Author: L

I kept a diary of all my media consumption throughout the week, by recording each “piece” of media (for example, one article, one book), and coding them along several dimensions in a spreadsheet (such as: device used, primary / secondary source, reason accessed, found via algorithm or not, etc.). 

My Lifelong Kindergarten colleagues Shruti Dhariwal and Manuj Dhariwal have been working on an extension to Scratch for exploring probability (called “Let’s Chance”). I remixed one of their example projects (Wish a Fish) to make a highway with devices passing by – each representing an object for accessing media (computer, book, newspaper, phone, movie). 

The objects appear in keeping with the frequencies of my use of them in the past week.

Here’s the Scratch project (as a screen recording – the actual project was made in a separate GUI that they are working on).

Here’s another one, representing how much of my media consumption was algorithmically generated. Yellow is algorithmic, blue is not.

Other findings:

• 30% of my media diet appears to be algorithmic in nature. But it’s hard to know, in an algorithmic world, how many are “second-hand” algorithmic – if someone recommends that I watch something that Netflix pushed for them, I’m still under some algorithmic influence, arguably. Of the media I encountered, 10.5% was recommended to me by other people.
• My “diet” is fairly balanced between primary and secondary sources. 
• 22% of media was required by my courses. 

I was excited about the 24 hours phone-less. I’m not a great texter, and feel the pressure to be always-on and available for diffuse conversation. I’ve learned how to adapt to the online way of being, where you move from meeting to meeting and are in conversation with everyone, just a little bit: Slack, Whatsapp, email. Ever-presence is in conflict with many of my favorite states (e.g., writing, brainstorming, swimming, talking). 

Because I’m an erratic texter, I didn’t tell many people that I’d be phone-less; a 24-hour delay is long but not uncharacteristic. I told my loved ones, who might actually worry if I didn’t pick up. If there was any easy way to “auto-reply” to SMS, I would’ve done it, but didn’t see an option for iOS. The list of people who might conceivably text me in 24 hours is long, and the list of people who would definitely text me is short; I didn’t think to tell those who occasionally write that I’d be briefly off-air. 

So one evening I made a call, turned off the phone, put it on a shelf, and forgot about it.  I woke up easily; my sleep schedule is consistent, though I’d need an alarm (phone or otherwise) for an early start. I was visiting family for the weekend. We went to a nature talk, and I brought my camera, so I wouldn’t miss my phone’s best feature. This ended up being an upgrade: I got some sharp owl photos. 

I thought of the phone’s absence seven times, most often when wanting to know the time. I’d want a watch for a phone-less life — but everyone else has a phone, so I just asked others for a time check. I realized that that’s the main thing I do with it: light up the screen, see the time, put it back in my pocket. I suspect the absence of this habit made me look a little more engaged with others throughout the day; I wasn’t ever signaling that something else had my attention.  

Close to the end of the 24 hours, I logged onto my computer and made an unfortunate discovery: a friend had organized a group day trip for her birthday, and they’d be trying to get in contact with me about it (to invite me to go, and to get recommendations for the area).  It turns out she’d texted me the night before, at the beginning of my time off, and again during the day. In retrospect, I probably should have sent a group message that I’d be off my phone, but since we usually use web platforms to communicate, it hadn’t occurred to me. But I also hadn’t been on my computer much, so that wasn’t a great failsafe. 

My main takeaway was that my phone is requisite infrastructure: people expect me to be always-available, and if I really want to avoid that, I’d need to communicate clear constraints and alternatives. And I’m existing within a social atmosphere shaped by the ability to communicate instantaneously, so even if I abandoned my phone, I’d need to be available on some other immediate medium. So — not ditching it, yet.