Compulsive Consumption and Further Reading
After thinking about my media consumption and the mediums through which I consume news and other information, I realize that my behavior is occasionally impulsive and intensely habitual. Every morning, after snoozing the alarm on my cellphone multiple times, I eventually unlock the screen and immediately go to Facebook. Whether or not I actually read the posts on my newsfeed, it’s hard to tell because I’m not fully awake, but my media consumption begins the second my eyes open.
As I’m getting ready for the day I start to engage content on Facebook in a more active manner. Generally after showering and dressing, I use my cellphone to sift through various applications as I prepare breakfast and coffee, pack up my backpack, and when I brush my teeth.
My typically sequence of consumptions goes as follows: When I exhaust new content on Facebook, I generally go to Instagram next, then Snapchat, followed by the news app, Breaking News. Typically, I wake up at 7:15 a.m., and by time I leave the house at 8:00 a.m., I’m usually caught up on social media and major news stories from the night before.
Perceptive readers will notice that I didn’t include Twitter in the above list. I generally turn to Twitter in the middle of the day, when I get the push notification for content that I might be interested in reading. At the point I receive the notification, I still don’t open the app right away, and instead wait for a time where I’m waiting in line, walking or bored.
I also do not use any push notifications for the other news apps on my phone, like CNN or Breaking News, because I don’t like my notification feed to fill up too much. Instead I like to proactively go to those applications when I have the time to read closely and carefully, rather than idly as I do with the news I get from social media.
From the exercise of monitoring my habits, I noticed more than ever that I am actually a primary user of Facebook for news. It is the first app I open when I have down time, but depending on whether I’m opening it out of habit or because I genuinely want to read posts on my newsfeed, my level of engagement varies.
When I am mindfully using Facebook, I realized through this exercise that I receive a pretty broad range of perspectives over the course of the day. Facebook’s algorithms curate the content its users see, so the varied viewpoints on my feed result from my engagement with posts with which I disagree. As I was critically thinking about my usage of social media as a form of news, it occurred to me that I tend to read one or two more articles beyond a single story a friend or news source shares, and these habits have actually enhanced my reading and created a multi-faceted experience.
Over the week of monitoring my habits, I’ve determined that it’s really important to remain active when reading online content, and that blasé engagement is detrimental to one’s attention span, efficiency, and time management.
