A #RudeAwakening

As a journalism student, I hoped that logging my media consumption would reveal that I mostly just use my phone to look at the news and rarely resort to social media for entertainment. 

I was wrong.

I will say that because my friends were visiting from Texas, I was on my phone less often and consuming less media in general. However, looking at my log, I see that no matter how many fun and exciting things I have going on, I still resort to social media a lot to entertain me in my freetime, whether I have a couple hours or couple minutes. I realized that my media consumption habits show that it’s hard for me to sit and do nothing–I need constant stimulation, even if it’s to go to sleep. 

I do get up in the morning and read an article or two before getting ready for the day. I find that my phone notifications get me the most excited to catch up with the news, since the short, often punchy headlines get my attention. These notifications fulfill my news needs the most as they’re what I usually go to everyday to learn about what’s happening around me. Also, sometimes I won’t even read full articles and just skim over my 30 or so notifications to get a general sense of what’s going on in the world as that’s easier and more efficient than sitting and reading every article that they’re linked to. However, through this quick skim of the news, I know I miss a lot of details. There’s only so much educating that general tidbits of information can do.

I also consume quite a bit of news when I’m doing homework for my journalism classes. For example, for my Coding for Storytelling class, I had to find examples of interactive pieces that I admired and wanted to eventually imitate when doing my own coding projects. Naturally, this led me to read more articles and consume more news than I usually would. After reading and re-reading an interactive piece on women in music, I looked up the playlist that was attached to the article, proceeded to listen to it during every car ride that day, and look up some of the musicians on Instagram to learn even more about them and the issues they were discussing in the article. 

With that being said, I still spend most of my “media time” scrolling through Instagram (or other social media) and watching TV. Again, thinking back to this Saturday, whenever I had a free moment or was feeling a bit bored, my first thought was to pick up my phone or laptop and watch Netflix, scroll mindlessly on social media, post something, or watch a couple YouTube videos. Social media is something I’ve started associating with “fun” rather than the news, and so instead of doing something more active or productive when I have nothing to do, I just pick up a device and watch something or scroll through my various feeds. I liked to think that I was an outlier when it came to the whole point on young people being on social media all day, but this 24 hour period offered a rude awakening in showing me that I fit perfectly into that trend.