My Media Diet

My Media Diet

Your media diet can say a lot about you, for example, about your society and culture, where you come from, and your ideology.  It can be representative of your peer group, what you do in life, etc. It can also offer a glimpse into your personality.  Here is a look into my daily media consumption for five days:

Wednesday, 04 May

Internet-3 hrs (what’s new on my favorite shopping websites-net-a-porter, shopbop, singer22, gilt, Saks, barney’s; news-salon, nytimes; blogs-terrysdiary, perezhilton; Camino)  

Facebook-4 hrs

Phone-4 hrs (emails, texting friends/family, phone calls-usually my mother, facebook)

Movie-2 hrs (streaming Netflix-something from drama or psychological thriller genre)

Thursday, 05 May

Internet-4 hrs (online window shopping, news, blogs)

Facebook-3 hrs

Phone-3 hrs (texting, calls, games)

TV-2 hrs (Gossip Girl on cwtv.com)

Friday, 06 May

Internet-3-4 hrs

Facebook-3 hrs

Phone-2.5 hrs

Saturday, 07 May

Internet-2 hrs

Facebook-2 hrs

Phone-5 hrs 

Sunday, 08 May

Internet-4 hrs

Facebook-3 hrs

Phone-2.5 hrs

Movie-2 hrs

My daily media consumption is pretty regimented.  The first thing I do every morning, the way someone might sit down with the paper over morning coffee, is check my favorite online shopping sites to see what’s new.  Then throughout the day I am on my blackberry, regularly checking email and Facebook, responding to messages, updating my status, or commenting on friends’ walls and pictures.  Other than for email and Facebook, I use my blackberry to call or text.  I’m not the type of person who downloads and uses all sorts of apps on my smartphone.  The most sophisticated activities I’ll perform on my phone is use the browser to Google things, or check my bank statements, or from time to time read an article or two.  The only app I really use on my phone is ATT Navigator, which is actually a pretty crappy service.  Also throughout the day, I use the Internet for school related work, with plenty of facebook breaks.  In the evenings, I use the Internet to catch up with news, gossip, and art on my favorite sites.  Other than that, I pretty regularly stream movies on Netflix, and I am a bookworm when it comes to novels, although that is not conveyed too well this particular week.  I think my media consumption says a lot about me, and where I come from.  I would say that my media diet is comparable to others my age, but probably not so suggestive of American society.  I don’t have multiple social media outlets, which I believe is pretty common.  It’s quite common for people to have at least a facebook and twitter, and even at least one other social networking page.  So far, I have stuck with facebook, and I use it quite a bit.  I spend a lot of time shopping online, and I think this says something about my interest in clothes and fashion, and also something about where I come from.  Although the Bay Area has a lot of options when it comes to shopping, with Union Square in San Francisco being famous as a hub for fashion consumerism, it is no LA or New York City.  Therefore, many of us are left shopping online. Perhaps this also says something about the type of consumer I am.  My media diet in terms of the kind of news I like to read shows that I lean quite far to the left politically.  I also avidly digest entertainment news. I think unlike many young Americans my age, I live on my phone, constantly texting and facebooking throughout the day.  I noticed that my media consumption decreased over the weekend, perhaps because I am actually interacting with friends face to face on these days and am out and about, as opposed to holed up in the library or in my room with my computer.  The one thing I’d like to change about my media consumption is the amount of time I spend staring at screens, which should be a growing health concern in general.   I have found that our generation has postural problems from spending hours hunched over laptops and computers, and who knows what all that screen time is doing to our eyesight.