The social media journal was for me quite confronting. Before our discussion on media in the first class I had always referred to ‘it’ as mass media which encased for me everything online/print ads/social media etc. However as the discussion unrolled I quickly realized that Media was a form of communication that really was quite literally unavoidable. Working out how to break down my media journal into sub-categories I saw that there’s a lot of conscious media consumption and a lot of subconscious (or unconscious) consumption of media in our everyday lives.

Sitting down at the end of the day and actually calculating my interaction with these different forms of media was \eye opening and I definitely felt more conscious the following days about what and how much I was consuming.  After calculating my total media usage per day I was shocked to find that almost half of my day is spent consuming media whether I’m aware of it or not. I guess after discovering media is everywhere you could even argue that I was constantly privy to it, and probably am but for me I focused on calculating my media consumption based on four categories. Social media, Internet media, print media, and unconscious media were my four categories and I was again surprised to find that my Internet and unconscious media consumption were two of the highest categories.

I was definitely expecting social media to be a bigger contributor, however in saying that I have also found the interconnections between all of these medias as they act as platforms off each other. For example my internet (laptop) consumption also involved social media notifications and so forth, so are we ever really shut out from the media? Is our whole world just a mass media in itself?