Media Consumption Journal
When I started keeping track of my media consumption, I became conscious of my news viewing for the very first time. Prior to this, I had never given much, if any thought, to how much news and media coverage I went through every day, as I do not consider myself a news-savvy person in general. Unlike many people today, especially on a college campus, I for one enjoy being disconnected, staying out of the loop on most subjects, free of all the buzzing and ringing from cell phones. (The only active notifications on my phones are phone calls and SMS) So the moment I started documenting my news consumption, it popped into my mind that this form would likely look very different from my peers’, in a few various ways.
Right off the bat, what may separate my news consumption from most people’s is the number of devices I use on a daily basis. To my understanding, most of my classmates keep two main machines as daily drivers, one being their smart phone and the other being their laptop. In spite of my intolerance of spending a chunk of time on smart phones, for the mobile technology connoisseur that I am, every morning I turn on my three smart phones, powered by three different operating systems. As opposed to business-oriented power users I have known who have multiple phones, I only have them for sentimental reasons, rather than function. I, in fact, spend very little time on them, with a recorded ~15 minutes among all them combined. Thanks to my horrible vision and contempt for glasses, my desktop computer and tablet, with their much larger screens, are my favorites.
Another thing is, unlike most students who are presumably domestic, I am an international student from China, and so I naturally follow both American and Chinese news. In fact, since I am in the U.S., Chinese news currently dominates my news viewing, for this way I feel closer to my family and motherland emotionally. I get most of my daily dose from sources on Weibo, in essence, the Chinese Twitter with less celebrity presence and more news-centric. After a brief time on Western social media, Weibo becomes my only source for news throughout the day. Ordinarily I would check my Weibo feed once in the morning, and then a few times after around 4 p.m. Pacific Time, as people in China would be waking up then, with a new wave of news flooding my Weibo home page.
Like many others living in this age of information overload, I tend to skim through most of the news headlines on all platforms, and only dig in on the subjects I take an interest in. Thus, I typically spend a mere five minutes on average in one viewing on each platform, with many similar viewings throughout the day. In those five short minutes, I am mostly just scanning the headlines without much deep reading. After all, news stories about changes that would have a major impact on my family and I’s life does not happen all that often. I would say that, on an average day, I would only read no more than ten articles from beginning to end. This means there could be a potential problem of people taking in many pieces of information without fact-checking, which may lead to news sources skimping on the details of the news. Every time I read an article that does not quite ring true with its booming title, which happens too often to me, I am reminded that the people making them probably realize it is much efficient for them to put focus on titles, with less detailed articles, and that they can afford to do that in this day and age.
One thing essential to my news consumption that was absent from my journal would be my usual weekly viewing of Real Time with Bill Maher, a political comedy talk show on HBO airing Friday nights. Among the countless television shows I watch, this is the only one that serves as more than just entertainment. I see the show as not only endlessly entertaining, but an opportunity of getting educated on current events. The reason for the journal, recorded on a Friday, to exclude such viewing was that the show was on break at the time.
