Personal Media Use and Production Diary

Personal Media Use and Production Diary

Our challenge was to record our media usage over 10 days and analyse the patterns we have, and how they compare to those of our peers and then relate them back to Journalism and Mass Communication.

My total usage is summed up in the table below, and the pie chart displays what fraction of my total media usage time is spent on each type:

I spent most of my time listening to music on my iPod, then general searching on the Internet and then going on Facebook. This can be explained by the fact that music can be listened to whilst doing other things, in my case every time I am on my computer. I only use the radio and television sporadically, when I go home from college where I live, and do not have a television. It shows that I am definitely more reliant on new media, like the Internet, that I have to use it every day.

For this task, I decided to divide my findings into 3 questions, the first being:

1)     Do we use more Old Media or New Media?

Journalism is changing. It is moving from classic media types, like TV and newspapers and magazines and radio to new media- the Internet, social networking and blogs. So I have split my usage into Old Media usage and New Media usage, as seen in this chart.

It is obvious that I use New Media much more than Old Media. In the 10 days I logged my media use, I used New Media for 84% of my total time, and only 16% for Old Media. This shows what we have been learning so far; New Media is becoming much more popular than Old Media. The survey supports this nothion; 75.5% of my peers use the Internet between 1-4 hours a day (And I am right in the middle with 1.7 hours), but the majority of students only listen to the radio for less than an hour, and watch television 1-2 hours, or less than 1 hour.

Journalism is moving towards New Media, and journalism will have to adapt to the new ways. I used New Media every day, to connect with friends, do research and organise my plans. One of the reasons that New media, and especially the Internet, is so widely used, is because everything is posted online. We make plans with our friends on facebook and twitter, we look at movie times and public transport on Google, even our lecturers and tutors refer us to the World Wide Web for any questions or resources. It is all there! Why would people find a few different, expensive sources, such as newspapers and magazines when all the information is available at the click and a scroll of our mouse? New Media is easy, it is accessible and it is more “fun” for the younger generations to use.

Now that we’ve established that the Internet is used most:

2)      What do we use the Internet for?

I use the Internet mostly for researching or watching things, with minimal publishing and production. This differs from my cohort, as the survey showed that 10% twitter, 32.4% blog on a regular basis. This reaffirms the notion that Web 2.0 is about “prod-users”. Our generation get their information from the Internet, and then repost it or rewrite that information in their own terms. The blogging results might be a little bit inflated because of our compulsory blog, but the results still confirm that mass communication is incredibly important in our daily lives.

Lastly, I want to investigate how we, as Journalism students, get news:

3)      Where do we get our news from?

The survey results show:

The survey showed that most people get their news from TV, online newspapers and then actualy newspapers. The surprising result was that 48.4% of my peers get their news from facebook. I find this strange, because there is not really a respected news platform on facebook, it is all secondary information from other people, mixed with their opinions. This is another verification that we are increasingly using new media sources to get our news, therefore Journalism will need to move to online resources. I however, got all my news from mainly newspapers and also online newspapers. This is mostly because I do not have a television accessible, and enjoy reading a hard copy of news. But even I think that it is much easier to read online news.

Conclusion:

I was extremely surprised at how reliant I actually was on media. Keeping a log of my time spent on each different media platform made it obvious how much time I actually spent. When I woke up in the morning, I immediately felt the need to check my facebook and email. I listened to music most of the day. A very small portion of my time was actually spent on reading news or important information. It is clear that new media is used much more than old media and Journalism is moving in that direction as well.