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.