I should and should not be consuming in order to achieve my goals. Embarking on the Media Diary for a week allowed me to compare my perceptions of and aspirations for my media consumption with reality. I learned that my gmail consumption far exceeded the time I spent on social media, entertainment, news, and other categories. A focus on effective time management must therefore mean a focus on my gmail use.air max sale

My perceptions:

I spend too much time on social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin.
I spend too much time on entertainment sites.
I don’t spend enough time focusing on my priorities (“urgent” v. “important”).

My aspirations:

Improve my time management skills to focus more of my media time on my top priority projects.
Spend less time on media I consider “distracting” like social networks.

Media Diary Goal:

Understand my media consumption by type and value added, particularly time spent on social media and entertainment sites.

Methodology:

1. Quantitative data: Use RescueTime to analyze browser use.

2: Qualitative data: Based on quantitative results, reflect on value added and how that value correlates with my time management goals.

Results:

Quantitative data: the RescueTime data showed me that I spend 50% of my online time on gmail communication, another 25% on composition (primarily schoolwork), only 7% on social media, and 18% spread across other categories.
Qualitative data: Looking at the RescueTime data shows me that if I am to increase my allocation to meaningful media consumption, it should be more effective management of my gmail use. This data was not parsed apart into “productive” and “unproductive” gmail time, so this is a next step for me moving forward.
Neither entertainment nor news media were significant components of my time over the last week original new balance
.

Discussion:

Maintaining this media diary was illuminating for me because my preconceived notion was that the time I am spending on social media and entertainment is preventing me from being productive. In fact, since half my media time is spent on gmail, I need to make sure that I am achieving my time management goals within my gmail use. A next step for me is building more effective email habits, such as the “4 Ds” strategy of Do, Delete, Delegate, or Defer. Correlating my gmail use with my time management goals will move me in the right direction towards understanding the value add of the majority of the time I spend on media cheap air jordan.

William’s Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by William

This was an interesting and challenging assignment. Defining what to include as media consumption, figuring out how to measure it, and summarizing the mass of data in a reasonable form were some of the design decisions I had to make. I decided to provide qualitative observations on my offline and mobile access and then try to “deep dive” into my web history to gain further insights into what I consume.

Offline Media

Print: I don’t currently subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. I picked up and skimmed the MIT student newspaper (the Tech) and the newsletter of the graduate dorm I live in (Sidney Pacific). The elevators of Sidney Pacific have a wide array of posters that I inevitably see every day. A common characteristic of the print media I consume is that they are simply there.

Elevator posters on February 8.

Television: I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies on Friday, February 7 for two to three hours. I also turned on the television at a few points this week, out of habit. Usually, I channel surf or leave the television on as background noise. Possibly because of the way that television is architected — it’s really easy to press the channel-up or channel-down button — I probably get a wider variety and range of perspectives than I do when I’m on the Internet. For example, this week, I’ve watched at least of a few minutes of PBS, the three major American networks, the Discovery Channel, Fox News, and C-SPAN.

Radio/Music: I didn’t listen to the radio this week. I usually listen to NPR if I drive, but I didn’t drive this week. I used Songza (a website like Pandora that gives personalized music recommendations) to listen to music on my phone and computer.

Mobile

A substantial amount of my media consumption is on my phone. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a good tool to automatically track my mobile usage or automatically take screenshots; in hindsight, capturing my browsing history might have worked to some extent, but it wouldn’t have been able to capture all of my usage through various apps. It’s my hope that my deep dive into my desktop Internet usage will capture some of these patterns.

A key exception is Facebook. A few weeks ago, to reduce distractions on my computer, I decided to logout of Facebook from my computer and access it only on my phone. I think that it has been a successful experiment — I’ve only logged in to Facebook on a couple of occasions. On my phone, I accessed Facebook on a daily basis and generally click on a few links on my news feed.

Desktop/Internet

RescueTime

As a first step, I used RescueTime to measure my computer activity. As illustrated below, it provided an indication of when I’m on the computer and the types of activities I do. It seems like a lot of my most productive hours are in the early evenings and early hours of the morning.

Usage by hour of day

Usage by category

RescueTime also provided a breakdown of my news and entertainment consumption:

News consumption

Entertainment consumption

Reflections

I’m pretty surprised by how much I read Canadian media — I usually go to these URLs as a distraction.
In contrast, I “stumble upon” other kinds of physical offline media more often.
It’s interesting to think about how to think about and capture offline interactions and media consumption. The ways that I can think of, such as written or audio journaling or taking photos regularly, seem fairly disruptive and invasive.
It takes time and effort to trace one’s own media consumption. Notably, large Internet companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and others — have substantial infrastructure and resources capturing every click and action of their users. It is interesting to think about what insights can be gleaned from that data, along with the limitations of what they can infer about human behavior and preferences.

Dalia’s Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Dalia

For my data collection, I decided to use the application Rescue Time. Rescue Time is ideally used to enhance productivity and manage the amount of time spent on ‘disruptive’ sites. The user can indicate a set of productivity goals with a set of sites that would be considered disruptive and calculate productivity on a daily basis based on media consumption.

I, on the other hand decided not to set any goals and just record my consumption based on sites visited. I do have to note that I have reservations regarding the pre-defined categories in the application, especially when Twitter and Facebook are considered disruptive sites. I find this problematic, not only because I use both platforms to conduct research, but also because I find that both sites can be valuable sources of information and news. Let alone the fact that other forms of media, such as daily interactions and talks are obviously not recorded and thus not represented in this data set. My other reservation is the fact that I can pause the application and stop recording any media I consume. I have to admit I used it on multiple occasions, which gives a skewed result of how many hours I was online and the media I consumed. Regardless, I found quite interesting results and patterns in the data set which I present below.

When I first thought of doing this assignment, I thought of creating a time lapse video of the sites I consumed using the data I collected from Rescue Time. Unfortunately, I face a number of hurdles, one being that the data collected was difficult to translate into a video. More importantly my search for a tool that would be able to create this time lapse proved futile. I tested out Popcorn Maker, (I recalled someone once explaining how easy it was to use, but also the ability to add comments to the videos) However, when I signed up and started using it I realized that I can only create a video from already published media on the web. Not wanting to duplicate some steps and publish material online to then use for a video, I decided to use iMovie, which I surprisingly had never used (Final Cut Pro was my program of choice.) As I started to compile images and graphs onto the program, only to realize that I couldn’t truly translate what I wanted to do with the data using this program.

I eventually, and for the sake of time decided to stick with an info-graph which you can find HERE. I used the site infogr.am to create this graph, it is one of the many tools that are available on the web that can create info-graphics from raw data.

In addition to the info-graph I created, I decided to look into and present my daily consumption which varied from day to day, especially on the weekends.

Day 1 – Wednesday, not a complete report since I started Rescue Time in the afternoon.

Day 2: Thursday

Day 3: Friday

Day 4: Saturday

Day 5: Sunday

Day 6: Monday

Day 7: Tuesday

What became a noticeable media pattern is that I was consuming more social media in the early morning and late night during the day. Whereas during the day I spent most of my time on e-mail, scheduling and ‘learning’ sites.

Over the weekend I noticed that I had more time to catch up on the news. I have to admit as someone who considers themselves a news junkie, the fact that I spent so little time reading the news was shocking. Although, my news reading behavior has changed in recent years and I’ve started to rely more on social media as new source.

Having noted all those observations, I would still place a disclaimer and indicate that the data collected by Rescue Time is not entirely accurate and does not indicate time spent at talks, watching a film or media consumed on my phone.

Jeff’s Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Jeff

I decided to present my media diary primarily as a short video highlighting the varied ways media reaches me. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeeHQJxOCtg&feature=youtu.be

This is in no way meant to be comprehensive, and in full disclosure it is a composite of two days.

Putting this together taught me a few key lessons:

* I’m nearly always consuming media — I was surprised by just how often. It depends on your definition of media, of course, but even when I was having a conversation with my wife or a friend, I noticed that there was often some form of media playing in the background (a TV in a restaurant, kids music at an indoor playground, etc.). And as you can see in the video I listen to podcasts on my iPhone whenever I’m walking, riding the T, or doing chores. So it’s rare that I go for more than half an hour without some kind of media input while I’m awake.

* Nearly all media I consume is digital, but I’m holding onto some print, mainly newspapers (Boston Globe and student newspapers) and a couple of magazines (the New Yorker and some cooking magazines). At times that creates awkward workflows, though. For instance, one day this week I picked up a Harvard Crimson when walking past a newspaper box in the law school, and I found an interesting story I wanted to share. So I opened my laptop, directed my browser to the Harvard Crimson online, then Tweeted the link to the story. Switching from print to an online version of the same article was a pain, but a couple of my followers retweeted it and it sparked a conversation with another journalist about the article, so I’m glad I did. I’m not in the habit of visiting the Crimson online, but I try to pick up the print paper while on campus because it’s nice to have the print to read while waiting for class to start. This incident made me realize that it would be easier if I just read the Crimson on my phone or laptop, and I’m sure that’s where I’m headed in the future.

* I guess I’m addicted to podcasts.

Content/Device Breakdown

I did log my computer activity for several days using RescueTime to get a more-detailed sense of my consumption patterns. I also kept a diary manually with major types of activity, since I found that RescueTime sometimes misclassified my usage. Here are some highlights:

* On a typical day I use my laptop for between 5 and 6 hours.

* When on my laptop, my biggest activity is e-mail. I spend about 10 to 20 minutes per day on Twitter (via Hootsuite), and about 15 minutes on Facebook. I do make a point to go to a few newspaper sources throughout the day (The New York Times is my home page and I often check Google News). I’m sad to say I read DrudgeReport every day.

* I use my iPhone to entertain me whenever I’m by myself (this adds up to a couple of hours a day of usage). I either listen to podcasts, check my e-mail, check Facebook, or read an article on the phone. This realization makes me think of that recent Louis CK rant.

Cristian’s Media Diary

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Cristian

Katerina’s Media Diary

Image

Are we consuming media through intermediaries? This exercise was a realization of my fragmented – yet concentrated – media consumption. I constantly live under tight deadlines, I switch browsers and leave traces on devices – such as library laptops – that are not my own. The Triple Revolution, as described by Lee Rainie & Barry Wellman, has shaped the way I get informed. I get 90% of media online, I follow the trends through social networks and “weak ties”, and interact mostly via my mobile phone.

Realizing that my everyday media consumption cannot be measured by one tool (Rescue Time) and due to privacy concerns, I decided to keep a “totally manual media diary”. First, I retrieved my browsing history from my laptop. Then, I added the one from my mobile phone and kept notes about the use of my favorite applications. Finally, I tried to estimate the percentage of my offline media consumption during the week – excluding phone calls – and dividing it in three categories: schoolwork, entertainment and unwinding. The only limitation of this methodology was the measurement of the exact time I spent at each activity. However, I estimated that I spent 32 hours consuming media online and 21 hours offline.

Observations

* My digital media universe is diverse, yet unevenly distributed. At home, I consume most of my daily stories, news and entertainment through 3 websites: Facebook, Gmail (personal and professional) and Youtube. My first “entry” to mainstream media (The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe etc) is through what Henry Jenkins called Spreadable Media or “user-generated content.” The power of “weak ties” (school email list, newsletters, Facebook updates etc) has proven to give access to a great variety of information.

* I tend to use my Android mobile phone in a similar way: through specific applications during specific times (such as the morning commute). In fact, I mostly engage with news stories on my phone between 7 and 10 am. Of course, multitasking reduces my attention to information and the time I spend reading on the device.

*Video is bad on mobile devices. I do not have cable, nor a television at home so video platforms work great for information, trends and entertainment on my laptop. However, they are my least favorite application on my phone.

*Audio applications are the winners of the mobile battle, but they vary according the the operating system (IOS, Android).

* I usually read on a screen. I read news quickly. But do I read what is important? Most of the links I click on, come from “references”: either friends and acquaintances via my Facebook newsfeed or through my schools email list.

* I am still a Sunday morning paper enthusiast. I do not have a print subscription, but I enjoy my digital one. I always print the articles I am really interested in.

* My offline media appetite is satisfied by coursework and entertainment (books, music playlists) is mostly used as a way to unwind and concentrate.