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Spring Breaking My Media Usage

I decided to track my media interactions for the week of spring break. It was not hard at all as I do not watch television as it is always being used by one of my 7 other family members, I do not listen to radio because it is always playing uninteresting music and shows on most stations, and being that it was spring break I did not use a computer as I wanted nothing to remind me of school for the week.

Instead I used my phone (as I always have) for everything. I have both the Hulu and the Netflix and those apps keep me entertained with my favorite animes such as “My Hero Academia”, “Attack on Titan”, and “One Punch Man”. My phone also works as my radio as I play my favorite music from the spotify app in the car, as well as my favorite podcast from Apple's podcast app. Podcast such as “Chapo Trap House”, “Opening Arguments”, And “Last Podcast on The Left”. My phone also works as my news source as I use the youtube app to watch my favorite political shows such as the David Pakman Show, the Majority Report with Sam Seder, and the Young Turks. Twitter also helps me stay on top about what is going on in the world since if there is anything noteworthy people will soon start tweeting about it giving their opinion on the subject. Twitter is also where I go for laughs as there is always something funny like a political pundit getting dunked on for being an all around bad person, or a tweet about a funny experience in someone’s life.

Being that it was spring break week and there also was a Rock-a-Billy Convention where I work, this week’s media usage was very different to most weeks. I was booked for 10 hour shifts everyday, and most of my freetime I spent sleeping in as I was terribly tired from the amount of work I had to do all day.

Thanks to my phone itself having a feature called “Screen Time” I have a far more detailed graph about exactly what I spent doing on my phone for spring break. According to the graph I spent 38 hours and 12 minutes using my phone for the entire week, averaging out at 5 hours and 27 minutes per day. 16 hours and 36 minutes of that were spent social networking, 13 hours and 47 minutes were spent on entertainment, and only 52 minutes of the entire week were spent on productivity.

To me this does say a lot, in fact it is quite shocking. I have always tried to make my time on the phone as productive as possible. When I started college all of my papers would mostly be written on the google docs app, in fact part of this paper is written on that app. And before that I had an instagram account that essentially worked as a blog in which I wrote my thoughts about various topics, which now I know did in fact help with strengthening my writing and learning as a joint study between University of California, Berkeley and a company named Digital Learning found after interviewing and observing 800 teenagers and young adults that some of them used the opportunities created by social media to explore their interests and become as educated or talented in a subject as they can possibly be, no longer held back by the rigid learning systems of a school (M. Ito and H. Horst 2008).

I do concede that I have strayed away from an academic mindset and have become vested in watching all the sitcoms I always thought were a waste of time. In the last few months I have seen all seasons of “the Office”, all seasons of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”, and all seasons of “Community”. A Syracuse University study by researcher Lesley Pena does point to binge watching giving the viewer escape gratification in a much better way than moderate watching of a series does (Pena 2015) so this may be part of the reason I started using my phone more for entertainment for than for academic purposes as it helped distract me from all the bad things going on with my life.

Having said that, I really do think my phone has been more so a force for good in my life than bad, while older people are claiming it is making the younger generation more depressed, there really is not any evidence to support that notion. A study concerning 190 adolescents of an average age of 18.9 found that there actually was no link between social media usage and clinical depression (Jelenchick 2013). Still people will links these things together, partly I do believe it is fear, not just of new things, but fear of what we can do with this. We can organize protests, warn people about something that is going to happen, and get people fired from their jobs for being heinous people. This does not sit well with older people so they will seek to make social media seem to be the worst thing possible.

Given all these thoughts on my media usage it may seem like what I should do next is cut down on the use of it, but I do not think that is the best course of action. Instead using my time more productively should be a priority for me. I do everything on my phone, it allows me to finish assignments from anywhere, learn something new everyday, and better myself at a hobby in a matter of minutes just based on what I use it for.

Work Cited

Ito, M., & Horst, H. (2008, November). Living and Learning with New Media: Summary ... Retrieved April 23, 2019, from http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf

Jelenchick, L. A. (2013, January). “Facebook Depression?” Social Networking Site Use and Depression in Older Adolescents. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from http://lp7lc5er8n.scholar.serialssolutions.com/?sid=google&auinit=LA&aulast=Jelenchick&atitle=“Facebook depression?” Social networking site use and depression in older adolescents&id=doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2012.05.008&title=Journal of adolescent health&volume=52&issue=1&date=2013&spage=128&issn=1054-139X

Pena, L. L. (2015, June). Breaking Binge: Exploring The Effects Of Binge Watching On Television Viewer Reception. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1283&context=etd