Media Diary

I should be tired of this now – the same diet every day. Before my kids burst into my room, I update my email, browse through twitter, and open the NYT on my phone. None of these works get complete. By the time the kids go out of the door, the loo awaits with the New Yorker, the LRB or the Private Eye. I manage to read half an article because I am always late for class.

On the way to class, a BBC podcast – In Our Time – often tells me about some philosopher or a historical event that I promptly forget.It’s also a great way to fall asleep.  On the road, I often check twitter and occasionally facebook. When I get frustrated, I read the headline of NY Times and then give up on news. It’s too depressing. Self control has been a great app. While working, I turn off facebook and twitter and get a solid hour. Otherwise, I flit – between writing and reading some random post on facebook that makes me numb. At night, I read – printed articles – so that I don’t get too tempted to browse aimlessly.

But the weekend was a special one. We were headed to NY on a bus – and that meant books were to be read. I managed to read a story by W Summerset Maugham  called ‘Rain’ – an assignment for class, on the bus. Then I read a book that I have been struggling with for a while – ‘An association of small bombs’ by Karan Mahajan – a story of an explosion in New Delhi. The fact that internet was intermittent meant I could really read.

In NY, my phone acted as a map. If you have five and six years olds, you soon realise that the best way to quieten them is to show them a moving blue dot on a complicated subway map. I showed my children films – on Netflix – projected on to a big screen. I watched Disney’s Tarzan and Finding Dory with my children. I used my phone to call and send text messages – and it felt that that’s what phones were made for.

On Monday, as the bus left NY, I held on to my phone and realized that the weekend is over. I went to my weekday mode, browsed twitter once again, read about politics in Nepal and when I got to US politics, I gave up. Twitter is way too obsessive and if I were smart, I’d have quit a long time ago.

I used Rescue Watch to track my media consumption but was not completely satisfied with the detail of reporting I received at the end of the week. I would have liked more in-depth information about the sites I was visiting (rather than the top three per category), as well as how the program chooses what to classify as “news and opinion” vs. “references and learning” etc. Another problem with this program is I have a very dangerous tab habit in which I average about 40 tabs open in a browser at at time and they may stay open for weeks…so I think the time analysis per page was somewhat skewed,  Nonetheless, the snapshot view provided by the platform as well as some additional reporting and recording on my part provided me with a few takeaways:

• Like most people, scheduling and communication, primarily on email and calendars, was the single greatest individual category of media consumption. According to Rescue Watch, it was 36% of my time and a total of 8 and a half hours over the course of the week. That actually seems pretty low to me and I wondered about the nature of the tracking. This did not include emailing and messaging on my phone. .
• The rest of my top 5 was pretty expected – numerous course readings,  the New York Times and Amazon (streaming TV shows). I also spent 4 hours actually going to the movies (the perks and joys of a long weekend).
• Digging a bit deeper into my browser history, while a significant number of the sites I visited were news and opinion sites, I spent far shorter periods of time on each page, meaning I am either a faster or more superficial reader than I thought.
• My news consumption started daily with a broader reading across international, local, national news and arts sections (though perhaps limited in ideological perspective) and then became increasingly more narrow in scope and theme as the day progressed. This was because most of my clicks either came from social media where like-minded friends were posting on the issues that I care about or through the various thematic email newsletters I subscribe to (Latin American politics and human rights, media industry, freedom of expression and press freedom etc.). Besides the Times, my reading was very piecemeal with never more than one or two articles a day from the same news source. I realized through this exercise that while my daily news consumption may include a variety of sources, aside from the day’s top stories, the subject matter was generally more or less always the same.
• The big surprise and rude awakening was the fact that shopping came in as the third ranked category on my rescue watch list. I am not a big online shopper so did a little more digging and realized the program was reading my Amazon time as shopping, rather than streaming content. Nonetheless, I did attempt to buy a couch online this week and this program laid bare all the wasted hours on this failed enterprise.
• Main conclusions: unsurprisingly, I spend a lot of time writing and responding to emails, reading the news and going to the movies. My indecision means I should not be allowed to online shop for furniture.

After tracking my computer usage for 6 days, I was interested in three questions:

1. How often do I use my computer for consuming, and how often do I use it for producing?
2. Which are the websites I consume from the most?
3. By studying the types of media I consume, what can I learn about myself?

Tracking all my media usage was not as difficult as it may have been for others in the class. I don’t use a smartphone, so I have no mobile consumption (beyond phone calls!) I occasionally read print sources, such as The Tech, but that contributed to fewer than 30 minutes this past week. Almost all of my media consumption is done through my computer, which I’ve been tracking with an application called Timing.

To answer the first question, I reviewed all the time I spent on my laptop and divided it into two broad buckets: productivity and media usage. This was more of an art than a science. I thought of productivity as any application or website in which I was actively producing something (e.g. writing something in LaTeX, composing emails, reading a pset on the computer while solving it on paper, buying stocks, etc.)

These tasks served as a nice benchmark for the thing I was really interested in: my media usage. I defined this category as anything that wasn’t “productive” as defined above, i.e. consisted almost entirely of consumption. This included reading news or blogs, browsing Facebook, or even reading other posts on this website!

Granted, these categories were separated by a fuzzy boundary at best. Some things like email were hard to classify: when was I consuming emails and newsletters vs. when was I preparing an email? Furthermore, Timing had trouble knowing when I was actively viewing something on my computer, so all the data should be treated as having huge error bars. (Times are probably underestimated.)

I believe the results still yield interesting results, however:

My media consumption is (thankfully) consistently lower than my productive uses of the computer. It is still considerably large, however. What surprised me was that I wasn’t spending a lot of time on any single website, but rather that I was spending a little time on many websites, which added up to significant periods of time in “consumption mode.” (See the chart below for more context.) Consumption in the age of the Internet is incredibly distributed.

My overall usage of the computer was lower on the weekend as expected (see Feb. 18, a Saturday). However, the weekend is also when the highest percentage of my computer time is spent on media consumption.

The chart below sheds light on my second question:

Google Hangouts, which I included in media consumption (although that could be debated), took up 149 minutes because of several videochats I had this past week. (One of these was a conversation with other Americans across the country discussing the recent political events.)

As a subscriber on the NYTimes, I’m happy to see it make it into my top 3, and the time I spent on it is about what I’d expect.

To answer the third and final question, however, requires a more aggregated analysis:

This chart yields the most value for me.

Social websites like Facebook and Twitter are having a large impact on how I see the world, even if I don’t go there for traditional news. That’s because they make up over half the time I spend consuming media on the computer. Just by the nature of scrolling through their newsfeeds and adhering to their algorithms, I am being shaped by them.

I don’t read the mainstream media (like NYTimes, Washington Post, and WSJ) as much as I would expect. When I think about where my opinions form and where I find the facts that I reference in conversation, they usually stem from these mainstream sources. However, given that only a fifth of my media consumption comes from there, I must be weighting these sources substantially higher in my head because of the perceived credibility that comes with them.

I was happy to see that new forms of journalism (like BuzzFeed and MuckRock) are the next largest category. These are sources that can provide alternative perspectives and in new forms. I intentionally try to seek them out, and so it was reassuring to see that I’ve been somewhat successful in keeping up with it.

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To end on a fun note, here are some fascinating tidbits that I picked out from my week’s worth of data:

• The longest time I spent on a Wikipedia page at one time was 7 minutes. Article: “Gas constant“
• The news websites that didn’t make it into the charts above (because I visited them for under 3 minutes) included CBS Sports, NYPost, The Independent, The Verge, Huffington Post, Fox News, and The Crimson.
• I like to visit BuzzFeed occasionally because they have some great original reporting. However, I still don’t spend as much time reading them as I would like! See below: