Media Use Diary

I'll be honest, when we were delegated this assignment, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what my media use would look like mapped out in a table or a graph.  I expected to use the internet a lot more than I should, clock a decent amount of hours in front of the TV and not read nearly enough as I should.  After scrupulously making sure I logged all my hours correctly, I was shocked to find that my initial assumption couldn’t have been more wrong!  
We were asked to log our media use over the course of 10 days.  I chose to focus on the five main mediums I use regularly.  Firstly, the use of my phone.  This includes texts, emails, web browsing, social networking, applications and music.  Secondly, using my laptop for web browsing, social networking, academic use and entertainment.  Followed by TV, print and radio. 

One of the first things I noticed was that I don't really consume/produce as much media as I originally thought.  As shown in figure 1, my computer usage is fairly standard, if not lower than average.  Maybe I'm not studying enough!  Comparatively, my television consumption was stock standard, if not a little lower than the majority of students. I think a reason for this could be the fact that I'm very social.  I don't enjoy sitting at home very much and I find any opportunity I can to hang out with my friends.  

My radio consumption, similar to my peers, was mainly from listening in my car and I noticed spikes in my consumption on days I drove to the Gold Coast to visit my family.  Surprisingly, in this current age, I do use a substantial amount of print media.  However, as much as I would like to say that I'm reading newspapers, it's actually time spent reading '50 Shades of Grey.'  Oops.

The hours I spent on my phone, however, was quite alarming!  Massive spikes in phone consumption occurred on Friday and Saturday (obviously).  If I was to get rid of my phone, I would have an extra 35 hours in a 10 day period.  Oh, the things I could achieve...then again, I'd probably need my phone to achieve them!  

I want to focus the attention now on the two main forms of media I consume.  Figure 2 shows that the bulk of what I do on my phone is production in the form of social networking (more commonly referred to as stalking).  Seriously though, in this regard I'm quite similar to the rest of my Journalism cohort because we all seem to have our phones glued to our hand at all times.  Something quite atypical of my data in comparison to the rest of the cohort is that I don't have an Instagram account.  I was shocked to see that a staggering 43% of the group have one.  SMS closely follows my social network production which indicates that I produce more than I consume.

Figure 3 shows what I spend my time doing on my computer.  As expected and similar to my peers, social networking takes the cake.  The group data showed that YouTube was the second biggest hit but I rarely use YouTube so again, I was atypical in that respect.  

The ten day period in which I collected data happened to be quite a social time in my life and I would say that during that time, my phone usage was above average while my tv/computer consumption was below average.  This took me by surprise, especially considering the olympics was on.  Having thought of it, I used the 'London 2012' app on my iPhone to get most of my olympic updates.

My media consumption is heavily weighted upon outside influences and my plans on any specific day.  Before I started this course, I didn't blog nor did I tweet.  After ripping off the bandaid I can honestly say that I quite enjoy blogging so I can only predict that my media production is going to skyrocket in the coming months.  Stay tuned.

Lily x