Media Usage Diary

I Tried To Think of a Good Heading But All I Could Think of Was This

TL;DR: I spend too much time on Tumblr and I don't care about Facebook.

Our main assessment piece for JOUR1111 (apart from successfully running a blog) was to monitor our media usage for ten days, then compare it to the class average, while discussing any other salient points/factors/journalistic methods we had a mind to. So, without any further ado, I present the findings of my media usage diary!

 First, let me show you what I monitored (you can also infer from the graph what I defined as 'media' under the guidelines of this assessment).

Those figures are my total media consumption over ten days. To make it easier for you, I also graphed the average amount of time I spent (in minutes) on these media each day.

All up, this is about 250 minutes of media usage per day, or a little over four hours (and I haven't even included books in here, that's at least another hour per day). 

Sadly enough, over a quarter of that figure is achieved through a site called Tumblr. However, on Tumblr I run several blogs and receive knowledge on international events and campaigns, as well as social movements, and keep in touch with international friends and also look at memes and funny pictures. At least, that's how I justify it to
myself. 

It should be noted in my graph that neither online nor traditional forms of news media are presented. Put simply, this is because I ... don't read the news (in a  conventional sense). As I mentioned, I get my news from Tumblr (also from Twitter, and very occasionally Facebook, which I'll go into more detail on later), so I feel like I don't need to. Tumblr is more than just a hipster site run to give me access to faceless people in dresses and angsty text messages, it's my portal, however unconventional to the outside world.

Before I talk about TV usage, I should mention how I was raised with TV (or more precisely, how I wasn't). Growing up, the only TV station I was allowed to watch was the ABC, and the TV was turned off at 6pm. This might explain why today my tv average is so low.
The average response given by the JOUR1111 cohort to the question "How much tv do you watch most days (both broadcast and online)" was 1 - 2 hours (closely followed by 60+ minutes). I rounded this to 90 minutes per day when comparing my data. As you can see, my average viewing per day was significantly lower, at only a little over one hour of TV per day. I suspect this relates to how people get their news - 71% of the JOUR1111 cohort said that TV was one of the main sources of the news media they consume, so they would need to tune in more often to stay updated. As I've mentioned, I get my news online, or on the radio. The only 'tv' I watch is online, on ABC Iview, Where the ABC streams its shows for its online viewers. Thus, I don't get the updates, the news, the personalities (or the ads) that regular TV viewers get. I just get my show. I think that's a good thing.

My radio consumption is another area of media usage that is significantly lower than the cohort average. It would be lower still, but the radio is on when I work, which increases the time I spend listening to radio greatly. However there is one radio segment that I nearly always hear in the morning, when I'm on my way to uni, and that segment is Mornings, on 612. I listen to Mornings because it  presents me with interesting information, the morning news, and funky songs to sing along with, or listen to in bewilderment. And all this without the usual boring celebrity gossip, which unfortunately dominates the FM, commercial stations. And I am not alone in getting some of my news on air - 39%, over one third, of my cohort said the radio is one of the main ways they get their news. When my cohort - a young, hip and trendy generation of internet users - say that they listen/watch over 2 and a half hours of tv and radio per day, I think it is clear that 'old' media is not in the danger some fear it to be.

But now we come to the embarrassing graph:

I spend more than an hour longer on the internet, per day, than the average JOUR1111 student. And this figure was mapped when I was busy with assignments, this may not actually be my average. The other thing to keep in mind as I talk about my media usage is that I only spend about 7 minutes per day on Facebook.
Read that again: I spend about 7 minutes per day on Facebook.
So how do I manage to spend so long on the internet if I'm not doing the stereotypical 2 hours a day on Facebook? I have no idea.
When talking about the obscene amount of time I spend on the internet, I should first give you some background on my family:

• My mother makes her living on computers, creating websites and web indexes for companies, herself, etc.
• My father makes his living working IT for various big corporations.
• Counting working equipment only, we have 11 computers for a family of 5. One of my family members is only 9 years old and he has a computer and a laptop. That's how computer happy we are. We also have 3 tablets.
• So I grew up in an environment where getting all your information from the internet and spending the day on a computer was normal. As a child, I knew that I could make an entire living off the net.

 So it's understandable that I spend the majority of my time on a computer (on the internet): that's what I was raised with. I get my news, my interesting facts, my funny pictures, my personalities, my stories, my games and my friends on the internet, all without moving from my chair. And that convenience is incredible, even if at times I'm worryingly dependent on a stable wi-fi connection.


Now for a discussion of Facebook and Twitter.

I spend about a quarter of an hour on Facebook and Twitter combined, every day. Twitter I use primarily to skim through the news, as I follow organisations such as ABC Radio, Reuters News and  612 Brisbane. Obviously, tweets won't give me all the detail a proper, leisurely read through a newspaper would, but the hook is often enough to get me to click the link available and read the article in full. It also lets me check up on what my favourite people are doing (when I say favourite people I mean Stephen Fry, Spencer Howson, Bernadette Young, the few friends I have cool enough to use Twitter, the fake Queen and a few webcomic creators).

Again, this convenience is incredible, and is what helped make Twitter a great news and social networking site.

Facebook is a different story entirely - I only follow my friends (at this point in time I only have a 44 friends on Facebook) or people who's contact details I need. I didn't friend everyone in my graduating year of high school, or people I knew from primary school (although this didn't stop them trying to friend me). This means that my dashboard doesn't update often, so  I don't need to spend half an hour every day scrolling just to see what everyone's been up to over the past 12 hours. Also, I only joined Facebook 4 months ago. I've never been interested in it. The only thing I find it truly useful for, apart from keeping contact details and leaving messages for friends, is staying in touch with my relatives who are scattered across the country. And that's why it terrifies me when I see friends who have 376 'friends', and tell me, quite seriously, that they spend 2 hours a day on Facebook alone. I don't even spend that amount of time on Tumblr. That's really all I have to tweet on the subject of Facebook.

So to sum up: I am (close to) your typical uni student. I watch a lot of TV, I listen to the radio, I do things on the internet for long periods of time without a break the key is to delete your browsing history. What does this mean for journalism, if I'm to be a journalist in the future? Well, my guess is that TV and radio will be put on simmer for a time, giving the internet its chance in the limelight. I'm not saying that TV and radio will be forgotten - that's crazy, especially since we can access TV and radio through the internet, and the two mediums are continually adapting and fighting to stay relevant in an age when the news cycle is constantly accelerating. 

I am, however, worried about the long-term viability of newspapers. Newspapers sales are slowly but surely dropping. To combat this, news sellers are taking their content online - I've talked about some of the possible ramifications of this move in more depth in previous posts - and I'm sure this will be effective (to how great an extent I simply can't guess). But I will be sad to see the end of the great broadsheets in Newsagents (what will we call them then?), because there's nothing quite like holding a newspaper in your hands.