My Average Daily Media Consumption
For this blog post, I was tasked by my Misinformation and Society class to keep track of and reflect on my media consumption for a day with a focus on the information presented and its credibility.
7:30 am:
This morning, after I woke up and got out of bed, I started my day with some YouTube videos I have fallen behind on. The current video series I was watching is a Skyrim Let's Play by the Elise and Sam Channel. These videos are mostly for entertainment; however, they do like to make jokes and briefly talk about current events. In the three videos I watched this morning, they don't talk much about politics or current events. When there is, however, I always try my best and look into the things they're talking about, especially since they are both from and based in the UK, so I like to learn about the things they talk about that are specific to their culture.
12:45 pm:
Around lunch, I took a break from cleaning my apartment to eat and scroll through social media a little bit. I mainly use Instagram as my app of choice, and while I mostly follow and see art accounts on my feeds, the occasional pop culture or news posts slip through. The one that stuck out to me was this post by Bleacher Report. These posts have always been interesting to me as they are formatted very similarly to how traditional news agencies make their posts. This, for me and I'm sure many others, throws me off because it forces me to actually check and verify who it's from and what they are talking about. For this post specifically, as a member of the military, I found the coach's quote and thoughts quite funny and objectively false since a vast majority of us, even special operations forces, do in fact listen to all kinds of music while working out and training.
6:30 pm:
Most of my day was spent finishing up assignments I have due for work tomorrow, but I did take a break and scrolled through Threads when this post crossed my feed. Again, it is formatted in a way that communicates “news” to me, and it does have relevance to some current events. With situations like this, people are often quick to start rumors or frame statements in a way that makes people engage with the content. In an effort to check the claim in the post, I was able to find only one “traditional” article on the subject linked here from the Daily Wire. As I thought, the post takes the possibility to the extreme when, in actuality, T-Mobile has made no real decision as of the time of writing.
8:00 pm:
Lastly, because I use Firefox as my web browser, every time I open a new tab, I am presented with a collection of articles with topics ranging from politics to cooking tips. While I don’t often look through them, I did want to see what was presented to me this time. These four articles were displayed under the politics section. From left, article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4. While all four articles are from reputable news agencies and generally seen as trustworthy, it is always important to look out for any bias presented in the articles. After looking through them for a few minutes each, I did not notice any glaring issues, which was nice.
Reflecting on the day’s media, I have noticed a few things. First, thankfully, most of the media I consume isn’t based on clickbait or bad-faith journalism. With that being said, though, my Threads feed does seem to have the majority of that kind of content. While I don’t pay it much attention, it does catch my eye often, but I do try to be skeptical of the content and further look into the information, and then I would most of the other content I see throughout the day. On the whole, I consumed less media today since I just got back from traveling for work and did not have much time. This journal of examples does give a good snapshot of the content I could see on a daily basis. I think I would like to do this more often, as it helps me be more critical of the things I see and take in; perhaps it will also help me tailor my media consumption even more!
