I appreciated this assignment because it encouraged me to reflect on how I recently redefined the applications that I use in spare time, and that I unknowingly drift towards as I go throughout my day. For this past week, I have actively switched my “default” app from Messenger and then Gmail to the New York Times App and then the Books app. While I did not track my time spent on these apps, it was easy to find through the Screen Time feature on iOS. In order to make the data collection concise yet meaningful when Screen Time exists, I recorded which applications or websites were entry points.
My data collection process was simple, I recorded the approximate time spent on media found through a variety of these initial leads on media, and captured my data in a graphic, below. The graphic was generated by converting the time spent on each entry point’s media sources into a transparency percentage according to a logarithmic scale, and modified the icon for that app or site. Perlin noise was added to create a noise floor, a point where features of images would become invisible. In order to make it so that each logo was visible in proportion to the amount of time I spent through it, I generated a cloud of 600,000 dots (one dot for every second of this past week), in order to have an equal baseline for visibility of each of the logos. This cloud of media consumption, I’ll call “Cloud of Media”.
While not all of the applications are visible, from right to left and moving down, there are Google Docs, Firefox, Youtube, New York Times, Apple News, Google Chrome, Reddit, Apple Books, Safari, Spotify, Dropbox, Simple Radio, Twitter, and a game title.
The image format conflicts with WordPress due to how large and difficult to compress it is, so the Cloud of Media can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u0w0011joqfiqnm/cloud_of_media.png?dl=0
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