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Emoji media diary
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Analog Media Log
This last week I kept a log of my media consumption through digital devices (desktop, laptop and cellphone). Quickly it became evident that I was logging nearly everything that I did except sleeping. In some cases I was also leaving out talking to people (when it didn’t involve Skype, the quick Google to illustrate a point or notes typed out in a Word Doc) and on occasion I would spend time walking from place to place without texting or listening to a podcast but I learned this was rare.
I am reminded of my first Bikram yoga class as I reflect on my experience over the last week. The 90 minutes of class felt like the longest stretch of time I had gone while being awake in the last 2 years without wanting to reach for my phone and check my email and Facebook. For those blissful 90 minutes I just tried not to die in that over heated room. I wasn’t fighting the impulse to check my phone, instead my brain was occupied with just trying to fight for the most basic of my needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy. If I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t think about my cellphone.
The next class when I returned it was easier to breathe, my body had acclimated a bit and I found my attention drifting. This week I learned that I basically need to be in complete physical peril, focused on an immediate task that will have real time consequences without my undivided attention or, asleep, to not be either thinking about consuming media and fighting the occasional impulse or just succumbing to that impulse.
The other reflection I have about the week is that I couldn’t figure out a good way to measure engagement. I was constantly acknowledging the existence of media surrounding me (advertisements on digital screens at the T stop or catching a glimpse of a neighbor’s laptop screen) that I did not engage with in a meaningful way. Instead this content just fluttered in and out of my periphery. But what I felt more curious about was how much content I chose to engage with (i.e. I clicked on something to learn more, selected a podcast or played a TV show) without feeling like I had comprehended it, consumed it or leaned from it. Throughout the week my use of media broke down into the following primary categories
- media as background white noise
- media as stimulation and elected distraction
- media for learning through consumption
- media for tools for learning through production
- media for communication
SIDE NOTE:I was fairly effective at tracking numbers 1, 3, 4, and 5 but media as stimulation and elected distraction was very hard to log. This type of consumption is often so automatic it is inconspicuous. I would get home and realize that I had checked my email and Facebook on the train but had forgotten to log it.
(media log and coding)
The bulk of my media consumption was to stimulate, distract or sooth me while I was engaging in another auxiliary activity. I would often find myself re-listening to episodes of podcasts because I would disengage in the narrative for long periods of time while I focused on something else and then re-engage only to realize I had lost my place in the story. But also sometimes this would not bother me. XFiles would play in the background as I edited videos while I had no intention of following the story plot.
By the end of the week I felt like it was not enough to have tracked what I had consumed but I also wanted to know what I had retained and my level of comprehension from the content consumption. (I couldn’t tell you the title of one article I clicked to from Facebook this week but I know I clicked on at least 20. ) That exercise I suppose is for another time.
Watch Out: The Deception of the Small
My smart watch keeps me up at night.
TRACK EVERYTHING
I am making the assumption that my neutral time is focused on productive activities. There might be bias in this interpretation.
Using RescueTime, I attempted to track my media diet and general digital activities. I was excited that I could download the application to my laptop, desktop, browsers (firefox/chrome), and even my android phone.
I reviewed my patterns after 7 days and was pleasantly surprised to see I appeared to be fairly productive – given that I am clearly expert at managing my attention… or so I thought.
LOCATE CURIOUSITY
The chart that stood out most to me was the one indicating my most used app was for SMS. It turns out that I consume most of my media through conversation.
Perhaps, the assumed productivity was just a capture of idle screens while I busily texted with friends about a range of topics.
TWILIGHT HOUR
Just as I was dozing off after 7 days of capturing data, I felt a buzzing on my wrist. I looked down to see a tweet from EthanZ on twitter and a message from a friend.
None of the tracking applications I downloaded could document the notifications I consumed on my smart watch!
In fact, I had recently discovered I could text from my watch by speaking directly to it and even send emoticons by just drawing them. Productivity has been tanking ever since this discovery. This explained my seemingly constant use of SMS which is tracked by my phone even when I do it through my smart watch.
LESSON LEARNED
This weeklong exploration revealed the difficulty of tracking activities even when being very intentional. I am glad I have clear evidence for why I should turn off my watch when I need to focus.
My observations reveal that Rolf Dobelli was right is speaking to the time wasting side of news (to which I add social media). Productivity increases as media decreases, but I spend most of my time on media.
The three things I learned by tracking my media diet for a week
1. Mornings are for work, evenings for play.
I generally only ask three things of the internet: to inform me, to entertain me, and to make me better at my job. Apparently, that last one stops being important after two in the afternoon. That’s when my consumption of work-related media — stories about science or journalism — trails off and my consumption of general news and entertainment picks up. By midnight, I’m gorging on music, pop culture, and politics.
2. Kanye West might well be a genius, but he’s no Einstein.
I’m not too ashamed to admit that the Kanye circus sucked up a lot of my internet time this week. But the data don’t lie, and the data are saying that I was even more enthralled with the discovery of gravitational waves, whose existence was predicted 100 years ago by Albert Einstein.
3. Old media is dying, not dead.
More than eight in every ten stories I read, watched, or listened to originated from the internet. But I found it refreshing to ruffle through the pages of a magazine, let talk radio play in the background, or watch a show with the family.
Dear Media Diary…
Digital Diary. A Haiku
Somehow this isn’t showing up on the main blog, so I’m posting it again here.
The Art of Media, A Diary
As others have noted in previous classes, RescueTime is big on data, slim on details. That said, the app has its advantages — and is certainly more sophisticated than my other fallback:
After the first full day of auto-assisted tracking on my laptop, phone and iPad, my stats looked something like this:
Concern over my social life aside, I wondered: how much of that time was voluntarily given? Or, to put another way, how much of my media consumption was I opting into?
Turns out, not as much as I’d like.
The chart above shows the number of emails in my inbox that I interacted with in some way during the last week. Overwhelmingly, I am a passive consumer of media: taking in far more content than I create. This extends to all the social media platforms I used for more than three hours a day.
I can’t say I’m very surprised to find out that of the 12 or so hours of “entertainment” RescueTime tells me I consumed, 11 of those hours were spent half-listening to podcasts from Radio Lab or music from Spotify as I went about other tasks. Media has been part of the background noise in some shape or form for most of my life. That said, I wonder at the implications of such a wide margin of consumption to creation — particularly as we continue to explore how media can serve in a civic capacity.
Christa’s media diary
I had a very unusual week due to a few one-off obligations, so my results are rather skewed. I am planning on doing this exercise again in the coming week, with cool graphics. However, initial insights include:
- I spent very little total time on Facebook (30 min for the week) but I checked it many times a day, leading to many interruptions.
- All the serious news articles I consumed online came through email newsletters or Facebook. I also read some news in newspaper form.
- I spent more time reading about World Cup cross-country skiing results than “serious” news, despite the fact that I had to seek out those stories myself rather than seeing them on Facebook or in my email. (It was an outstanding weekend for the US ladies. Still, this is embarrassing.)
- I am really surprised how much time I spend texting. I could have read the Wall Street Journal A section all the way through about three times for the amount of time I spent texting – not to mention all the interruptions that make it take longer to do other things, or prevent you from finishing them.
My breakdown by media category, with the type I consumed most of first and least last: movies, videos, email, news, making media, texting, Facebook, iCal, shopping, weather
Lastly, while the rest of the week was kind of a bust, I had a very interesting experience today that taught me more about how to get people to read even when they think they’re too busy for the news (myself included). In Jerusalem, I always got frustrated that I would post a picture of a stray cat or Palestinian kids playing in the snow and get dozens of likes, but when I posted a story I’d worked on for weeks, only a few people ‘liked’ it.
Today I came across a story on Facebook that some friends (not close friends) had shared and despite my weird week, I was impelled to click on it. It was called, “Having it all kinda sucks.” I found it so compelling that I read all the way through, shared it on my FB page, and tagged a few women friends who are mothers and asked what they thought. That led to the best FB conversation I’ve ever had on my page. It gave me hope for engaging my FB friends on important topics.
Looking forward to doing this again with a more representative week.
Track your media: Know thyself
Summary
“Track all the media that you put into your head after you leave this classroom”, said Ethan. The exercise was demanding, I did it for five days and the interruptions felt unnatural as I was collecting the data of my Whatsapp’s messages, the news I read or my mom’s FaceTime calls. However, that neurotic gathering of information paid off: at the end it provided a revealing portrait of my media behavior.
Among other things, I discovered that I’m locked in a microscopic part of the Internet, that I’m consuming media one in every four minutes, and that E-mail takes most of my time in front of a screen.
Gathering the data
To collect the data I took screenshots of all the digital media that I consumed via my mobile or my laptop.
150 screenshots in five days
Then I organized all that information (time, device, language, format, etc.) in a Google Spreadsheet that turned out to be nine columns and 134 rows.
Interviewing the data
I used WTFcsv, a tool included in the DataBasic.io set, to visualize my data and start asking it questions. In some cases I also used the Explore function embedded in Google Spreadsheets.
1. How much time did I spend in front of a screen?
Five days have 7200 minutes, and let’s say that I slept 1800 of them (6 hours per day), so I was awake for 5400 minutes. During the five days of the exercise I spent 1331 minutes consuming digital media: that means that I was 24.6% of my time in front of a screen.
One in every four minutes I’m consuming digital media. That’s just shocking.
2. How diverse is the media that I consume?
Using pivot tables in Excel I found out that I only visited 45 unique websites, that’s an average of 9 different websites per day. There are around 990,950,000 websites in the Internet right now. In proportion, the 45 websites that I visited are like the size of a particle of dust (0.5 µm) in the Big Ben.
See that speck of dust? It’s what I know of the Internet.
I also discovered that I only used 17 of the 87 apps that I have installed on my mobile… No comments.
3. When in the day do I consume more digital media?
4. What media format do I consume more?
5. In which activities did I invest more time?
6. En qué idioma consumo la información?
8. Time invested in each activity
Things that I would like to know but that I couldn’t visualize
- Infrastructure of the Internet. The location of the farthest server that send me information, for example.
- Gaps in the consumption. Besides my hours of sleep, how much time did I spend without consuming any kind of digital media?