Im glad that I had the opportunity to do this project because media is so intertwined with our everyday experience that it’s challenging to break down just how much of it we interact with on a daily basis. I downloaded the moment app to start to gauge one large source of my media in take. I learned that I’m on my phone for an average of 2 hours and 17 minutes a day. I also learned I pick up my phone about 115 a day. I wasn’t able to see my most used apps yet since I only downloaded the app a couple days into this project. I’ve been trying to pay attention to what I look at while I use it. I broke it down to mostly email, instagram, texting, and depop (a clothing app). It scares me that amount of advertisements that I consume on both my phone and in person. There are so many floating through that I have almost become numb to it. This project posed me to think more about why the average person will watch television or zone out on their phone to “wind down” after going through their day or working, because if you think about it we are already so overstimulated and exposed to so much media that it’s pretty weird we would want to soothe this by plugging in to more feeds, ads, and shows. It gets pretty overwhelming to actually think about the amount of things that I’m consuming and how much of it is actually of substance since so much of it is selling something or pushing something, but this project has pushed me to think more about how I go about my day, how I track what I’m doing, break down my time, and also forced me to pose a lot of questions about media in general.
Media Diary Reflection – Sophia Rooney