Changing Habits
If this exercise has shown me anything it’s that I’ve been really busy. You can see the few minutes of downtime in my day when I check my phone and am waiting in line. And then there are long stretches of time where I’m near my phone but not really allowed to look at it, like when I’m commuting or in class.
It’s also been interesting doing this exercise twice now, once last semester and now this semester. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say pre-election and post-election. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see proof of a change in the way I consume media.
It’s definitely a good change, whether the impetus for it was good or not. I remember my biggest issue from last semester was that it seemed like my media consumption was mostly pop culture and sports analysis, with the occasional culture essay thrown in. My main vehicle for consumption is still Twitter, but since the election the conscious consumption of my news feed has drastically changed. I still follow my favorite voices in arts and sports, but since November I have also added various political and hard news sources to my lineup.
It may also be a sign of the times. Much of the onslaught of news is hard to avoid now, and it’s permeated everything. I think it also has something to do with my friend group. We were all profoundly affected by the outcome of the election, and since then the cross-continental group text has been a lifeline in more ways then one. We have used it not to just provide support for each other, but also share information. I wouldn’t exactly call it a marketplace of new ideas, it’s much more like preaching to the choir, but it has expanded my political news horizons nonetheless.
Some things haven’t changed. I still get the majority of my news from Twitter, I think the biggest difference is that I’m clicking on “legacy” media more. At this rate, I’m going to have to buy a subscription to the New York Times or the Washington Post. I find that a whole semester in journalism school has also had the unintentional benefit of affecting my legacy media bias. During my habitual Twitter scrolling I’m much more likely to click on an article someone’s shared from the Washington Post versus one from Buzzfeed, even if the articles are similar.
Lastly, and I think this was more representative of the absolute craziness of the past week for news than representative of any sort of new media habit, but over the past two days I’ve found myself stopping through my Twitter scroll to actually watch entire embedded videos instead of just glancing at the headline or the reaction. Some were shared with me by friends, some came from trusted voices on Twitter, but I definitely found myself stopping more often to watch entire clips of the confirmation hearings for Betsy Devos and then Rick Perry from either CNN or CSPAN. If they and their fellow nominees are confirmed, I have a feeling that similarly ridiculous sound bites will become commonplace.
