I consume, therefore I am
Humans are animals of habit. Our habits, our interests, what we do and what we consume define who we are. Over the past few days, I had the opportunity to reflect on who I am and how I consume through a class assignment called the “Media Consumption Journal,” where my classmates and I tracked our media habits for 48 hours — everything I was reading, listening to and, ultimately, clicking on was recorded.
I did an assignment like this during my undergraduate career as a journalism student at the University of Arizona in 2011, and I honestly wish I had saved it. Back then my life was defined by grazing Facebook statuses of my peers, reading the occasional Arizona Daily Star article, and treating The Huffington Post as religion.
This week’s assignment painted a different story. Today I work full-time at a global public relations agency. Tuesday and Wednesday were workdays, and these were the 48 hours that I was asked to track my media habits. As I looked over the two days of media consumption, it told me a familiar story: Wake up at 7 a.m., check my phone, maybe read an article while still in bed, commute 30 minutes to work listening to the Serial podcast, getting to work and tracking media for various clients on trade sites and general news outlets, driving home from work while listening to Serial again, and getting home to consume interest pieces.
I wasn’t surprised about the media I was consuming or the mass amount of media I consume on any given day. What most surprised me about my media consumption habits was something USC Annenberg Professor Matthew Leveque recently mentioned to me in an interview for my thesis on visual literacy: Today consumers are snacking online, they’re not sitting down for a “full meal.” Two minutes here, five minutes there, 30 seconds on another and then my attention was gone.
This makes me wonder, if readers are denying long-form thought pieces and their attention is lost in just 15 seconds, how will the media landscape change to accommodate the reader? It’s a question that hasn’t needed to be asked in the past, as a lack of competition of the days of one-paper towns created big media giants that had no fear of a changing consumer. Some might argue that this question has been answered with tradigital media outlets such as Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post, but the problem with that answer is that I’m considered to be in the first generation of digital natives, and readers will only continue to change over time as the information bubble grows bigger and technology continues to evolve quickly.
Another question that I am curious about is how media will not only try to entice readers in the future, but also how media outlets will keep readers coming back through engagement initiatives. In the future, I think that this might look like micro communities of readers that are interested in certain topics, and who also have a platform to converse about those topics with other informed individuals.
I acknowledge that my consumption habits define who I am, and that they are ever changing due to new topics I may discover, changing jobs or different living situations. And while I enjoy knowing what media I consume day-to-day, it leads to some bigger questions about media and its future — its role in our lives, and how our lives are now influencing its content. It will be interesting to see how media consumption and media content changes with coming generations, but only time will tell.
