Consciously examining my media consumption over the past week has been a revealing exercise. In addition to looking at the breakdown of what media I consume in a week, I wanted to document what form of media I spend the most time on, how I get to it, and what times of day I spend on different platforms.

The simple answer: Gmail, all day.

In the las week I spent more than 9 hours on Gmail and scheduling tasks out of the 39 hours I logged on my computer, documented with RescueTime. A close second was writing (time spent on Microsoft Word), followed by social networking sites and news/opinion.

My week looked like this according to RescueTime (w/ hours logged along the vertical axis, day of the week on the horizontal axis, and a key for activity below):

But in reality, my week looked a lot more like this: my daily schedule with activity color coded on top by four categories (red = email, yellow = entertainment, orange = news, pink = social media):

Combining the data from RescueTime with a notebook log I kept of my media consumption throughout the week, I found that my news consumption tends to happen in the mornings, while I consume more topical/class-related material during the days, and I tend towards entertainment (buzzfeed, netflix) in the evenings.

I had three additional takeaways from this exercise:

1. My media consumption is socially driven

I found that I spent a lot more time browsing Facebook and Twitter than I expected. I’m starting to realize that the reason is largely because I pick and choose to read things that my friends share on social networks. For instance, this story on NPR (Facebook link pictured above) was done by a friend of mine and shared by a lot of my friends in the Beirut journalism network. Via social media I am steered towards consuming the stories written or shared by my friends, many of whom share an interest in the Middle East. Not only do I click on these links, but, after examining the open tabs on my browser at the end of the day, I found that I am more likely to go back and actually read/listen to/consume stories shared on my social networks over other links. This concerns me that I may be stuck in a news echo chamber of sorts, dictated by my online social networks.

2. I am a more engaged media consumer in the mornings

By the end of the day, my browser looks like this:

I am much more likely to fully consume and repost or share a story if I encounter it in the morning. By the end of the day, I’m usually operating at information capacity and I’m less likely to read an article to the end.

3. I consume a lot of offline media

My coursework at Fletcher keeps me reading hard copies. I spent approximately 8 hours on offline texts (I’m including my Kindle in this, but that might be a stretch). This material is predominately made up of books and journal articles related to my research and coursework at Fletcher. I’m not sure if this offline consumption is driven by the environment of being in graduate school, but it certainly cuts into the news consumption time that I spend online and on current events. It’s interesting that while I do consume offline media, very little of that media is news; rather, it is longer magazine or academic articles or books.

What would your life look like if you didn’t have a smartphone? Or an iPad? Would you consume less news? Or just get it in a different way?

This week I tried to answer some of these questions by logging my activities online and offline. I recently stopped using my iPhone (on purpose) and my iPad (not on purpose–it got dropped), and our assignment this week allowed me track how I do—and don’t—consume media in my current low-tech environment. My tools at hand were a MacBook Pro, a Kindle, and good ol’ pencil and paper.

Even before I began, I knew that I was consuming less media that I used to back in the days when I carried an iPhone and a Blackberry at all times and immersed myself in a constant news stream, day and night.

But it really surprised me to quantify exactly how little news I read this week. I hardly consumed any breaking news media–just 114 minutes. I barely wrote any emails, averaging 46 minutes a day on gmail. And I spent only three minutes on Facebook.

Partly, this was due to circumstances—I happened to spent a lot of time travelling and a lot of time trying to write code during this period. Over a five-day period, my activity chart looked something like this. I tracked my hours using RescueTime for computer-based activities and a notebook for everything else, and compiled the results in Excel:

My most frequent activities were programming (369 mins), attending class (255 mins), and writing emails (231 mins). In fourth place was reading long-form journalism, which brings me to my next chart: media consumption. I’ve defined media in three categories—books, long-form and news.  This week I spent time reading long-form journalism for my narrative nonfiction class, which was my top category in terms of hours spent:

The news that I read was a bit of a jumble. Here are my top news sites by time spent (for short news stories):

I also tracked what devices I used to consume media, and the result surprised me: I read a lot more on my kindle than on my computer.

Here is the breakdown for what devices I used when reading books, news and long form, by minutes spent. I suspect this would have been pretty different if I was using an iPhone or an iPad:

By comparison when I did the same breakdown for my activities overall, my computer was dominant, accounting for 81% of my time logged. It seems like life without a smartphone has me spending more time on my kindle, and more time reading long-form journalism instead of news stories.

So is it worth living without an iPhone or an iPad? For the time being, absolutely.

I consume medias mainly on PC, Kindle,Mobile phone,TV,printed media and organic relation (oral:talking with people, physical:dance workshop). I used “Rescue Time” for my PC, and as for other medias, I took notes and summed them up.

While setting up my PC for Rescue Time, I encountered something very surprising.

On Rescue Time, you categorize your activity on PC either as “distractive” or as  “productive”. Checking news is part of my work life for more than 20 years. So I categorized “News & Opinion” as “productive”. There came an alert “Most people categorize this as “distracting time”.

WHAAAAAT!! When I was on shift as a page editor, I had to read all 5 national newspapers from top to end  for 3 hours in early morning before go to work. And you call it “distracting time”!  (Of course you can persist and set it up as “productive” in Rescue Time)

OK! Calm down. Here is a very important key for news industry. People want to be productive. But most people think reading news or opinion as distracitve, because it’s passive, I guess. If we can let people consume news in productive way, there could be a break through for the future.

Let’s go back to homework. Here is the summary of the time I spent for the different media.(numbers are minutes I spent)

I spent702 min. for mail. Half of them are for the report and message sent back to Japan, so that is for business. “Oral” does not include chatting at the lunch, but group meeting.”Physical” refers to dance lesson and dance workshop.

As I have been working in the media industry, I tend to use both old and new media. If I put them on timeline, you can see different aspect.

I use mobile phone as an alarm clock. So I sleep with mobile and Kindle. Whenever I wake up at night, I check my mobile for news. When earthquake happen while I am sleeping , I usually wake up at the primary wave and check the data and news on mobile. If it is bigger than M5, I turn on TV and PC.Thus the first screen I see in the morning is mobile.

Then I check TV news. First CNN, surfing through big networks then lands on CNN again.

During daytime, I use mainly PC, but also mobile when I am on move.The evening time is for printed media and Kindle. The last screen I see is mobile again.

This pattern is created after a long time of experience. If anything big happens, I have to go to the newsroom, I have to make phone calls.

How do I choose the media I consume?

I spent 140 minutes, which is almost a quarter of time I spent for media, at the media introduced through social media. They are mainly technology and business information.

There are several news sites and data site which I constantly check. It is like police car checking several points on patrol. There I check top stories and then shop around. It is like “Things to do ” list.  This patter must be quite different from young people, but having several media which I need to check for work, I cannot help.

For a more detailed overview of my media consumption, click here !

After trying to figure out which tool I could use to track my media consumption, I immediately encountered a problem: I have 3 different computers that I use regularly depending on my location (my old computer which always stays home, my new computer which resides at the Berkman center, and my netbook which always follows me along), 2 phones which I often use to check my emails or skype, and I sometimes rely on analog media, just as books. I could therefore not figure out a single application that would collect data about my media consumption simultaneously on all devices.. so I decided to keep track of it myself. Here is the spreadsheet that came out of it.
In addition to measuring my media consumption, my curiosity brought me to also collect the main topics of consumption. I tried to classify every piece of information that I gathered from media into broad categories, so as to be able to subsequently assess the correlation existing between the media I consume and the type of content or information I get exposed to.
After fiddling with various tools for datavisualisation, I ended up picking up d3.js – a very powerful tool for creativing beautiful data visualisations in (almost) no time – at least once you’ve figured out how to use it.. The current visualisations are not that exciting, of course, but that’s all I managed to get done for this first attempt at learning the tool.
The result was quite surprising as I realised that my media consumption during the week was limited to a very small number of very specific topics, which are not in fact at all representative of how I perceived my interested to be:

• Art was the great winner, with over 26 hours over the whole week. Of course, this was greatly related to the fact that I spent most of my week working with colleagues on our Burning Man proposal whose deadline is next week, so a large part of my “Conversations” this week were related to “Art”.
• Programming was (surprisingly) the second, with over 10 hours of exposure. This is, in reality, not so surprising, considering that I was actually learning how to use d3 for this very assignment, so I had to spend many hours browsing the web in order to figure out how to achieve my goals.
• Science-Fiction was third, also over 10 hours of exposure. I did not expect it at all, since I’m actually not a Science fiction freak, but then again I am currently reading a science fiction book and I’ve been watching various Sci-Fi movies that week, so it probably makes sense.
• The rest basically amounts to my research topics: surveillance, antitrust, bitcoin, copyright, privacy and mesh networking, which when summed together amount to over 40 hours of exposure during the whole week. A result that did not surprise me at all.

The other interesting result of this analysis was derived the relative proportion of media I have been consuming over the week. Web is naturally the number one (with over 36 hours of consumption), which is not surprising since most of the information I seek comes from the web – although I did in fact expect my weekly exposure to the Web to be even higher than 36 hours. But what was highly surprising to me was to realize that the “Web” medium was so closely followed by “Conversation” (with over 33 hours of exposure). Of course, one might argue that “conversation” is not a medium in itself.. yet, as I compiled the spreadsheet, I carefully marked down only these conversation that were actually exposing me to new information, or that involved some kind of collaborative information construction.
This made me reflect upon the actual definition of “media”. I personally never really thought about what is or is not a medium, in fact, I consider myself to be extremely ignorant as regards media. So this is probably not the proper definition of “media”, but according to my personal view, “media” is whatever convey information or allow someone to communicate – which is why I decided to include “conversations” whithin the media category.
Overall, I think this was an extremely interesting exercise, which allowed me to become more aware, and to pay more attention to my media consumption. While I think the weekly “topics” were slightly biased or contaminated by circumstancial factors, I was happy to discover that “conversations” play such an important role in my media consumption. Since I arrived in Boston 3 months ago, I have found myself complaining about how difficult it is to get any work done in such a mentally stimulating environment such as the Berkman Center and the MIT Medialab. Now, I can finally justify it on being one of my main sources of information ;).
I also really enjoyed the process of figuring out how to transform a basic spreadsheet into something meaningful and visually enticing – which allowed me to discover the potential of d3 as a datavisualisaton tool, and to come back to my somewhat rusty programming skills.