My Media Diet

October 13:

SFGate.com: 30 minutes

Facebook: 30 minutes

October 14th:

Facebook: 30 minutes

October 15th:

Facebook: 2 hours

October 16th:

Facebook: 2 hours

Hulu.com: 1 hour

October 17th:

Facebook: 1 hour

Hulu: 2 hours

I didn't realize how narrow my internet use is, or how much it doesn't change. The week I recorded my internet use was when I was busy with a couple papers. I am also in a co-ed business fraternity and I've been busy with meetings and what not, so I feel that it's not a total representation of my media use, but it's close. Even writing this blog now, I have AIM in one window, three tab in Google Chrome (Facebook, Angel and wikipedia) and my last.fm application open in another window. I think my media diet is pretty average for a person my age. I am one of the billion facebook addicts, and since coming to college I've had to move to the internet to keep up with TV shows (thanks to hulu) and reading the news since I don't get a paper subscription.


Thinking more critically about my media diet, it just further reminds me of how much extra things and tasks we do on the internet. Google Chrome saves my passwords for a lot of these sites, so it's almost like muscle memory when I log online. I just have to type in one "f" for Facebook, and Google Chrome does the rest. If I want to open another tab, it shows me a list of my most visited sites, so I can pretty function online without having to think too hard- as scary and lame as that sounds. Everyone has their own internet routine and list of sites he or she visits everyday, and soon everything gets so monotonic, we look like zombies in front of laptop- just vacantly cycling through sites after sites.


I think this daily routine makes it hard for anyone to use their time online efficiently. Maybe it's just myself, but pretty much anytime I open my computer, I have the same cycle of actions. I check my email; I check the NPR newsfeed in my inbox to scan the headlines I most likely have some notification email from Facebook, so I soon log on to check, and then I get sucked into the site. I start scrolling down my newsfeed, cycle through friend's profiles, and soon move on to others, to the point I have no idea how I just lost an hour or so of my life. It's probably why I'm still at the library close to 12:30 AM now, just finishing up all of my homework.


Thinking to back when I was younger and how I spent all my time IM-ing friends on AIM, and now hearing my mom nag my younger sister about not doing her homework because she keeps spending time on Facebook, I wonder what's going to change as we move farther into the technological future. What other distractions are going to pop up? What new social networking fads will there be? All I know is that I'm sure it's going to take me twice as long to get any homework or studying done...

Technology and Social Interaction

With all the new ways of communication online, I think we have to find a balance between virtual and face-to-face communication. If you're only used to talking to someone online, you're going to have a difficult time meeting new people in the real world. There are so many little social cues and nuances that disappear when you're online. Sarcasm does not translate well through written text; I've tried numerous times and each interaction became super awkward.

When I was younger, I was a huge AOL Instant Messenger user (AIM). I would constantly use that medium to talk to my friends after school. I never was a big texting person because you had to condense your words into the small 140 character limit. With AIM, I could ramble as much as I wanted. I even think all my years IM-ing people has made me a faster typer. But because I met my friends first in person at school, talking online didn't affect my relationships with them. I've have noticed however the effects of simply talking with a person through email, IMs, Facebook etc. 

I had a best friend from elementary school that I used to talk to constantly. We were attached at the hip at school. We always spent the night at each other's houses every weekend, play dates after school, etc. She moved to Nevada in fourth grade, and we soon moved to communicating through phone calls and letters. Once we were older, we moved to emails, and then Myspace, then Facebook. We stuck with emails for a long time. She would write to me, then a week or so later I would write back, detailing everything that happened previously. It worked really well for a while, but then the emails became more spread out, replies took longer, then soon we only talked through Facebook. I still thought we were relatively close friends, maybe things changed because we're older, but nonetheless we're still best friends. I didn't realize how much has changed until I flew out to visit her for a couple days. Things were great the first day, but then I noticed that we soon ran out of things to talk about. The convenience of email and everything was that you avoided those awkward pauses in real life conversation. If I couldn't think of anything to talk about, I could wait a couple days to reply to her email. You can't avoid that awkwardness in real life. After that visit, I haven't talked to her in a long time. There will still be the occasional comment or post on Facebook, but we're not really friends anymore.

If there isn't a good balance of face-to-face and internet conversations, then technology can have a negative effect on our relationships. In my friend's case, technology dragged and bogged out our friendship. If we stuck to communication in real life, it probably would have naturally ended when it needed to. As long as there's that balance, I think technology can have a positive impact. Skype has helped maintain that balance. I use it to talk to my friends away at other colleges, and to talk to family members back home.

I think the real challenge is meeting people first online. Internet dating sites are big, and I've heard cute love stories of people finding their future husbands and wives through sites like Match.com. It can be a good start to meeting people, but you can't simply have a online relationship and think it'll work. I personally would go crazy if I made a new friend online, but had no way of ever meeting up with them in real life because then what's the point? Why be friends if you can't actually go out in public with him or her? You also need to see those little facial expressions and nuances. What if the person in real life was a total jerk and loser to be around? All of that can disappear online; you can basically create a new persona and identity. The internet can be great, but I think we need to remember that life happens offline in the real world too.

Social Networking and Privacy

With the sudden popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites, I think our culture is moving towards a trend of oversharing and almost narcissism. We change our statuses constantly, we upload millions of pictures a day, we "check in" to different locations- we want the world to know exactly what we're thinking/eating/reading/doing at this exact moment. While I'm guilty of a lot of these over-sharing habits, it's kind of frightening how little I think about this new trend and loss of privacy. 

I pretty much use Facebook everyday. I use it to keep in touch with a lot of people that are away at other schools and my family, while adding new people that I've recently met as "friends." I try to shorten my Facebook usage by not getting updates though my phone, and I never saw the appeal of Twitter and Foursquare. Even if I wanted to "tweet" or "check into" different places, Facebook has either already morphed a lot of those features onto its own site. Status updates are basically like tweets, and Facebook Places almost replaces the use of Foursquare. I'm still a little creeped out by Facebook Places and Foursquare because I would not want people to know that kind of information. I also doubt there are people that actually care if you just got coffee at Peet's or if you're at Santana Row, unless you have a stalker (which probably makes his/her job a whole lot easier with these sites)

It wasn't until a news article about Facebook's failure of adequate privacy settings that I began to think about what I put out there on Facebook. I used to do a lot of those addicting quizzes, like "Which decade fits your personality best?" until I found out that those quizzes accessed your personal information, even after you were done with the quiz. I also had to go back and figure out what section of my profile, like pictures and videos, I wanted to keep "private." Unless you manually go through every section and pick what you want visible to everyone or limited to friends, you're projecting every aspect of your life to everyone, friend and strangers. It's so easy to forget how public the Internet is, and once you post something it is out in cyberspace forever.

Despite privacy and oversharing issues, I think there are some benefits of this blur of our personal lives and technology. Skype has been a great invention that helps me keep in touch with friends and family while at college. Instead of a faceless conversation on the phone or a quick email, Skype gives you face-to-face contact. Facebook, as said before, helps stay in touch with friends and family that are away through photo albums, status updates, etc. What is going to be difficult is how to distinguish what we keep private and what we put up online. I try to think more critically about what pictures I post on Facebook, and I try to limit how much personal information I list. I've seen way too many of my friends get in trouble for incriminating photos they put online, and I've heard enough horror stories of creepers on the Internet that lurk on girl's profile information. It's going to be hard however to separate what should remain private and what we upload online because the privacy norm is constantly changing.