Over a period of ten days, I recorded my media usage and used
the data I collected to compare it to a survey taken by approximately 432 other
journalism students.
Looking at my log, it is clear that most of my time is spent
from online - this is more than likely due to its accessibility. With the push
of a button I can be connected to friends, family and the latest news and
entertainment happening locally and around the world.
On
average, I read online newspapers (mostly ninemsn.com) daily for around 15 minutes, I am on Facebook
from two to three hours per day and I am tweeting my life away on Twitter for
about 20 minutes per day. In comparison to the survey, these look to be mostly
with the majority of the people who took the survey. 43.1% of students who took
the survey get their news online and 29.6% of them spend two to three hours a day on the internet, with 91.9% of these people spending the majority of their
time on Facebook - exactly like me. With blogging, I read or write blogs anywhere from from 10 minutes to 30 minutes a day - this coincides with 6% of the students who took the survey. This is a very small amount but one of the main reasons I have taken to reading and writing blogs is for this course. Before this course, I had never written on a blog before but I would sometimes read them because it is interesting to see what people's take on certain topics are.
I would think that
this is largely due to the fact that 78.2% of students own an internet-enabled
smart phone.
In terms of television
and radio usage, the majority of students watch television for one to two hours
a day and they listen to the less than one hour of radio daily. It seems that
again, I am with the majority. As seen above in my log, I watch television for
entertainment and news for an average of 30 minutes to one hour per day with my
radio usage only coming up every several days and always being under half an
hour. I tend to only listen to the radio if I am in the car – like 89.9% of
students - and am in the mood;
I tend to prefer getting news from television and online sources
because then I am easily able to share it with others as well. For instance, if
I watch something on television, then I am able to look it up on YouTube and
share it on Facebook or Twitter – a classic example of how social media can be
a powerful tool in communicating ideas, opinions and news. With radio, I listen
to it more for the music or for traffic updates, but it is not high on my
agenda as a way of getting my daily news as it would be for others, who
perhaps, travel long distances to get to university or people who just rely on
it.
My behaviour of relying on the internet in order to get my
news is most probably due to my generation. This should not be a surprise as my
generation, generation Y, is known to be the technology generation. We take the
internet for granted. It is something that has always been there so we rely
heavily on it to provide us with what we need – entertainment and news.
As you can tell, I gather most of my news from new media,
rather than from old media. Technology plays a great part in how I receive news
and I prefer it this way as it is much more accessible and easy to gather more
information on rather than buying a newspaper. With newspapers, your
information is limited to what is written on the page, but online you can
simply Google a topic and you will be provided with more information that you
could possibly imagine.
This study was quite an interesting one as it gave me a lot more
clarity as to how people use media for news and entertainment. It also made me
realise how much I use and rely on the internet. I mean, I’m not gonna lie, if I could marry the internet, I would.
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