Madeline Boyce: a media “participant”

Madeline Boyce Snapchats more than she texts.

She rarely posts on Facebook.

And she’ll download and delete Instagram every other month.

She’s a watcher, not a poster.

“I’m not super into sharing everything with everyone,” she says simply.

Boyce, a 21 year old University of Oregon senior, lives in a shared house with 59 housemates. She’s got two living rooms — each with their own TV. But she doesn’t use them. If she’s watching TV, it’s a social activity, Boyce says. She and her friends have Netflix shows they’ll watch together, hunkered down somewhere in front of a laptop.

To stay in communication with her housemates, Boyd uses Snapchat. She’ll watch their stories to keep up with what they’re doing and ask them about it — but she rarely snaps to their shared story. She only sends pictures back and forth with a few close friends. Snapchat is a habit she picked up mostly from a boyfriend, who used it as his preferred means of communication.

Boyce sees herself as more of a “participant,” in social media than a “performer.” Yes, she consumes it actively, but she doesn’t really like to produce it. Putting things out there makes her nervous.

Of her last five Facebook posts were four group photos and one link. Since signing up for Twitter in December 2012, she’s tweeted four times. Boyce doesn’t like Instagram, and mainly only uses it for practical purposes (like looking at family photos of the family she’s au-pairing for) but she’s got nearly 300 followers. That’s about six followers for every post she’s published.

Boyce says that about 90 percent of her social media consumption happens on her phone. She’ll check Facebook every few hours and stop to check what’s trending. When she gets home from class, she’ll watch friend’s Snapchat stories. And her Buzzfeed app is a pretty “adequate” distraction, she says. Often, she’ll catch herself taking quiz after quiz or scrolling through their friendly mix of news and entertainment stories to pass the time.

Her news also comes mostly from mobile, and an app called “News and Weather” that’s installed no her Android. She likes that she can set it to see national stories or local stories, and that it gives her a choice between news sources so that she can chose the most reputable one (she is a journalist, after all!).

Boyce prefers reading text to watching videos, but she likes does like listening to music. When she’s studying or writing on her laptop, Boyce will turn on the free version of Spotify or listen to music on YouTube. Mostly, she listens to tunes that are upbeat — like Jason Derulo, Bastille and Sam Hunt, to name a few.

As a social media user, Boyce acknowledges that she “never posts on anything, really” which might be somewhat outside the typical social media habits of the average millennial. She uses the services — but she doesn’t consider herself married to it, unlike some of the other millennials she knows.

Recently, one of Boyce’s friends asked her if she ever found herself falling asleep while scrolling through her phone.

The phenomenon struck her as odd. If her friend was tired, why didn’t she just put her phone down and go to sleep?