My Mediums for Mediating Media




This graph provides a slightly simplified look at the variety of media I used at different times of the day. There are clear spikes during both days of linked media use in the morning and evening, with less concurrent use occurring throughout the day. I liked how clearly the charts showed certain trends, though the full record is needed to get the whole picture as a result of how I recorded the data. It did not lend itself to too many simplified comparisons like that seen above. The infographic was made on piktochart.com.






I did this experiment while I was on vacation, so I do not know how representative it is of my everyday use. However, it still does show some interesting trends in my media usage. Before going into the study, I assumed my media usage would be relatively consistent throughout the day. However, both days showed large spikes in usage when I first wake up and prior to bed. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense as those are the two times I am least likely to be engaged in other activities. Looking back over my media usage, it seems that when I lack something else to immediately occupy my time, I reach for some sort of online media like texting, Facebook or the like. It was this last part that led to my assumption of a relatively stable usage throughout the day.

I also noticed that a lot of my media usage was parallel usage, where I was making use of several different types of media concurrently. The primary example in this small data set is the use of the phone to play games while using my computer to access Moodle or watch Netflix. Similarly, one thing, such as checking Facebook, typically started a cascade of accessing similar types of media. I could see this being a problem in the classroom if students are asked to access certain types of media for an assignment if they associate those with other things. For example, if students look at one social media site, they might shift over to others that they also make use of and lose focus on the initial task.

Creating a media ethnography for themselves might help students better understand their own media usage. It can really showcase how different media become connected in the mind through habit or ritual and could even help students moderate their own usage.

One potential way I thought to incorporate this sort of self study into an English class would be as a way to practice non-fiction creative writing such as an autobiography. Keeping a journal of their own daily activities and then going back to edit them into a essay format would create a narrow assignment that would let students focus on the form and not get lost in the content. If the class is a broader creative writing class, students could then take what they learned from their own media usage to craft realistic, relatable modern characters for a work of fiction. Media use is something that has begun to function almost as a constant background to modern life, and that is when things can begin to be overlooked when constructing a character or setting in a work of fiction.

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