Personal Media Use and Production Diary

Initial Diary (in minutes)

*Number of texts sent and received. NOT represented in minutes.

Graph Demonstrating Media Usage

The Social Networks
Facebook and Twitter

Facebook, for me, is purely for social interaction. Last year, I lived in Germany for a year on exchange and now, if I want to chat to someone I met last year, Facebook is the easiest method. I'm able to stay in contact with my friends and see what that have been doing by browsing photos that they have uploaded, reading statuses and posting and commenting on their activities. It's incredibly useful, easily accessible and, best of all, free. I wouldn't say that I spend a spectacular amount of time on Facebook, especially considering a lot of people I know, but I'm definitely guilty of checking my notifications several times a day.
When I checked the survey our class participated in and saw this:

I admit that I was shocked. Not because 97.2% of our cohort had a Facebook account, but because 2.8% didn't. I managed to get this idea into my head that everybody on the planet has a Facebook. When I thought about it, I did slap myself in the head a bit for being so ignorant. Hopefully the influence of Facebook will die down a bit within years to come, before all our fingers are glued to out keypads.

The main purpose of Facebook is definitely not news. I do occasionally read online articles through Facebook when a link is shown in my News Feed, but the majority of articles usually date back a few years and have only popped up on my home screen because someone has read it and thought it either amusing or interesting and has decided to post it. It's not the greatest place for keeping up with current affairs and I would therefore not count it as one of my news sources.

 I had never used Twitter before JOUR1111. I was unfamiliar with #hashtags and Retweeting. In fact, I was in exactly the same position as over 70% of our cohort:

I set upmy account in my first tutorial, got used to it, played around with it a little bit and slowly started to get attached. You can actually see in my media diary that as those 10 days progressed, I was logged in for a little bit longer each day. I never saw the point of Twitter before this course but, almost immediately after signing up, I started to see the benefits. Thanks to the thousands upon thousands of worldwide news feeds, I have managed to stay connected not only to my friends but to the rest of the world. News feeds all get updated on a regular basis so you always get that constant flow of information. Twitter has definitely become one of my main sources of News. It may not always be detailed or opinionated, but it helps me with staying current in regards to worldwide news.

The Visuals
YouTube, Television and Broadcast News

Visual media outlets take up a big part of my daily media usage. YouTube, like Facebook, is an outlet that I use everyday. Most of the videos I watch tend to lean towards the comedic genre, but I also watch a lot of celebrity interviews, snippets from TV shows and movie trailers. I would have to say that YouTube is one of my main sources of information. After I search something on Google, I search it on YouTube. I find that it offers a very wide range of opinions, as videos can be posted from anybody with access to a computer. When watching a video that describes an issue from one point of view, there will almost always be contradictory comments underneath from other users. Are these opinions biased? Most definitely. But it's one of the easiest ways to discover the general viewpoint of the public and also a way to link to other information.

I rarely turn on the TV. If I want to watch a particular television show, I choose to watch it online because of two simple reasons:

1. No ad-breaks.
2. I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want.

I've been trying, because of JOUR1111, to keep up with the news, and so I try to watch the news a few times a week. As you can see from my table, I only managed to watch it three times.
Obviously, broadcast news is easily available and an easy way to keep track of current affairs, but I find that I can barely sit through one news segment, let alone five or six. I think it's because when I watch the news on television, I don't choose what I see. Whereas with online news and newspapers, I decide what I want to read, how long I want to spend reading it and if it's worth looking into in more detail.

On the other hand, I watch an exceeding amount of online shows. I didn't realize before I had this diary, but now I see that I can watch up to three hours of shows in one day and, for me, I think it's a little too much. I see that I'm not entirely alone in this:

Due to the wide range of shows available through the internet, I'm honestly not surprised at the amount of time our generation can spend watching TV. The shows that I watch, however, are all fiction. Their sole purpose, for me, is entertainment. They neither help me with university nor inform me on any news whatsoever.





The Online Informants
blogger.com and Online News

The only time I ever attempted to start a blog before JOUR1111, was last year, when I went to Germany. I managed to post twice: once in my fifth week and the second time the day after, correcting my original post.  Now that it's part of my assessment, I've been trying to post at least twice a week, but it's hard. I realize the importance of publishing your work, and so I try to get inspiration by looking at other blogs and therefore spending time browsing through different blogs. I don't, however, check news blogs. I know that they are available, I even know the names to a few of them but, for me, blogs are not the best way to keep up with news. The people who write blogs are generally untrained and biased. They are the people who have very strong opinions and need to be heard. Of course, there are bound to be blogs out there that are accurate and well written, but I prefer not to trust any of them. The way I see it, if you have access to a blog, you have access to the internet. If you have access to the internet, you therefore have access to online news, which much more accurate and informative than blogs.

Online News is definitely one of the main places I get my information. Because I follow so many different news channels on Twitter, they always link me to articles that I'm interested in. I find it the easiest manner in which I can get informed, as well as the fastest. If I were looking for a news story on a particular subject, I could just type the subject into Google, add 'news article' on the end, and in a matter of seconds: BAM! there are 23486348 results.


The Readers
Newspapers, magazines and general reading

I don't read the newspaper often, but when I do, I read it all the way through. At the cafe that I work, we get The Courier Mail every day and, when we have a slow day, I have time to sit at a table and read the whole thing through. It may seem to some people that newspapers are outdated, yet a surprising amount of JOUR1111 students still read the paper:

Although it's not the most popular media device, over 50% of our cohort still read the newspaper.I find that it's one of the only places where you can get information on everything from politics to sport and from real estate to holiday deals, so it's very useful for a general knowledge of current events. I find that when I read the newspaper I skip over a lot of the talk of politics and I don't think I could read a sports article all the way through due to a plain lack of interest.

As well as the newspaper, we also have a large amount of magazines at the the Cafe. However, because of the type of people that come into the store, the only magazines we have on offer are of two genres: celebrity gossip and motorcycles. As I'm not really keen on bikes, I always end up reading the celebrity magazines, in particular: OK! Famous, Who, Grazia and Women's Day. They don't particularly help with events other than celebrity scandals, but in regards to entertainment, I can confidently say that I am (almost) fully informed.

I also read a lot of fiction books. Before I started at UQ, I found that I could read up to five books a week. Now, with my work load and the amount of study I try to get in, I only read about one book a week. Although I may read a lot, the books I tend to lean towards have little to nothing to do with anything current in the world. There are few with themes that are very present in today's society, but nothing directly relating to recent events.




The Communicators
Skype, email, texts and calls


Texting, calling and emailing are things I do pretty much everyday. It's the easiest method of communication and I therefore use it to organize things with friends, ask them a question or even just for a chat. I use Skype at least once a fortnight, since most of my friends live thousands of kilometers away from me. I am the proud owner of a smart phone, and I can therefore do all four of these things from my mobile.

Only 22.7% of our cohort didn't have an internet-enabled smart phone. It's getting easier and easier to stay connected with people all over the world.
Since news can spread easily though word-of-mouth, phones and emailing are a great way to hear about news. Assuming, that is, that your friends also pay attention to what's going on in the world. But other than that one little factor, these four methods of communication have little to do with journalism.




All Together Now
Quick summary of main points

• My main news sources are online news, Twitter and the newspaper
• I joined Blogger and Twitter for the first time after starting JOUR1111
• Facebook is mainly used to stay connected with friends, not news
• Blogs are good for publishing my work, but cannot be trusted for news because of biased writers
• I watch more shows online than on television
• I like reading newspapers for a broad view on today's world
• Skype, emails, texts and calls are mostly used for communication, and have little to do with journalism