JOUR1111: Personal Media Use & Production Diary
For this piece of assessment, my task was to record the different types of media I used for 2 weeks. Then, I found patterns and trends within my data record. Finally, I analysed how my personal media use shaped my understanding of Journalism. I have summarised my findings below.
First of all, here is the table recording the different types of media I used for the 2-week period and a graph outlining the total times spent on each media.
Date | Written Media | Online Media | Television | Audio | |||||||||
Type of Media | News-papers | Lectures | Novels | News | Blogs/ Twitter | Facebook/ Emails | Random Surfing | Academic | News | Movies | Comedy | Drama | Music |
9/08/11 | 0 | 180 | 0 | 50 | 0 | 20 | 60 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 30 | 120 |
10/08/11 | 0 | 210 | 0 | 50 | 10 | 25 | 0 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 60 | 60 | 120 |
11/08/11 | 0 | 180 | 0 | 40 | 0 | 15 | 0 | 25 | 60 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 120 |
12/08/11 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 120 | 35 | 30 | 180 | 20 | 45 | 75 | 30 | 30 | 40 |
13/08/11 | 30 | 150 | 0 | 125 | 45 | 30 | 210 | 180 | 40 | 90 | 0 | 0 | 20 |
14/08/11 | 30 | 60 | 0 | 50 | 10 | 20 | 150 | 60 | 40 | 0 | 30 | 60 | 25 |
15/08/11 | 0 | 360 | 0 | 50 | 10 | 20 | 50 | 40 | 40 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 120 |
16/08/11 | 0 | 180 | 0 | 80 | 15 | 15 | 60 | 45 | 30 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 120 |
17/08/11 | 0 | 210 | 0 | 40 | 15 | 20 | 80 | 35 | 25 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 120 |
18/08/11 | 0 | 180 | 150 | 25 | 10 | 10 | 40 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 15 |
19/08/11 | 0 | 30 | 150 | 30 | 10 | 15 | 40 | 40 | 0 | 60 | 0 | 0 | 15 |
20/08/11 | 0 | 120 | 175 | 80 | 5 | 10 | 80 | 80 | 0 | 75 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
21/08/11 | 45 | 180 | 170 | 100 | 40 | 10 | 180 | 60 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 10 |
22/08/11 | 30 | 360 | 170 | 120 | 85 | 20 | 150 | 120 | 25 | 0 | 30 | 30 | 15 |
Total | 135 | 2460 | 815 | 960 | 290 | 260 | 1280 | 755 | 365 | 300 | 450 | 210 | 870 |
As you can see, I spent the greatest time of 2460 minutes on reading lecture material. Due to my tough (at least for me) workload, I am required to constantly revise my work. It should be noted that this time period includes the lectures I attend at university. One of the greatest reasons for this high number is that one of my courses PHYS1171 has assessed clicker questions each lecture. Also, I believe that attending my lectures both at university and revising at home will help me for my assessment. JOUR1111 directly helps my knowledge of journalism, as each week we go through a different aspect of the field and also write a blog for each lecture. This gives me a clearer picture of what journalists have to do to deliver a great story. However, my other courses have a surprisingly great impact on my understanding of Journalism too. All of my courses involve me thinking “outside of the box”, applying my knowledge (e.g. for experiments for Psychology or calculations for Physics) and learning more. These skills are necessary to not only become successful, but they also help me to understand the important factors of journalism. They help me to write better, to think more and be creative. So, for journalism, this helps me to write better features and articles, think of more interesting stories and bring my own unique sense to my writing.
My second greater media use is “random internet surfing”. This is the time that I spend on the Internet, searching through the web and finding interesting articles. I did not list this as reading news online as I did not first access a news website (e.g. like brisbanetimes.com). This time includes reading a combination of celebrity gossip sites, blogs, games, Wikipedia and other article sites. The Internet is a great resource of information about almost anything. So naturally, I spend a lot of time finding interesting information about many things. For example, sometimes I will use Wikipedia to read information about a particular movie and check it’s critical reception to see whether it is worth watching. I think this process itself my analysing skills. As I read through various articles, I always take note of the positive and negative views. I also gain argumentative skills when reading particular debates on a topic. These skills, although small, help a great deal to my understanding of Journalism. They help me analyse stories, so that I know what is important or can quickly identify wrong information. They also help me analyse an argument so that I can see how a journalist is presenting their view and how it could be outlined in a more persuasive manner. When news is presented on TV, I sometimes use these analytical skills to see how news reporters present the news. I like to take note of the music used, the urgency in their voices and reporter’s facial expressions and see how that affects the story.
Here is a comparison the time I spent on lectures and random Internet surfing. As you can see, they are not very similar. They both increase and decrease, at different times, showing inconsistency between the medias. However, it is very obvious that much greater time is spent on lectures. It is interesting to note that when lecture times are high, random Internet surfing is low. This makes sense, as Internet surfing should occur less when there is greater need to work on lectures.
I spent the least amount of time reading newspapers. I found that I only read them on weekends when my family bought them. I did not spend too much time reading them, because I know that I can just access the same info, if not better, online if I really needed too. Online media is very useful to me, because I can access specific information that I want, rather than just reading through unnecessary information. Other than writing, it can also provide pictures, music and videos, which are very helpful and more entertaining. Hence, I believe that it is great that journalism can quickly adapt to the changing technologies as it means we are always going to have news available to us in many different forms, each with its own value.
