Media Use Diary: An Analysis

A record was kept over a period of ten days of my media use (both content access and generation, media both old and new), below is an analysis of that information in regards to the usage or my peers in JOUR1111 and Journalism and Communication, and Journalism as a field of endeavour.

MEDIA USE AS A TABLE:

New Media use was recorded in the fifteen categories polled in the Introduction to Journalism and Communication student survey. This method was chosen as it provided the most easily analysed set of data (as peer group comparison is can be done using exact data parallels). For the sake of ease, daily data will be rounded to the nearest 15 minutes. NEW MEDIA SOCIAL NETWORKING DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY AVERAGE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 FACEBOOK 2 2.25 1.25 2 2 1.5 2.75 2.25 2.5 1.75 2.025 TWITTER 0 0.75 0.25 0 1 0 0.25 0 1.25 2.75 0 0 0.5 0.25 0.5 0.75 0 0 1 0 0 0 1.5 2.5 0 0 1.25 0.5 1 1 0.5 0 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1.75 0 0 1.5 0 0 0 1.25 0 0 0 0 0 0.5 1.5 0.5 0 1.25 0 0.25 0 1.75 0 0 0 0 0.25 1.25 0.75 0.5 0 0.5 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0.75 0.5 0.25 0.5 1 0 0.5 0 0 0 1.5 0 0 0 0.5 0 0.5 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0.25 0 1 0.5 0 1.5 0 0.25 0 1.75 0 0 0 0.75 0.5 0.55 0.9 0.375 0 1.125 0 0.075 0 1.4 0.525 0 0 0.625 0.275

READING/WRITING BLOGS EMAILING SKYPE (I.M./VIDEO CHAT PROGRAMS) ONLINE NEWS GENERAL SURFING BANKING SHOPPING STUDY/RESEARCH PLAYING ONLINE GAMES STREAMED RADIO PODCASTING STREAMED A.V. DOWNLOADING ENTERTAINMENT OLD MEDIA TELEVISION RADIO BOOKS PRINT MEDIA (NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES) MUSIC AND AUDIO

DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY DAY 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1.75 2 1 0 0 0.5 0.25 1 2 1.5 1 0.25 1.75 0.5 0 1 0.75 0 1.25 0.5 0 1.75 0.25 0.5 1.5 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0.25 1.75 1.25 0.5 1.25 0.25 0 1 0.5 0.275 0.7 0.55

3.5

3.75

4.25

3.75

3.25

3.5

4.5

3.5

3.8

MEDIA USE AS A PROPORTION:

Here my media use over the 10 day period as a proportion. From this it is clear that the activities of Facebook and Music and Audio are the most common media activities. In this the red line represents the divide between old and new media, with new media being far more prevalent at 55% of total time.

Facebook Twitter Reading/Writing Blogs Emailing Online News Banking Study/Research Playing Online Games Streamed A.V. Downloading Entertainment Television Radio Books Print Media (Newspapers and Magazines) Music and Audio

The results for the first two days show time spent playing online LAN games, however from the 3rd day onwards no such results are recorded. I stopped playing LAN games on that day to focus on my studies so its presence influences the consistency of the results, however it has been kept in the survey as it provides a more accurate representation of my media use on a grander scale. As I spent some of my time on the holidays and earlier this Semester playing LAN games and so I thought it prudent to include results that represent this in some way. This information cannot be taken as a face value, the way I use media and the multi-task nature of new media create situations in which my media use is multi-layered. It is often the case that I will engage in two or more activities at one time, I chose to record all the activities participated in, so as to give better comparability. However, it will appear as though I spend almost 8 hours a day on the internet and 6 hours engaging in other activities, which is a gross over-estimation.

That is why I chose to include a measure of 'time spent on the internet' as a separate record, as below: DAY 1 6.5 DAY 2 7 DAY 3 3.75 DAY 4 5.25 DAY 5 4.5 DAY 6 4 DAY 7 4.25 DAY 8 5.5 DAY 9 4.25 DAY 10 4.75 AVERAGE 5

INTERNET USE

Old media is difficult to categorise in this regard, as when I'm travelling to and from University, work and almost any other event I will listen to music; when I am on Facebook or another form of recreational non-audio media I will listen to music, this result in an very high statistic for it. It is therefore best to consider much of music as a 'double-up.'

PEER GROUP COMPARISON:

Using the result of the media use survey students of Introduction to Journalism and Communication, my use can be compared to the cohort so as to gain some understanding of where I stand in my age group. I consider the result to be analogous to my age group (for these purposes 17-20), as it represents 88.5% of the survey results, and so holds almost total control over the results.

Facebook Twitter Reading blogs Emailing Skype Reading online news General surfing and browsing Banking Shopping Studying and Research Playing LAN games Listening to music from streamed radio Downloading podcasts Watching streamed TV programs Downloading entertainment

The cohort's response is in many ways very similar to my own, most obviously it ranks Facebook on the as the most popular as well, but there are also some notable differences. For example the categories of 'General surfing and browsing' and 'Shopping' rank highly in the cohort's response, but are entirely absent from my own. This is due to the nature of my personal media use, I tend to adopt a policy of 'look and leave' accessing the material I need to access and then retiring to Facebook or removing myself from the internet entirely. This policy helps me manage my time more effectively, although I do tend to get lost on Facebook. Old media use can be compared in more depth than new media as the survey polled on the specific nature of the participant's media use.

In relation to Television, I fall into much the same category as the rest of my peers, spending about 1 hour a day on it. This is due to the ease at which I can access entertainment and news on the internet, TV's scheduled nature constricts this and so makes it less appealing as an outlet. I spend virtually no time listening to radio on the average day, if I do it is only incidentally when I am in someone else's car. Again I am very much in line with my peers here and it is for much the same reasons as TV, anything a radio set can do, my computer can do better or at least that is what I've found. My access to music has already been alluded to but it is similar to the cohort's yet again. I listen to my iPod whilst travelling alone, which is my predominate travelling status and when on the internet or doing work on the computer, I will listen to it then. I do differ slightly from the cohort in that I listen to more music on the computer than I do on my iPod, however due to the sheer amount of travelling I do listen to the difference is minimal. My social media use had changed since I filled out the survey, and it likely has for many of my peers in JOUR1111. I still only have one facebook account, but my use of Twitter and blogs have greatly changed. Before I started this course I had no Twitter accounts, now I have two; the first I use to keep tabs on the activities of JOUR1111 as do we all, the second I created using the Economist's top Twitter feeds of 2012, an article I highly recommend. This second account has come to be my primary source of news, I will check it at least once a day it will provide many stories of international significance and interest. My 'news' Twitter feed has overtaken TV and newspapers as my typical sources of news for a few reasons. First among them is its high customisability, I can tailor my feed to news sources I am genuinely interested in as opposed to newspapers and TV which provide a wide variety of news with virtually no choice involved, save accessing or not accessing. This customisability also allows me to identify the kind of story I am likely to be accessing by the nature of the source which can speed up specified browsing greatly. The final and perhaps the most talked about element of Twitter that sets it about old media news sources for me is the immediate access to stories as they are released, often hours after the event they are documenting, Al Jazeera is especially good in this regard. My peers in JOUR1111answered that they accessed news from the TV and online news sources more than other kinds of media outlets, which I can say would have held true for me at the time of the survey, and since my time in JOUR1111 I have become more dextrous in my reading of the news, as I can only assume my peers have done as well. In relation to blogs, my behaviour has obviously changed. Before the course began I did not access blogs almost as a rule due to my lack of understanding and interest. After having been required to start

my own blog for the subject I have gained a new appreciation of them. I will now spend around an hours a day reading blogs, Huffington Post and Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog in particular. I find the media source to my excellent for features and opinion pieces. The cohort's use of blogs mirrors my own before the course in many respects, showing perhaps a greater interest in the media form.

CONCLUSIONS:
In my time in JOUR1111 my average media use has changed and the Hugh who filled out the survey would be a very different media consumer to the Hugh who wrote this diary. Through my use of Twitter and Blogs I have gained a new interest in Journalism as a craft and source of entertainment and hope that that interest is sustained into the future.