Personal Media Intake Analysis

            I fear that this post, which is supposed to be multimedia, may end up being a bit monochromatic. I wanted to achieve so many things, like camera movements or a sound spike; but no matter, onward is the only way. Something that should be noted before this comes into full swing is, I don’t own a connection to any television. I have a TV, but it is relegated to DVD viewing and a partial connection to Netflix and Hulu. So a rather active medium has been done away with almost entirely from my life. Anyway, onto the rest.

            During my analysis and gathering, a couple of things about my media intake caught my focus. First was, because of the lack of TV, a great deal of my media intake has gravitated over to digital/internet media. The second part that I began to consider, upon recollection, is that I tend to gravitate towards literary type of media in the day (this includes things like blogs) but as the day goes on, especially towards the evening, I start to key in on video/audio media. It is these two things that I want to primarily cover in my analysis. These particular recollections are what I want to spend the balance of my analysis upon.

             To tell a little about my day of analysis, the first thing I did, after being initially awakened by my alarm was to lay in bed for a minute. While this activity doesn’t include any media, I greatly appreciate the silence and the kind of drifting between sleep and awake. I feel as if this time is where I get to prepare for the day and much of the chaos that follows. But, once I have woken up the first bit of media I encountered was using the internet to log onto a news website and begin reading about various news articles. While I generally try to stick to news or scholastic pursuits I am a habitual social media user, particularly email and Facebook. But for the most part I was content to spend a while reading some news articles and discussive blog posts by Eric Samuelson. I believe that I prefer engaging this type of media because there is a specific subject which I can think on and try to engage with through the media.

            After that I switched over to a textbook that I was reading for a class, but at the same time, and in the same book, I was flipping through pages and enjoying cherry-picking information during small interludes of my assigned reading. I have come to the realization that I am a person who likes a singular intake of media. Unlike the MIT students from Digital Nation I cannot flit amongst media, I prefer to follow a single train of thought. While this doesn’t mean that I am immune to flights of digressive thought, I prefer to finish the digression before returning to the primary focus that I was previously attending to. And I have found that if there is a great deal of media happening around me I have a sensory overload that affects how I act and greatly disables my ability to rationalize trains of thought. After some reading I had to drive my wife to work and then returned home to finish reading and a large portion of my day was spent reading, either online or in text, scholastically or recreationally.

             The great change with this came when I had to go to a film class, watch films, and then analyze them. After this point, I returned home and then the media I engaged was audio/visual. I listened to music while I performed chores, my spouse and I gathered together to watch a particular program on Netflix for a period of time. And now as I work on my homework I find myself taking extended breaks to listen to music or to watch short snippets of video (this includes film trailers that I enjoy or scenes from particular films).

            I want to try and figure out why my media intake makes this marked change throughout the day. And thinking about it, I have a feeling that it is tied to the loss of a branch of media and my media intake is a way to try and compensate for its absence. I think that the focus on printed/literary media early on is because I have energy to make this medium the focal point of my attention. Another thing about this practice is, I feel that in print a great deal more depth can be revealed about a subject than in television programming. I believe that I understood more about a particular issue because it was in printed media because the ad space was one the same page, but I could more easily tune it out than, say, a television commercial which might interrupt a news story.

            But how does this all lead to the sudden shift in media intake later on in the day? I feel the energy and restraint to prevent myself from escaping the advertisements, or from going onto a long trail of digressive meandering, means that later on I get lazy. I think that laziness is what help brings about the shift in focus, because I find it much easier to dissect and analyze video and audio media than print. With printed media, especially from the internet, a person can get obsessed with trying to cover an issue from numerous angles and depths and trying to keep track of the intricacies involved can become a chore. However, when I am watching a trailer for The Tree of Life, I know that the trailer is supposed to get me to want to see the movie for economic reasons. But having already seen the film, and liking it a great deal, I am able to take a great deal of pleasure in not analytical engagement and enjoy the music and the moving images. It is this realization that causes me some consternation because this pertains to many of the issues discussed in Media Literacy Education, in particular, the critical and analytic consumption of media in order to create a more media literate individual overall.