Josh McMillan Blog #3

            From the minute I hear the buzz and jingle of my alarm clock to moment I go to bed, it feels like I’m always buried in a screen. But is this really true? I chose to record my screen time for a full day to see how much time I actually spend with electronics. The general overview of my day starts with a lift, then class, lunch, class, class, and then varies depending on how much work I have. Throughout the course of the day I spent a little over 5 hours on my phone and 5 more hours looking at other screens. Here’s how it was broken up.

Picture of me waking up to no
emails about classes being canceled

            I wake up around 8:45 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to lift in the gym. My alarm is on my phone so I typically spend about 15 minutes checking emails, going through social media, etc. before actually heading to the gym. I listen to music while I lift. This means while lifting I will be on my phone occasionally to change songs and sometimes drift off into social media. My lift ends around 10:30 so I can shower and head to class. My first class is multimedia and web publishing, so needless to say that is about an hour of computer time. After that class I have lunch and watch some TV before heading to class at 1. That’s another half hour of screen time. Both my one o’clock and two o’clock classes are lecture style and neither used the projector that day. This is the largest chunk of time without any screens. After my class ended, I was at 2 hours of screen time on my phone and about an hour and a half of other screen time.

Phone screen time at 3:00 pm

            After my classes I headed to the library to do some work. I spent about an hour there doing work on my computer then headed to my dorm. It was about four o’clock now and I spent about an hour or so on YouTube and Instagram essentially just messing around until dinner. I ate dinner at 5:30 and then checked my screen time again afterwards around 6. At this point I was at 3 hours of phone time and 6 and a half hours total.

Phone screen time at 6:00 pm

          At this point I headed back to my room and spent a good amount of time playing some music and getting some work done while being slightly distracted on my phone. I took lots of breaks and ended up spending around half my time on my phone. This continued till about nine. When I ended up getting ready for bed. I was in bed at around ten and was on my phone off and on until around 11 when I feel asleep. This brings my totals to just over five hours on my phone and around 5 more hours on other screens, mostly my computer.

Phone screen time at 11:00pm

            Of these ten total hours in front of screens, just over two hours were spent on social media. If you include YouTube as social media I spent more like three hours and 45 minutes on social media. Through all of this social media use, I didn’t post one single thing. This is very typical for me. Often times I think about posting something and choose not to. I think this is because over the years I have established to myself and my followers that I’m the kind of person that doesn’t post much. This sort of self-censorship, as Marwick and Boyd (2013) described, leads my audience to see me in a certain way. In this instance my not posting content is an attempt to maintain the idea that I am not a big social media user.

 As you can see, YouTube was my most used app on my phone. I was on all other social media combined twenty more minutes that YouTube alone. This is pretty consistent day to day mostly because it’s the only platform that never runs out of material for me. Instagram and Twitter will reshow me the same things if I’ve been on it enough, but YouTube takes a different approach. The home page is always suggesting new videos based on videos I’ve already watched. I always end up at the bottom of the rabbit hole realizing I’ve spent too much time on it. Although its easier where I waste the most time, it would also be the hardest for me to delete. I’ve been following a few creators for over a year now and I really look forward to their content being released. I also use YouTube for educational purposes as well. This means that although I spend the most time on it, I am very unlikely to try and decrease the time spent.

            The amount of social media I use is very dependent on what kind of day I have. On busy days or weeks, it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to delete certain social media apps. This eliminates the temptation to go on them instead of finishing my work. Another method I use almost daily to lower my screen time is putting my phone on do not disturb. This helps me by being able to have my phone near me without it buzzing every time I get a text or any other random notification.

            I would be very interested to see how my average screen time stacks up against other college students. I think that I most likely spend a little bit above average amount of time using screens. Ten hours in total seems like a monstrous amount of time to be on a screen. During the summers I would imagine my screen time is drastically less than the average. I work just about every day 10 – 6 where I use my phone extremely sparingly.

Lifeguarding is a pretty bad job to
be on your phone during!

            Overall this experience of tracking my screen time was very beneficial to me. I normally see my screen time on my phone, but I was surprised at the amount of time I spend using other devices. Another thing I was surprised about was how much I was on my phone while doing schoolwork. Tracking my screen time for 24 hours allowed me to not only reflect on why I use technology, but in what ways I am and should be using it.

References

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, d. (2010). I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society 13(1), 114–133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313