Push It Real Good — How I Gave Away the Power to Choose What Is Important
First, let me come clean: I am a mother of two kids and a graduate student. These two identities define and limit my media habits more than anything else at this moment of time. If I didn’t have kids and an insanely busy study schedule, I would probably be glued to my smart phone, which is not exactly the way I want to spend my life. On the other hand, kids, assignments and lectures inconveniently distract me from being as informed about what is happening in the world as I would like to be.
As an assignment for a class studying monetization and the future of the media, I had to keep a meticulous journal of my media consumption for 48 hours. I knew the drill because I had done the same exercise five months ago, just when I had moved to the United States from my home country, Finland. Back in the day, I was desperately seeking a fulfilling media relationship.
Since then, I have found my companion. It is not, however, any single news outlet, though I have found new favorites in, for example, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, I am hooked on mobile push alerts: those short messages that appear on your lock screen and keep you up to date with news worth knowing about. I love the format; a good push alert contains enough information to stand on its own. If I need more, it is usually just one tap away. What on earth did I do before push notifications? Checked regularly if some new topic had climbed its way to the top of a news site or a mobile app? Or read a print newspaper, for crying out loud! Who has time for that?
It has come to the point where my phone is my only means of consuming news. During the journal period, I deviated from the pattern only once and read the electronic version of the Los Angeles Times on a tablet. That happened while I was eating lunch. The subscription is a free trial that most likely won’t turn into a paid one because — you guessed it — I almost never find the time to read the paper.
My media habits are strongly connected to routines. I will most likely check social media and thus, news, during my commute to and from USC or while eating.
Keeping recent discussion on algorithms and filter bubbles in mind, I feel somewhat uncomfortable with my dependency on social media. Facebook provides me with most of my Finnish news and a good chunk of what is going on in the US too. Twitter and LinkedIn add their own twist to the mix. I also subscribe to a few Messenger news bots, the daily headlines of which I try to check.
Because of the time constraints, I aim for quality, not quantity in my media consumption. If I do decide to tap a link and read an article, I am genuinely interested in the topic and will most likely read it all the way through. The same dedication applies to sharing: if I share, I care and have actually read the piece.
Nevertheless, to some extent I have handed over my ability to choose what news I read. A newspaper, an online news outlet or a mobile news app is, of course, a compilation of news selected by editors too. Still, they offer a wide range of topics from which to choose. By letting push notifications and social media define my news consumption, I am getting only a narrow slice of all the content available. I am not happy about it but have to deal with it for the time being. Unless there is a way to add hours to the day, I will have to accept the constant struggle to stay informed as a mandatory condition of my current life situation.
