Tag: Assignment 2

For the past week, I wrote down every day my media consumption, but also my daily mental state (as I always do).

I spoke on the phone and checked compulsively instagram>whatsapp>mail. I also lost my phone and lasted a day without checking my mail. I went into spirals of stalking people in Tech companies on LinkedIn, and binge-listened to a podcast. I also ordered 3 books.

I want to understand what is causing these different patterns of consumption, exposure and compulsion. What I will focus on is the relationship between my mental state as reflected by some daily highlights, and my exposure to media (both deliberate and unintentional).

When I am most susceptible to compulsive behavior? When I most susceptive to procrastination? Are sponsored ads a reflection of my late night googling?

Below is a summary of my media diary this week. The right side shows unintentional media, and the left shows more intentional media (here is a rough gradient from least intentional to most intentional media exposure):

• Shared WhatsApp media
• Media from conferences
• Shared media on Facebook and Instagram
• Sponsored media on Facebook and Instagram
• Watched episodes on Netflix
• Mindlessly spiraling from account to account on instagram
• Searching for LinkedIn profiles
• Searching on Google
• Sharing my media

Each row represents a day, and the red and blue Rhombi (red for high mood, blue for low mood) encapsulate a daily highlight. The dots on both sides of each Rhombus, show the rate of the different unintentional and intentional media exposures.

I discovered that during days that I felt in a bad mental state, I would use google more than on other days (25 min more on average). I searched increasingly for answers when I was feeling dissatisfied. This led to ads on Facebook and Instagram the next day – acting as a reminder and continuously affecting my mood, but on a more unconscious level. I also noticed that when I was in a good mood, I was generally more energetic, and would be more compulsive. I checked my phone much more than on lower energy days. Compulsion came with high energy contrary to what I had assumed (that lower mood causes distraction and thus more compulsive behavior).

The dynamic of intentional and unintentional exposure to media was also affected by my willingness to be sucked in and distracted from my priorities. When I was feeling low in energy, I procrastinated more, and it was easier for me to infinitely scroll. I was also more inclined to click on some of the sponsored ads.

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Over the course of seven days, I recorded a data point each time I engaged with published content for ~10 seconds or more. This visualization groups those many pieces of content based on their provenance (e.g content that I deliberately access versus content recommended by algorithms). Each piece of media is represented by a rectangle, and its size is based on the time I spent with it. The resulting visualization shows the footprint of various access channels on my media consumption.

As it turns out, my media diet is mostly composed of content whose provenance I control: physical media I own, Youtube channels I subscribe to, and chronologically-sorted Twitter timeline. My interaction with recommendation algorithms and ads is limited to my music consumption: Spotify is almost the only space where I let the machine dictate what comes next. Hypertext links used to be a driving-factor in content discovery; here they’re only responsible for a tiny fraction of my consumption.

What doesn’t appear here is the many hours spent scrolling aimlessly on Twitter (chronological) and Instagram (algorithm-curated), as I look, but barely engage with the conversation.

Please go to @MySocialMediaDiary2020 on Instagram and check the Stories Highlights.

While collecting data for my media diary, I was struck by the realization that more often than not, I’m consuming media while I’m doing something else – eating dinner, washing the dishes, walking to class. Even more, I noticed that I’ll often consume media while I’m consuming another type of media. This chart reflects the myriad ways I like to consume media, often concurrently. The numbers below the media reflect the total hours spent consuming/producing that type of media for the week, and the lines and arrows reflect the activities I most caught myself performing while being mediated.

During the week-long span from Sunday, February 16, to Saturday, February 22, I recorded all of the media that I consumed in a “media diary.” The way I defined media was anything that portrayed information or entertainment to me through a screen, text, or audio source. Note that I did not include in-person interactions as media so long as they were free from the use of technology to enhance the conversation/interaction. This exercise taught me quite a bit about my personal habits and what I might do to be in better control of those habits. While it is nice to not need to write everything I see/hear, I am grateful for the added layer of thought I have added to my subconscious when I am consuming media of any variety.

In my media diary, I simply wrote five things that defined each entry: 1) the date I consumed the media, 2) the title of the media I was consuming, 3) the general medium through which I was consuming the media, 4) how much time I had spent consuming the media, and 5) how deliberate I was in seeking out that particular piece of media. Again, just by writing these things down, I became more aware of how often I might “waste time” doing things that aren’t immediately important when I could be spending my time on other priorities.

In order to get a better sense of what this data looked like, I decided to focus in on three main points to visualize: what general purpose the media held at the time of consumption, how much time I was spending consuming that media, and how deliberate I was in seeking that media out. I chose to visualize this data using a simple particle simulator (adapted from an idea that I had to implement in another class). As you will see below, each individual particle is a single entry of media that was consumed. Three variables in the particles symbolize the three parameters I was focusing on, and they are as follows:

Category (color): I whittled down my media consumption into four categories–recreation (red), spiritual (yellow), productivity (green), and family/social (blue). Starting from the end and going backwards, family/social signifies any consumption of media that I used to communicate with my friends and family, such as phone calls, video chats, and text messaging; productivity means anything that was used to accomplish tasks necessary for classwork, research, and general future career needs through email, presentations, online textbooks, etc.; spiritual is for any religious media that I consumed that goes toward helping me be a better person and building my faith, such as reading scriptures, listening to talks and lessons at church, and so forth; recreation is for anything else that doesn’t fit into one of the other three categories, including YouTube videos about my hobbies, playing video games, watching movies or sporting events, etc. I could have done just two categories or added even more, but these four categories paint a fairly full story.

Duration (size): the bigger the particle, the longer I spent involved in a particular activity. Among the longer-lasting forms of media were movies, sporting events, and classes. The smaller ones include checking emails, using social media out of boredom, and so forth.

Deliberateness (speed): the speed of the particle is inversely proportional to how deliberate I was in consuming a particular piece of media. Namely, the slower the particle, the more steady and deliberate I was in choosing to consume that exact piece of media, and the faster the particle, the more spontaneous and distracting a piece of media was, almost thrust upon me, whether by an algorithm or by my two-year-old daughter.

So, without further ado, here is my week visualized:

As you can see from the data above, there tends to be a majority of recreation-centered media consumption in my life. Perhaps it’s due to how exactly I defined media, but it’s still quite apparent that I use a lot of media to entertain myself. That being said, I do use media for a lot of productive things. It’s ingrained into the classes I take, doing my homework, setting up meetings with people, and many more things.

The biggest takeaways from this data for me, though, is that the bigger items are typically slower than the smaller items. I’m spending a majority of my time really focused on specific tasks that I have personally decided to enact. While there are several little distractions throughout the day, they don’t completely dominate my time. Adding them all up definitely would show quite a bit of time taken away, though, so I want to be better at eliminating that usage, especially when it’s something not very important.

Overall, seeing this data has helped me to understand my media usage and habits better, and with that better understanding, gives me some ideas on how to better set expectations and boundaries for myself to be more in control of what I do each day. And for that added insight, I’m very grateful for the experience. But I’m sure glad I don’t have to write everything I do down in my little notebook. I found myself not wanting to give in to every impulse because I didn’t want to write it down. That’s honestly not the worst thing, though…