Keeping this diary was an exercise that provoked a lot of reflection and questioning of my own habits. In particular, I became very interested in my intake of images as special media units among the endless stream of bits I encounter throughout the day. After a few days of keeping the diary, I noticed that (1) I often clicked on a story rather than just read the headline if the image drew me in, and (2) my entertainment news tended to be more image-heavy than stories of a more serious nature, which tended to be more text-heavy.

Interested in examining the images I encountered when accessing news stories in particular, I mapped images from the news I accessed onto a visualization: http://imgur.com/a/Kphd1. For each article that I actually read (rather than glanced at), I sampled the first or the main image in that story. I then organized these images by day and by time of day— morning, daytime, or nighttime. From this record, I made many observations that weren’t immediately obvious to me when studying my diary, but I want to share two in particular:

1. I tend to access media on a half-day schedule. The images sampled generally reflected the time of day when I was actively surfing news and media, (clicking on links and reading, rather than glancing through headlines or social feeds). Just looking at when and for how long I tended to surf the news made me realize that a typical work day for me is divided into two parts— morning or evening will be dedicated to uninterrupted work, and the other half might see more distracted surfing or reading, where code-shifting is possible. This was a cute insight to me, because just the other day I was talking to someone about the Paul Graham essay on the half-day “maker’s” schedule— I’d be curious to see if others in the class saw a similar division of their time.

2. I see more pictures of women’s faces and bodies than I do of men’s faces and bodies. This was immediately apparent to me when looking at all the images I sampled from my diary. In this small sample alone, there are 7 undressed women pictures and only 1 undressed man. I think this disproportion reflects my own interests in stories about women— a theme I saw across the subject matter of my diary. But my intuition is that it also reflects a broader differences in the ways bodies are depicted in the media.

One last note on the exercise: the experience of looking through this much of my own browsing history was extremely unpleasant: it was truly stimulus overload. This was one of the more surprising observations I drew from the assignment. Culling through links and images at this rate made me feel like my mental “cache” was full, so to speak. I found this reaction really interesting, and it makes me wonder if the multi-tasked, high-speed browsing that I usually do, and that this exercise multiplied, has a comparable but less obvious cognitive effect.