WNYC’s Bored and Brilliant project: NOT journalism

So let me start off by saying that WNYC’s Bored and Brilliant project, run by the Note to Self podcast, was interesting but at the same time kind of redundant. We know that we are on our phones too much. I didn’t need a study like this to show me. The other thing I learned was that in the defense that we are always on our phones, society has created a world where having your phone attached to your hip is pretty necessary.

So here is what I did over six days of challenges…

Day one: keep your phone in your pocket or purse and when you are traveling from place to place. So, I guess you can say I was lucky because day one was a day I had multiple classes, where using my phone wasn’t even an option. However, being the news junkie that I am, I have a number of news apps on my phone. With all of those apps, come constant notifications that I like getting during the day. So while I kept my phone in my bag while walking and driving to class, I’m usually catching up on my notifications. I spent a lot of time watching the nightly newscast and then on the internet having to catch myself up on events that happened hours before. I guess I did see more people and had more interactions on my walk, but I enjoy using my walks as a time to catch up on my current events and emails.

Day two: photo free day. So I’m assuming this meant that I wasn’t even allowed to take photos and selfies for Snapchat…but that was kind of hard to do… mostly because I kept forgetting. On the other hand, I am one of those people with thousands of photos on my phone. I like to take pictures of everything. So considering that I went to a banquet and took no photos on my phone, I think I did a good job. I will say that I don’t think photos are as harmful as other things that happen.

Day three: delete that app you are constantly using. So I’m a millennial and am constantly scrolling through Instagram looking at the falsified photos people are posting about how much fun they are having, had the night before, or had a year ago when they were vacationing in a different country. I will say that once I deleted that app on my phone, I did go to try and open the app multiple times, before realizing that I had deleted it. I guess maybe that was out of pure instinct and when I am bored. So while I didn’t necessarily die of craziness because I didn’t have my Instagram, I had to find other things to do. I did find that I was much happier with my boring day at home because I didn’t have to look at what cool things other people were doing.

Day four: set an “away message” on your email… I spent the day at my internship at a news station and was back and forth on my email all day, so I couldn’t really do this. And for a lot of people, I feel like this is unrealistic mostly because it’s looked at negatively if you don’t respond to emails quickly. I guess this is a bad thing that proved the point of this experiment.

Day five: go to a public place and people watch is essentially what I got out of this. And I will admit this is something I do everyday and I think you can learn a lot from about people and patterns of society.

Day six: build a house out of your wallet. Okay, I feel like a kid again and this was cool and fun.

So let’s take a step back and ask ourselves if this is really journalism. Was I able to make a more creative house from my wallet because I wasn’t distracted by my phone for six days? Probably not. I feel that while this was interesting, there was a lack of storytelling in this “project.”