Blog #3 Recording My Screen Time

Since I decided that a day without any screen use would actually be highly detrimental to my ability to keep up with classes, I opted to record all of my time online, or in front of a screen as the case may be, for a 24 hour period. What I found was two-fold: 1) I did a lot of research in the library databases, and 2) I use YouTube as my main form of escapism/entertainment. I’ll endeavor to give a summary/breakdown of the content I consumed and why, and then I’ll look into analyzing just how ingrained technology has become in our society and habits.

Everything starts, unsurprisingly, when I wake up at around 8:30 AM. I sleepily grab my phone, and already I have a screen in my face. I’ve been awake for 2 minutes, and I use the term “awake” loosely. What I do then is put on a YouTube video of someone playing a game called Subnautica. This string of videos play for the next three hours until 11:30 AM. During this time I’m slipping into and out of consciousness, half listening to the person playing the game in an attempt to wake up. After three hours of extremely limited success, I force myself out of bed and pause the video.

I put my phone away and groggily grab my laptop and open it. I now have another screen in my face. I open up the CNU Library Databases to start looking for articles on the Bacchae and Dionysus. The research is for my Senior Seminar topic, and I know that I’ve been putting it off for too long. I’m not finding anything worthwhile and it’s beginning to frustrate me. This lasts for about 45 minutes, from roughly 11:30 - 12:17 PM. 

Suddenly my phone starts buzzing at about 12:17 PM. It’s a friend of mine. I answer instinctually. Now I have two screens in front of me. My friend is driving up from Richmond to see me and a few other friends in the evening. Deciding that talking to him is more interesting than slogging through databases, I close my laptop. We talk about various topics for the next 45 - 50 minutes, from about 12:17 - 1:01 PM. 

Just as I hang up the phone because he’s reached his destination, I can hear my brother down the hall practicing his vocal lessons. It’s loud, obnoxious, and sounds like someone is strangling a duck. I open YouTube on my phone again and start a compilation video of classic music. I put my headphones in and my head down. I don’t open my laptop like I expected to. The music ends after about 20 minutes, running from 1:10 - 1:30 PM. I take an unexpected nap, and after waking up see about getting lunch. By the time I get back to my laptop and phone (I left both in my room), it’s 3:00 PM. Reluctantly, I open my laptop and resume my search for articles. This lasts from 3:00 - 4:00 PM. At around 4:00, I find the last article that I need for the day and shut my laptop. I open up YouTube on my phone again, using the YouTube app, and proceed to watch another person play a different game, Dragon Age: Origins, from 4:00 - 5:00 PM.

Friends of mine were supposed to pick me up at around 5:00 PM, so I get dressed while the YouTube video plays in the background. I carry my phone around with me so that I can hear and occasionally glance at the video while I brush my teeth and throw on fresh clothes. At around 5:05 PM I get a text saying that my friends will be late. There has been a few accidents on Route 66 and traffic is at a crawl. They’ll be delayed by an hour. I take this time to start working on a homebrew class I’ve been thinking about for D&D. During this time, I have a note open in my phone and I’m typing information into it. I do this on and off for about 30 minutes, so from 5:10 - 5:40 PM. My friends are set to pick me up at 6:07, so I spend the rest of my time wandering about or lying on my bed. When they finally arrive, I grab my phone and head out the door. That was the last time I looked meaningfully at my phone for anything other than checking the time that day. When I got home, it was late and I went straight to bed.

Now that the summary is out of the way, I want to talk about my major take-aways from this exercise. I think that my most significant findings were in how I interact with videos like those found on YouTube. It seems that I treat it as a means to avoid feeling solitary. In all but one case during the day of recording, my use of YouTube was to have someone else’s voice in the room to either help me wake up (which actually had the opposite effect), or to keep me company while I went about generic tasks. This interaction with a form of social media, as YouTube presents videos people have recorded for the entertainment of others, is then used to both entertain me and dispel any feelings of loneliness I possess under certain circumstances. 

I also think it’s significant just how frequently I had a screen in my face, except for the evening. From the moment I woke up, I had access to social media in the form of the YouTube app. For others it could be Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. I can say this with absolute certainty: I was not awake enough to post anything comprehensive at 8:30 AM. Say my preferred go to social media in the mornings was Twitter. I’m scrolling through various posts for entertainment, when suddenly I find a post/comment that I disagree with. They say to be careful what you say on social media, but a groggy version of yourself that’s only half-awake may not take that lesson to heart. This ease of access we all have to social media through our phones is likely responsible for many half baked arguments and cyber bullying experienced online. It’s unrealistic to say that terrible comments and racist/sexist posts would disappear if it was harder/less convenient to post things on social media, but there sure would be a lot less of them.