The following are stats derived from using RescueTime.

After tracking my media habits for the past week, what I found most striking is not the media that I consumed by what I didn’t consume. This is most striking in terms of format – almost no media was in formats that existed before the web. The one exception, was NPR which I listened to for 10 minutes on a car radio. The books, I read were in PDF format rather than paper. The videos I watched were seen online rather than on a television. If meetings and lectures count as Media they were the one traditional format that took up significant time.

I was surprised how little time was spent on news. I expected Google News to rank higher than it did. I now realize that I would simply glance at Google News a few times a day, never spending more than a few minutes there.

In terms of the Media where I do spend time, Gmail was by far the site I used the most, This was to be expected since I use gmail as a task manager through the ActiveInbox browser add-on. Thus the time spent on gmail includes task management activities in addition to traditional email.

In terms of applications, the gnome-terminal (Linux command shell) was where I spent the most time. During the past week, I spent considerable time accessing remote machines through ssh.

Shopping sites such as amazon.com and slickdeals.net also ranked highly. In the past, deal sites such as Slickdeals.net have been a time consuming and expensive addiction for me. Perhaps, because of my backgrounds in economics and security getting great bargain is immensely satisfying — even if it’s for something I don’t really need. Thus I’m relieved to have spent less than 2 hours shopping there.

Chart of sites:

Chart of categories

Tracking media consumption is hard. We are constantly inundated with ads, TVs and music in the background, pictures, and other bits of media we may barely see. Sites with dynamic content, like Facebook and Twitter are particularly hard to track. The content is varied and there is no lasting record of content viewed. This is problematic because I get a significant portion of my news through Twitter. I could track every tweet I load, but I do not read every tweet I load. The same goes for articles on a webpage with ads or multiple types of media on the page. I might not read the ads or the comments, but there is no way to automatically tell. Gaze tracking on the page may be one way to solve this problem.

It is probably possible to track media consumption well with some elaborate scheme and the right software. I have some ideas of how to do this, but I mostly stuck to tracking sites I visited on my computer plus the more major offline media consumption experiences. I also focused on content I consumed because, while I did produce content, I did not track time spent consuming or creating different types of media. While I spent a significant amount of time creating content, the number of things I made is insignificant when compared to the number I consumed.

I manually categorized the few thousand individual pages I visited and some offline media experiences in the past week. The graphs and discussions of each graph are below.

The above graph shows how I consume media. As I was primarily tracking links, I naturally consume most of my media on my computer. I also use my phone to quickly look things up and read the news while in transit. If I was fully able to track my Twitter usage, my phone percentage would likely be higher.

At 0.5%, offline consumption is barely visible. Offline consumption includes paper books and handouts, classes, and lectures. Conversations, ads I see, music or TV programs in the background of a room, and other media I consume intentionally or accidentally would greatly increase my offline consumption. Unfortunately, I did not track all of those.

This graph highlights the limitations in my tracking method. That said, I do spend much of my time in front of my computer or phone visiting links. So what types of media do I consume?

Apparently I do a lot of searches. My searches category also includes searches on individual websites, but 33.2% of all pages I view is a lot. I did not track the content of my searches, but it probably is proportioned similarly to the other categories.

Another interesting finding is that I read more blogs than standard articles. I also view many school website pages as I check hours of food places, read assignments, upload school work, and check course registration.

There are a few things this tracks poorly. Books and TV and movies have small slices because I consumed relatively few of them. In some ways, the less time a particular type of content takes to consume, the more I view it. Thus, the most time consuming activities appear far less prominently than they should. For a different reason, social networks should have a bigger slice. Tweets do not take long to read, so I read a lot of them, but each tweet does not add a page view.

The graph above shows the type of content I consume. The categories are based on which areas viewed the most media about this week. After searches and social media, I consume the most media about free information. Free information is a category I created to include transparency, open access, leaking and disclosure, and other related areas. For most people, free info would probably not be a category. Instead, they might read a couple related articles a week in US and world news. These categories are just what worked for me.

Likewise, I am not sure there is ever a normal or average week in content or type of media I consume. Some people have discussed events, like the snow storm, that make their media consumption this week abnormal. I definitely looked at more weather pages than I generally do. That said, many weeks there is a story I search for many articles on and cross reference so I can understand the whole situation. This constant searching for many articles drastically and regularly distorts what type of content I read.

After monitoring my media consumption this past week, I came to a rather unsurprising conclusion: I spend a lot of time staring at Power Point presentations.

As a student, it’s no shocker that the largest portion of my media intake comes from lectures and presentations. This week included a lecture from John Sterman at Sloan and a presentation on the remediation of a former refinery in Baltimore, Maryland. My frequent exposure to big-screen learning might also explain why I find myself looking for shorter, smaller bursts of media on my walks home. It turns out that those between-class glances at Instagram, Twitter and Facebook add up. Even more pronounced was my social media usage while in “transit.” I happened to go out of town this weekend and happened to spend an embarrassing amount of time using social media, text and email on the flight and going to-and-from the hotel and my research site. Overall, I chose to represent my data set in four categories: MIT, Home, Transit and Field Work. A few reflections on each category:

MIT
I spend a lot of time here. This category marked the broadest range of uses with everything from online news to in-person presentations.

Home
I tend to do a lot of in-person interacting at school so I tend to catch up on my reading at home.

Transit
I typically bike to school but traveling with a studio team to Baltimore required a substantial amount of coordinating which we accomplished via text.

Field Work
My camera ran out of storage during a site visit for another course. I wound up working around things by taking photos via Instagram.

I decided to approach some high level questions about my media diet. I tracked my activity in RescueTime and ManicTime and also took notes of what I read. My main points will focus on when I get my news diet, how it differs through the day, and what outside factors interfere with it. I organized my diet by how I might consume content differently at different times of day.

When do I read my news?
I wish Rescue Time could break down my activity by time of day.
Morning – I usually read the overall news and what has been happening in the past day. Mornings are either NPR time or Flipboard (twitter feed) time. One of them wakes me up.
Afternoon – during breaks in between work and meetings. I often read links that caught my eye from social networks or that people recommend during meetings
Evening – I have an end of the day catch up on what whether something significant is happening in the breaking news. I read international news, particularly about Romania. The last one is clearly triggered by my late night conversations I have with my dad about news that is local to him.

This makes me wonder how the context of the day affects how people consume news, and how different of a user we are at different times of day. Is there a way to customize the news experience to the different contexts and need that we might have at different time? Are there certain triggers that make us read particular type of news?

Where do I get my news content from?
Most of my reading comes from social network outlets. I look through my twitter feed daily. I chose to use Flipboard on my iPad which gives me a headline and a couple of paragraphs from an article. Every day I visit the main page of a mainstream media news outlet. I really enjoy using the iPad interface for doing that and I have a set of news apps installed that I check. When I don’t use Flipboard I listen to NPR on my iPad. The iPad is my main source of news consumption.

I am of course wondering what I am missing on by my selection of news sources and mode of consuming news. I wish there was an easy way to find out how different sources present the same topic, or what other articles would be of interest that I never get to read.

What kind of news articles do I read?
Over 50% or my read is technology related articles, strong professional bias. The rest cover sparsely topics of health and wellness, work space, design, international news.

I am still exploring how the different news producers we use can get users to engage with more diversity.

Who are my discussion partners about news
Mostly online through chat with friends, over dinner with friends. Attending a talk sparks at least 30 minutes of discussion around the information gained. My dad.

I think discussion partners are a great way to actively engage with content through discussion. Unfortunately very few of my reading (or headline browsing) results in discussion. I wonder how much of the news get disseminated though word of mouth and how that plays a role in the information processing process of a certain topic.

How long do I spend reading one article?
I captured a snapshot of two hours of browsing. On average the span of attention on each article can be seen below. The amount of continuous time I spent on one task is between a few seconds to 10 minutes. In a 60 minute session of deep dive into news I clicked on 10 articles on average. I didn’t finish reading them all.

I wonder how many articles I fully read and what am I missing by not finishing the reads? Is there a different way the same content can be delivered that would make me engage with it more easily? can we have different versions of the same article for a different context of the user, different time availability or attention level? How do users allocate their attention to navigating their news content. What keeps one engaged with a reading? how much information do we acquire from browsing headlines? Is there a better way to organize a news feed to help the user gain more from the content than they are currently?

I’m a bit of a Twitter addict — I have the Twitter app on my phone and both Twitter and Tweetdeck on my laptop. For the most part, that’s where I consume the most media. For a week, I tried to keep track of all the links I clicked on and read on Twitter via my laptop and tweet about them at @MediaMemoir. Below is a chart showing the links that I tweeted about at the account.

This graph doesn’t show the types of media that I encountered from TV, articles I read on my phone or in print, or all the tweets I read (if I kept track of every tweet I read… I don’t even want to go there). For the most part, I don’t tend to spend much time clicking links and reading on my phone. However, most of my light media consumption probably comes from reading quick summaries and tweets via Twitter (which is not on this chart).

Most of my heavy media consumption (actually reading an article or watching a video vs. just reading <140 characters about it) happens in a few dense chunks during the day. These chunks are mostly determined by my schedule.

The past ~7 days…

RescueTime
RescueTime offers three views of increasing granularity. For me, Email is king, followed by my vices of Reference and News, which can be somewhat interchangeable, then my social networking vices which are later broken out into Facebook and Reddit and Twitter. After accounting for videos (YouTube mostly) and games (I’m a sucker for a good puzzle plat former like Continuity), you get actual work: Writing and Evernote, random Business tasks. Shopping shows up here only because I was buying books for classes and research on Amazon and I badly need a new pair of sneakers.

Erhardt's General Categories Graph (RescueTime)

Erhardt's Detailed Categories Graph (RescueTime)

Erhardt's Specific Activities Graph (RescueTime)

Snapshot of Browser Activity
Using a Firefox add-on Voyage which allows you to explore your browser history as a wall of media, I was able to dig a little into my behavior in 30 minutes blocks and uncover some of the true freneticism of web browsing and the wormhole like time-suck that comes from portals like Google News, Wikipedia, and Reddit. So here is a snapshot from yesterday morning: 9:00am-9:30am (read it from right to left). I started off by reading a New York Magazine piece on Aaron Swartz. Then I checked Facebook and Google News, the latter led me to read about the proposal to drop wrestling from the Olympics. Modern pentathlon was on the list to be axed as well so I did a Google search for that in order to quickly get to the Wikipedia page where I read about its history. Then came Reddit: most of the bubbles without favicons were images submitted to a thread about whether or not eye color makes people significantly more attractive. Then I was back to Facebook, in which I apparently visit 46 pages while I looking into the relationship of a friend of mine with his fiancee, whom he had just proposed to according to the site.

Erhardt's Browsing History Snapshot from Feb. 12, 2013 (Voyage)

Offline Media Summary

• Books: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, read an average of 8 pages before sleep during 3 of the past 6 nights; Readings for this class, 2 hours; Readings for my Intro to Networks class, 1 hour
• Newspapers/Magazines: Weekly print Economist subscription, read an average of 5 articles a day, mostly on the T to and from the Media Lab; The Tech picked up from stand in the Media Lab, read cover to cover last week’s issue between classes
• Television: Downton Abbey, Sunday ritual with my fiancee, watched 2 hours; Jeopardy, watched 3 episodes in past week after making dinner; The Taste, cooking competition show, watched between Jeopardy and The State of the Union last night, 1 hour; The State of the Union and Republican Response, watched approximately 2 hours
• Podcasts: Listen to an average of 1 hour per day when I exercise at home in the morning, 7 episodes of The Moth, 2 episodes of This American Life, 1 episode of On the Media
• Music: 95 songs from 10 albums played while working or browsing the web, captured using last.fm scrobbler (see below)

Erhardt's Music by Album Graph (last.fm)

Reflections on Media Diarying
1) Measurement bias is a bitch
2) It’s not what it looks like, but it kind of is, maybe
3) Holy crap, email

When I embarked on this assignment my first step was to search for any kind of tool similar to RescueTime that would automate the collection of my media consumption behavior. This was important to me not only because I thought it would help me quantify my behavior but also because I wanted something so lightweight that it wouldn’t disrupt my actual consumption. Putting on my sociologist hat, I’m familiar with the range of biases that are introduced by various quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Two common ones are the observer effect and the social desirability effect. The observer effect results in subjects changing their behavior due to the fact that they are being watched. The social desirability effect is a specific example of the observer effect when a subject adjusts their behavior to come across how they think they should come across in terms of societal norms and values. In terms of keeping a media diary, this means that I might change my media consumption because I want to appear like I’m a very productive person who has perfect self-control and does not indulge in frivolous media. OR, this means that I might simply avoid consuming media at times where its inconvenient to me to record that media since I’m also the observer and I’m feeling a bit lazy (happened a few times with non-digital media). So in this week, I strove to do exactly when I would normally do and hope that I could record as much of that as possible automatically and just not think about it too much. This is imperfect and certainly an underestimate of my media consumption in a number of ways. One example is that I used a Firefox add-on called Reddit Enhancement Suite which allows me to visit the media linked to by Reddit right on the page as I scroll through: this means the number of cute cat pictures and AdviceAnimal memes that I actually consumed is completely lost in the measly 28 pages I scrolled through on Reddit which were actually recorded.

Many of the tools for automatically quantifying media consumption also reduce the media to sources: i.e. YouTube (84 videos), Facebook (132 pages), GoogleDocs (31 pages), etc. So when I’m watching a YouTube video that’s relevant to my research, which involves studying media, it gets counted the same as that Harlem Shake video that was linked from Reddit. Furthermore, while that Harlem Shake parody was very distracting at the time in the context of the work I was or should have been doing when I watched it, the sum total of Harlem Shake videos I have consumed inform my understanding of a cultural phenomenon which is relevant to my research as a media scholar AND my cultural capital in the Bourdieuian sense: something that I personally value and can be exchanged for social and economic capital when others value my knowledge of it. This cuts against the prevailing notion of “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” That said, I have a certain occupation and social milieu that values the consumption of YouTube videos, which may not be true of others. And certainly the primary education movement in the 1990s of any reading is good reading has been shown to have been flawed. My more formal literacy may help me digest and appreciate a broader swath of media in ways that are particularly productive. OR I’m part of a doomed generation that justifies its frivolous media consumption through complicated rationalities. Relativism + cultural capital is my saving grace here; I should also plug deep qualitative research like ethnography and content analysis as a better way to open a window into the INTENTION behind the consumption of a piece of media, like what I did with the snapshot from Voyage. (Intention is very interesting and relevant to the research we are trying to do at the Center for Civic Media because we want to get past the concept of slacktivism when it comes to purposeful consuming and sharing of media.)

Erhardt's Productivity Graph (RescueTime) -- Blue is good, Red is bad

Finally, there is the realm of pseudo-productivity in the opposite direction: email. RescueTime tells me that I spend the majority of my screen-staring time on my email client, 7.5 hours in the past week! Email is simultaneously how everything and nothing gets done in the knowledge society and workplace. Studies have shown that email produces shots of chemicals in the brain that either excite you or terrify you depending on your disposition; either way they keep you coming back for more. Plus, sending off emails are quick wins in terms of check offs on to-do lists: hit send and you’ve done something! In the past week, I have sent out at least 50 email messages. I have received many more than that. There are numerous recommendations floating out there about managing email deluge: scheduled email checks with specific time limits once or twice a day, converting inboxes to priority order rather than chronological, and simply unsubscribing from anything that seems to hurt more than it helps. I’ve tried all of these at various times to no avail. There is also the oft-cited law that states–the more email you send, the more email you receive–which seems inescapable.

Something that I’m really curious about the future is how media consumption will change in terms of behavioral patterns and its meaning socially, culturally, and in terms of productivity when wearable technology is our main digital media source and is ubiquitous. Think of Google Glass as the closest approximation: I’m interested in what our media landscape will look like when we consume it through the lens of augmented reality. Will it break down the silos of media: away from YouTube, email, news websites, etc.? Can I have exchanges that perform the function of email but not in this way that takes us out of our productive spaces? And then will we develop cognitive mode-switching techniques will fill in to help us distinguish one mode (email) from another mode (video watching). How will this change the patterns and diversity of media we consume: will it look like push or pull or some new yet-to-be-experienced form?

https://twitter.com/mediabender