Sophie’s Media Diet

Sophie's Media Diet

 

Media– like food– has become an irreplaceable part of our daily diet. To many people, not being able to scroll through the news, to check Gmail, to check Twitter, to check Facebook for a day or two feels like a real fast. Our hunger for media often parallels our cravings for calories– the later in the night it is, the more we want salty, addictive snacks for mindless consumption.

With this in mind, I spent one week (2/4-2/11) recording what sort of media I was consuming every time I ate. The most repeated results are what I’ve used to put together the infographic above. Because I absolutely adore food and cooking, I actually spend a fair amount of my day not only digesting media and food but also media on food. Food blogs, like Serious Eats and the Kitchn, are my favorite, and I read them daily like newspapers.

The results are telling– I do, in fact, tend to eat “slower” foods with longer forms of media– such as dinner with Netflix, and a Cafe au Lait with the New York Times. Recently, I’ve been working on a project that involves scraping and parsing several media outlets — thus consuming tons of articles and stories without actually reading them. When I code, I tend to eat nothing at all, or salty, repetitive foods such as goldfish to match the rate in which I’m doing things.

It should be noted, that of course, what is shown is an incomplete picture– I tend to eat a lot more of both food and media than shown; what is chosen is curated for the overall summary.

1 thought on “Sophie’s Media Diet

  1. Sophie, your juxtaposition of media habits with food consumption yields interesting insights. How did you collect this data?

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