Mika’s Media Diary

I moved from my home country to Boston a couple of months ago. My everyday routine has completely changed including the ways I gather information through the media.

  • In Japan, I used to read a newspaper, magazines and books, watch TV (7 terrestrial and 2 satellite channels), and checked social media feeds in Japanese.
  • In Boston, I’ve subscribed to digital editions of newspapers, cable TV channel RCN (287 channels) + TiVO + TV Japan , Amazon Prime Video, and radio podcasts. The social media feeds I check are in English.

This week’s assignment was interesting because I wanted to know a few things about myself. Has my TV watching habit changed in a new country? Am I getting good information? And have I succeeded in escaping the filter bubble, which was an idea that I was determined to work on after the election?

I used RescueTime and time-logging by hand for 7 days between 2/8 to 2/14 and created the below visual based on the data from 2/9, which was the day I spent the longest hours consuming the media. Electronic devices that I checked were 2 smartphones, 1 tablet, 2 computers, a TV set and TiVo. In order to focus on the type of media, I excluded the time for business, research and communication.

This assignment has given me a chance to review my everyday routine and opened my eyes to an important fact. I no longer care if my current habit is different from my past or if it is balanced or not. It has been a cold winter. I often chose to stay at home. But now it’s time for me to stop being a consumer and start being a producer.