Like it or not, much of today’s entertainment comes in the form of technology - digital media, so to say. Surfing the Internet, browsing Netflix, watching a movie, checking your cell phone - all of this falls under the umbrella of digital usage, the concept I will be exploring today. Even now, as I type this blog, I’m utilizing digital media - I’m using my computer, I’m listening to music, and sort-of playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, in the sense that it’s paused in the background and that I’ll probably pick it back up a time or two before I finish this blog.
To examine digital media usage, I first examined myself - for three days, in fact. Two of these days fell on the weekend and one on a school day, a purposeful choice in order to see if anything differed from spending a good chunk of my time relaxing (Saturday), a good amount of time with family (Sunday), and a sizable amount of time in class (Monday). The following is what I found, separated into the categories of devices I used over the weekend.
To begin with my cell phone, I must admit that I spent absolutely no time on it Saturday. I am often prone to forgetting entirely of its existence, and thus it is not unusual for my messages to number into the 20s (much to a couple of my friends’ chagrin) and for my voicemail box to be full almost all the time (to the annoyance of my grandmother, who seems to have too much to say and too little space in which say it).
On Sunday, I used it much more - five minutes speaking to a friend of mine about a project of his, and asking him a few questions for my grandfather. On Monday, I spent a total of six minutes catching up on text messages and steadfastly ignoring my voicemails, which are (for whatever reason) a major annoyance to me. I think that I would rather text than talk, which fits with what Sherry Turkle says about just that in her TED talk entitled “Connected, but alone?": over and over, she hears “”I would rather text than talk.”” And she’d hear the same from me. Total cell phone use time: 11 minutes.
Moving on, I’ll discuss the use of my iPad. My iPad isn’t used for much else than music and reading - I have the Kindle app on it, and I tend to read some at night before I head to bed. This weekend, however, I barely touched it. This might owe to the fact that I had an exam today and have another tomorrow; there wasn’t as much time to sacrifice to leisure activities as I usually have, and the iPad stayed in my room most of the three days. I used it to read for around 20 minutes on Saturday, googled for about three minutes on Sunday, and watched a short video (4:06) on it on Monday. Total iPad use: 27:06.
The third most utilized of my electronics was my PlayStation 4. I use gaming as a ‘reward’ of types between study sessions, and as such whenever I finished studying a particular section of my Economics book, I defaulted to playing Dragon Age: Inquisition for a while. There’s nothing like a violent video game to take our your economics-related frustrations, in my book. In total, I used the PlayStation for two hours on Saturday, three and a half hours on Sunday, and not at all on Monday, due to increasing panic over my exam. In addition, I used the PS4 for Netflix and DVD playing - on Sunday, which is family day, I watched a movie and a couple of episodes of Psych with my mother. Total use: around eight and a half hours.
And then there’s my piece de resistance, my computer. I use my laptop for everything - homework, gaming, YouTube videos, writing, listening to music - you name it, I do it. Except, perhaps ironically, social media. I don’t really have much to do with that at all, and nor do I check my email unless it is forced upon me. Even still, my computer is almost always open - I used it for six hours on Saturday (making a study guide, listening to all types of music, writing a short story, studying the study guide I’d made), nearly nine hours on Sunday (studying the study guide, listening to more music, contemplating 7 Days to Die, watching YouTube videos - gaming, I’m afraid), and just over five hours on Monday (much of the same). Total use: around 20 hours. This use was not limited to academic pursuits - I also used it to simply distract myself from my looming exams, and to ignore other work I needed to get done. I don’t normally procrastinate, but when I’m this stressed, it seems that I often cannot stop. To that end, Turkle’s suggestion that “we develop a more self-aware relationship” with our devices is a good one.
As far as I know, I utilized no other piece of technology than those listed above; those were certainly enough. I do want to point out that a good chunk of my time on the computer wasn’t used frivolously - instead, I was writing, studying, and listening to music as I studied - but I admit to watching 58 minutes of YouTube videos on Saturday, 43 minutes on Sunday, and 39 on Monday).
With all of this said, I’m not exactly sure if my weekend would have played out differently if I had not needed to study so much. I probably would have watched another movie, and my computer use may have been less, as I had originally wanted to make plans to do more than I did this weekend - plans that were, of course, doused by the need to study. That said, (and as I said in discussion earlier this week), I spend a lot of time using various digital devices to distract myself from problems instead of actually spending time thinking about said problems, and so I agree with Turkle when she says that “you end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude,” which “is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.” Like she said, “our fantasies of substitution have cost us.” I think I need to refocus a little bit, away from being so neurotic about grades and test scores and toward social interaction. To that end, perhaps I will try to get some friends together to do something this weekend, or perhaps next week. And perhaps I will continue my efforts to go on a vacation to Cedar Point with a handful of friends this May, too!
