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.