I kept track of my media consumption on Google Keep for the past week and summarized it with a timetable. This past week, I’ve mostly been working on a research project, so I didn’t spend much time reading articles – my primary method of staying up to date. My time outside of class, homework, and human interaction was primarily reading MATLAB and Python documentation. I was mostly surprised that most of my world news comes from NYTimes’ daily briefing. It had me thinking about the trade off between being able to get my attention with phone notifications versus the information bandwidth, which enables deep dives, limited by screen size.

What a simple design. What clean colors. What a nice way to map how I distribute my time.

And so I began to log my media intake on the calendar. Again, the media log quickly overcame me and my calendar began to flood and overwhelm, so I decided to stick with the structure but move away from the platform. And voila, a visualization was born!

The x axis is time, the y axis my attention. For each section, my attention is distributed between 1. people and human interaction (white) 2. Spotify, music, and podcasts (green) 3. ads (yellow) 4. entertainment, such as a Cherry Glazer concert or Brooklyn Nine-Nine (blue/purple) 5. class lectures, videos, and workshops (teal) 6. Instagram and Reddit (red) 7. work media such as readings for courses, research, and media content I produce (pink). For many chunks of time, my attention is split between people and media, or Spotify and readings.

Blacked out to see the contrast in media versus non media attention, overall you can see about 50% of my time is devoted to media intake, be it the only thing holding my attention or just music running in the background. A dip in media consumption over the weekend in the middle of the graph comes from a visit to a friend’s family in Western Mass. During that time, spent little to no time consuming media until, only chatting, playing games, and watching a little brother’s basketball tournament until the All Star game that night. I included an all day workshop on Saturday, the two teal half tall chunks, where we needed to both read and consume content produced by community organizers, but also engage with people consistently throughout the day.

Finally, I separated out work from fun. Instagram, Reddit, Spotify, Podcasts, and some news fell into my entertainment or fun graph, the second of this set. While the blue shows concerts and tv shows and is somewhat irregular, taking up almost all of my attention at one time for an extended period of time somewhat irregularly, the green of music and podcasts and the red of instagram and reddit were regular and somewhat constant throughout my week, but took up much less attention space. I get my news sometimes through podcasts, but often spend little time diving into it.

Something that was difficult to track was non-work article consumption. I read news articles and watch videos, but for quite short periods of time regularly and often. I am not a news junky, but get updates from the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and a few other news outlets. While some articles I will read, I rarely anymore spend extended time on the sites themselves or sifting through stories.

Work was much more difficult to separate out. In classes and research, I read many stories and news stories for work and research, but that have an entertaining quality to them. It was a much more difficult to make labels for the work, and different media started clumping together to form just two groups: out of class work and in class work.

A few takeaways: I listen to podcasts or music frequently throughout the day as background or while doing other work. I have worried I spent too much time on social media apps and entertainment and have put an effort to calm it down, but see the cycle of low work, high work that naturally occurs throughout the week and weekend and find it healthier than I anticipated. I am a bit surprised about how little news I consume. Because the articles I read in work are old but politically minded, it often feels as if I am in touch with what is going on in the world currently. Many of the meme accounts, instagram accounts, and subreddits I follow are feminist, socialist, political, etc. and touch on a lot of news. But I do not go on NYT or WaPo like I used to. I believe it is pretty intentional, but I wonder if it is helpful or constructive to the public sphere.

1. I don’t consume a lot of traditional media. I watch almost no TV (don’t have one) and don’t have a login to watch internet cable (the last live TV I watched was the Super Bowl.) I don’t get the paper delivered, nor do I subscribe to mailed magazines. I do have a Netflix account, but watch sporadically (I watched one movie for ~2 hours in the week I logged).
2. I am extremely reliant on the New York Times for news. I read (or scroll though) the “Home” section of the mobile app most days, and I often listen to “The Daily” podcast. One interesting behavior I noticed is that if I do come across news on social media or the internet, I look to validate it in the NYT app.
3. I increasingly want someone to tell me how to interpret the news. I’m starting to want to know both the news and what experts think about it. The Daily is great for this, but I also listen to Pod Save America / the People sometimes and Bill Simmons for sports.

Taking a closer look at the data, it’s clear I consume more media on my phone than my computer (though I wanted to show a percentage basis here, the absolute numbers aren’t so stark). I tend to use my phone for social and non-work uses while I use my computer for schoolwork and professional tasks.

Looking at specific apps, I’m getting a lot of my media on social media, and, as mentioned above, almost all of my news from the New York Times. Also a little bit strikingly, I spend very little time reading for pleasure (aside from news), as shown by the only 6% of time with books. One detail with this chart is the podcast number is inflated because I often listen to podcasts while I multitask on my phone.

In closing, a few takeaways for me based on the exercise:

• I should probably diversify my news sources. Nothing against NYT, but I think I would be in some ways be more informed if I read other outlets and compared the different ways the news is framed.
• I like audio a lot. I am starting to read less and listen more, especially with respect to long form journalism. Podcasts like Caliphate or The Dropout are starting to replace my reading of the New Yorker or the Atlantic.
• I was curious to what extent I would be able to cut out TV shows when I got rid of my TV, and I think I’ve been pretty successful. I don’t miss it.

I was also surprised to realize that 51% of my media consumption was done through my laptop. I think it might be because during my work day I sometimes take some mental breaks by reading some news and entertainment articles. I also sometimes use my laptop for viewing videos which might have attributed to my consumption pattern.

Another revelation for me was the significant number of mediums I consumed that are being tracked third-party data-tracking applications. By using “Ghostery” a web extension which allowed me to monitor and block these applications, I realized that third parties are tracking 45% of the media I consume.
I have created the sculpture below to express my feelings regarding being continuously tracked by third party providers and by the media outlets I consume online. In the middle, there is the eye of the user being monitored by different digital eyes (representing the tracking of information) that are surrounding the user from everywhere, designed to make the user feel that the experience is as natural as possible so that the trackers can continue to mine data.

Overall, this exercise was eye-opening for me, and it allowed me to notice specific patterns in my consumption that I did not expect. It also prompted me to reconsider the way I consume media.

Social Media (95% Twitter)

On Twitter itself, I consumed second-order memes on the OpenAI text generator, several lukewarm takes on democratic primary candidates and red-brownism, ambient basketball energy, an excellent suggestion for a new TV show, a great playlist of Caribbean pop, and one truly excellent metajoke, which of course are what make the whole enterprise worthwhile. A terrible browser extension (StayFocusd) limits me to 30 minutes of Twitter a day on my laptop; I hit the 5 minute warning on three days, and ran all the way out of time on one.

I followed few outbound links from Twitter this week, and the first one I did follow my eyes immediately bounced off of. My note at the time says “too tired for imagination.” I ran into Steve Salaita’s latest blog post later in the week and loved it. That sent me to what is the only 2-deep reading I’ve recorded, the New York Times article recounting his firing. Another day, far too late one night in that daze of mindless stimulation, I consumed two articles on Lisa Frank’s old factory, labour practices, and tragic einstellung. Just today I read the LA Times article about gig-economy startups using home cooking businesses as cover for a law they needed, and missed California food for a bit.

During a midday lazy Mastodon check-in I was excited to read an article about a mutual, but it was in French, my chrome install doesn’t automatically offer to translate, and I couldn’t muster the agency to do so manually, so I sent it to molder with the other neglected tabs.

On Facebook I saw distant friends confused by a debate over Bernie Sanders (invisible to me), and was saddened in sympathy with their confused sadness. (This happened just before the Jacobin issue for the month arrived with Bernie on the cover.)

Direct Visits

Because AFROPUNK uses frickin’ React or something and doesn’t have RSS feeds for its writers I manually visited Clarkisha Kent’s page when my calendar reminded me that her excellent column had updated.

I also binged Captain Disillusion videos on YouTube late one night. This might be the only media choice I really regret, though I very much appreciate his bit.

I visited the Ars Technica homepage from muscle memory several times, enjoying the excellent (if overly strongly stated) comparison between Google’s self-driving car efforts and Xerox’s personal computer in addition to ten other fairly forgettable articles, on pokémon glitches, structural racism by any other name, microwave resonators, Standard Ad flexing slightly, this year’s Dance Your PhD, confirmation that I don’t need to see the Alita movie, basic epistemology, a boardgame I’ve never played and probably never will but keep hearing about, and a new phishing tech.

EMAILS

Amazon Chronicles, Stratechery, The Counterpublic Papers, SCIOPS, and The First and 15th. I followed no outbound links from these newsletters, and read most a day or two after receiving.

RSS (feedly with 176 sources)

I opened my feed reader three times this week. The first time I read webcomics, closed many things after skimming, saved Anne Helen Petersen’s new article to read later. The subsequent times I read only webcomics, looking for a moment of respite in meetings or classes.

miscellaneous other media (nontextual or nonline)

• One (1) Jacobin magazine cover, mentioned above.
• Two (2) housemates playing different saves of the same Zelda game.
• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin at the Boston SciFi Film Festival.
• A play-reading that I unexpectedly acted for at the last minute as part of a DSA coffeehouse; also featuring an excellent children’s book, some dang good folk / union songs, and other acts that were more of a mixed bag.
• Many readings; for class, to prepare a reading list for a reading group, to prepare for lab group meetings.
• Finished a Pandemic Legacy Season Two campaign (it’s a boardgame that tells you to destroy pieces permanently, good fun).
• Inhaled the entire Alita: Battle Angel manga in two sittings, to celebrate it being the weekend.
• Bits of music from Spotify scattered about. Had Lemonade stuck in my head briefly but of course it’s not on that platform, and (on my phone, where it’s more of a hassle) I didn’t enough to open Youtube.

Here is my diary, the second tab has some rudimentary analysis — there are deeper, more interesting ways to go at this I’m sure. This was a fun exercise, and I found a bunch of different ways to gather data on my media consumption. My iPhone’s weekly report showed me how many alerts I get per day (65!!), Google tracked my YouTube TV watching (daily Jeopardy habit). But most of all I realize that very few minutes go by in a day without me consuming some type of media: podcasts, music, books, etc… I’m constantly plugged in.

Below are various charts showing my usage as well as my takeaways from the entire experience:

Technology Usage

I broke down the various methods I consumed media by tracking my activities on each platform. I also kept track of my sleep to show the stark contrast each day between watching television and resting.

Additionally, here is the day-by-day chart of my technology use:

Analysis

By looking at both charts it’s clear that my time is largely taken up by staring at either my MacBook or my iPhone. This is largely due to my app consumption, especially Netflix (for my laptop) and Twitter (on my phone). I was somewhat surprised by my Apple Watch usage, partially because I thought I looked at it fewer than I do; I averaged 75 glances at my watch each day.   

Application Usage

My media consumption is largely done through an app on either my laptop, phone, or smartwatch. Though I currently have 151 apps installed on my iPhone, I only used these 11 apps for a statistically significant amount of time over the six days:

• Netflix
• Spotify
• Outlook
• Twitter
• Podcast
• Slack
• Instagram
• Microsoft Word
• Facebook
• WhatsApp
• Text

Here is my total app usage over the past six days:

Additionally, here is the total number of hours spent on each app:

Analysis

I do wonder how much my app usage depends on my schedule each day. For those where I’m in class more, I seem to rely far more on Outlook and Twitter. But when I’m home, Netflix is the dominant app by far and away. I wish I could’ve seen a snapshot of my usage only a year ago. I know my Twitter usage would’ve been much higher, as I’ve noticed a drop off over the last several months in the time I spend on Twitter each day. This may be due to my exhaustion of political news or simply a move away from checking Twitter compulsively throughout the day for news. Also, I’ve started using Slack more now that I’ve joined a startup team, and we use it as our main means of communication.

Reading Habits

Finally, I wanted to see how much of my day I dedicated to consuming news, and more importantly, how I choose to do so. I know my use of Twitter has decreased over the last several months, but I wasn’t sure if I had dropped from one of my most used apps.

A large portion of my news consumption comes from podcasts, including:

• This American Life
• Reply All
• What What Don’t Tell Me
• The New York Times’ The Daily
• NPR Poltiics Podcast

Here is a the breakdown by day of the total number of hours spent on each app each day:

Analysis

The biggest surprise for me came out of my little use of Facebook. I always assumed it would be one of my most used apps, but I rarely check the app unless I have an event or a friend request. I also included my time on Messenger because it was such a small portion of my overall time on the app.

Takeaways

Maybe the biggest thing to take away from this exercise is how little I sleep or do anything without a screen in front of my face in some way. I’m always inundated by media in some fashion, and the majority of it is something I do without even thinking, such as listening to music or checking my email on my watch or phone.

When I finished my analysis, I realized that I only spent approximately 13 hours in the total 144 hours of the six-day period doing non-technology activities, such as talking with people. It made me realize that it may be time to schedule some sort of technology break for a few days, if only to refresh my mind and remind myself that things are going on around me and not just on a screen.

That changed after election day. I realized that I had — like the vast majority of the journalists and commentators ensconced in the Twitter bubble — missed some of the ‘real stories’ of the election, including the anger felt by ordinary Americans towards Washington elites, not least Hillary Clinton. It also helped that things temporarily quietened down in the dying days of the Obama administration. Suddenly, I became absorbed in long-form think pieces, photo essays, and articles about topics — gasp — other than politics.

But I’ve been backsliding of late. Politics has heated back up to the temperature and tenor of the campaign, and Twitter in particular has become proportionately more compelling. So this self-tracking assignment arrived at the right time, and I’m pleased to note that the insights it generated have served to shake me awake from my subconscious relapse.

I use three devices for information and communication: my iPhone, my iPad and my laptop. Despite the power of the Apple ecosystem and the cross-platform nature of most social media sites, I try to reserve the different devices for different things: my phone for quick hits of information as well as communication, plus podcasts on-the-go; my tablet for more relaxed, mostly ‘read-only’ consumption, and my laptop for longer-form writing and coding. Because of these different patterns of use, I wanted to make sure I could track my media diet across each of these devices – what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, if you will.

First off, my iPhone. In my definition of what constitutes media, I excluded small-group communication apps like Whatsapp and Facebook’s Messenger, as well as email. I was only left with five apps relevant to media consumption: four social networks, and Downcast, my favorite podcast app. Downcast dwarfed the competition, accounting for fully ten hours of listening. (My podcasts of choice this week: Pod Save America; the West Wing Weekly; The New Yorker’s Politics and More; 99% Invisible; the Bill Simmons podcast with Malcolm Gladwell; and a conversation between Tyler Cowen and Fuschia Dunlop.) Besides podcasts, the distribution of time spent on social media was skewed towards Twitter, while Snapchat lived up to its reputation as the most rapid form of social media engagement:

My iPad painted a different picture. It seems I actually do use many of the mainstream news app I have installed, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Economist, and the Times of London. The absolute time involved wasn’t enormous – the New York Times was my favorite news source with 102 minutes across the week – and was still dwarfed by YouTube (which I use for its British radio archives) and Netflix (some of my favorite shows this week: Santa Clarita Diet, Midnight Diner, Chef’s Table and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.) I certainly used Twitter on my iPad as well, but much less than traditional news sources overall:

Finally, assessing media use on my laptop was a little tricker, since almost all media is consumed through Google Chrome, as opposed to brand-specific apps. Helpfully, the laptop-tracking app RescueTime does a pretty good job categorizing each website you visit. Overall, I used the web on my laptop for News/Opinion and Social Networking slightly more than other more defensible purposes like Reference (mostly Wikipedia) or Software Development (mostly StackOverflow). Happily though, the absolute time I spent on these wasn’t too large: 108 minutes over the course of the week on News and Opinion, and 100 minutes on Social Networking.

Drilling down into these categories, the News and Opinion section is actually a little misleading: fully 70 of the 108 minutes was spent on Medium, primarily writing my blog rather than reading others. Beyond that, the BBC emerges as my most loyal destination for web-based news, clocking nearly 15 minutes, and I spent ten minutes getting distracted by BuzzFeed. I glanced only fleetingly at other news sites. My social media usage on other devices replicated on my laptop, with another hour and a quarter spent on Twitter, and a little over 20 minutes on Facebook. Regrettably, RescueTime doesn’t track time spent listening to music on the Spotify app, so this isn’t comparable to the podcast listening stats noted above.

Overall, analysis of my media diary suggests that I’m having some success using different devices for different purposes, in particular getting some news from traditional sources on my iPad. Social media – especially the regular sugar hit of Twitter – is certainly pervasive, but all in all, my media diet seems reasonably balanced.

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