In one of my classes this semester, I had a homework assignment which consisted of tracking my media usage for 4 days in a row. I was really interested in this assignment because I was curious how much time I spend using media when I pay more attention to it. As the 4 days went on I tried my best to calculate my usage as accurate as possible, and by the end of the 4 days, I was quite shocked about how much of my day involves media, especially social media.
During those 4 days, I didn't want to try and change the number of times I picked up my phone and opened up social media apps, but rather I wanted to be more aware of how much I do. I noticed that pretty frequently I pick up my phone to scroll through all kinds of social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, FaceBook, and SnapChat. If I'm bored or want to take a break from homework, I tend to turn to social media apps. I'll just sit on my phone and scroll, even if I've seen all of the most frequent posts, I continue to scroll or keep refreshing the feeds. Having to pay close attention to my media choices made me realize how crazy it is that I could scroll through feeds for what seems like forever continuing to look at the same content as I frequently check each app.
Yes, a lot of my time on social media is active and involves interacting with friends, but when I'm bored I just scroll continuously until I switch to another social media platform and then do that same thing again. There are so many other productive and better things I could do than continue to scroll through feeds, like interact face to face with friends or be more productive than taking breaks to catch up on the social media I missed in the few hours I was doing homework. I'm really glad this assignment helped me conceptualize my social media use and find a want to change it. I do love to use social media because I can catch up with my friends from school and home, on pop culture, and the world around me, but I hate that I spend too much time checking and scrolling through the same sites too often.
Now that this assignment is over, and I learned a lot about my media use, I definitely want to make some changes to the way I go about my social media usage. I'm not going to get rid of it completely because I love how it lets us be so connected to friends, celebrities, and current events, but I want to try a get rid of the habit of scrolling mindlessly through social media when I'm bored. There are some many other things I can do for entertainment, and I should turn to those instead of being glued to my phone, continuously checking the same feeds over and over again waiting for new content to pop up.
