Media consumption diary: a 24-hour personal analysis

Media

In a one day diary of media consumption, it becomes evident that many of my interactions with the world are via media. I receive most of my information through media forms as well. Even when relaxing, media is something that drives the process. There is also a lot of passive consumption of media in my daily life. My media consumption will be analyzed through the lens of different media theories.

Turow

Turow argues that media and advertisers have become exceptionally adept since the 1970s at understanding audiences, their consumption patterns, and how to exploit these. For our part as audience, we have much less understanding of our own consumption patterns. This exercise was the first time that I had really given thought to my daily media exposure, only to realize that my use of media is constant, throughout the day, and sometimes very passive. I used media forms as intermediary between myself and my friends, but also between myself and the world.

The journal was particularly insightful with respect to the passive media consumption. For example when I listened to the public radio, I had no idea what I was going to be exposed to, so I learned a few bits of information that I had not intended to learn. The same occurred when I went to watch the game. There were multiple screens, so I was exposed to programming that was in the background, like the Baseball shows by Ken Burns. I had not sought out that programming, but was exposed to it through my environment.

Turow notes that media starts to dictate lifestyle. One's choice in media reflects and determines lifestyle; the two are difficult to separate. In my 24-hour period, I consumed media from left wing and right wing sources, and it is easy to see how consumption of media exclusively from one source or another would have a profound influence on one's worldview, because many media forms are trying to sell you something. If not a product, then they are selling you an idea or a lifestyle, as Turow notes. When you become a consumer of a given lifestyle, today there is typically enough of that culture to consume that you can easily become segregated into that lifestyle. I listened to a Rush Limbaugh rant, and I watched a basketball game. If I wanted, I could listen to right wing rants all day and all night; if I wanted I could consume sports 24 hours a day as well. Thus, it is easy to have an entire lifestyle built around specific media products. This represents a significant change from Turow's description of how media used to be consumed, and it represents an attempt to polarize America by splitting people into easily-defined consumption groups.

Social Networking

Fenton (n.d.) describes how we are becoming networked through media, and I found this as well. I was able to utilize fairly direct channels -- phone calls, texts and emails -- to communicate directly with my friends. But even these channels are typically tied into advertisers. For example, Yahoo email is used. Yahoo gathers information about me, and to them I am a captive audience that they can sell things to. But my interactions with the rest of the world were governed even more strongly by networks. When a lifestyle is created, that opens the door to network with other people in that community. But that of itself is a form of self-selection that results in a limited scope of people with whom I would interact. I can relate to people on the basis of having consumed the same media, rather than on the basis of who they are. So that is a strange dynamic that arises from having most of my interactions with the world defined by media consumption.

Interaction with the Media

For most of human history, we did not have such intense media interaction. McLuhan argued that in his time fifty years ago, we were still adjusting to the electric age, wherein we continued to view the world through the pre-electric lens, even though we were consuming ever-increasing amounts of media. Television was still relatively new back then. Today, his prophesy still holds. We might have adjusted the way that we think to the television age, but as Turow (1997) points out, marketers have moved far beyond that. My daily interaction with the media was near-constant, and when different media forms informed my interactions with the world, it becomes clear that thinking in older paradigms is not going to explain anything. Our understanding of our interactions with media has not kept up with the way that the media understands its interactions with us. We are guided by marketers into this silos, where the media we consume defines us, and where we tend to interact only within the framework of these silos. Yet we still tend to view the media in a more generalized sense. We see ourselves as being distinct from the media we consume, as though we can just choose to stop our consumption any time we want.