This week I decided to create a media diary, recording what media I was exposed to day by day. I broke the diary down into sections with the date and time, what type of media it was, what device I saw it on and also my opinion on that type of media. My media diary made me realise a lot about myself and my media intake. When analysing my diary I realised my media consumption can be determined by a number of factors. My age has an impact on what media I engage with, many of the television programmes I tend to watch are aimed at my ‘late teen age group’ such as Family Guy and Pretty Little Liars. I am also a lot more exposed to social media, I constantly communicate with my friends through likes on pictures and comments on statuses, rather than going out and seeing them in person. This type of communication is a lot more popular amongst the younger generation as many older people don’t know how to work this form of media. I also find my class influences my media intake, my life style is influenced by popular culture rather than high culture, I am a lot more likely to sit down and watch a reality television show instead of watching a documentary. I also found my gender can affect what media I enjoy, watching a more male aimed film like Deadpool made me realise I much prefer watching a romantic comedy which is more aimed at a female audience.
My media diary did have a lot of typical patterns, it became evident to me that in the morning and constantly throughout the day the main type of media I engaged with was my mobile phone. In order to function in the morning I have to check what I had missed out on from the night before and what new images and statuses have been posted as the day progresses. I also found my main ‘comfort zone’ within media is my bed time television. I found myself watching an episode of Family Guy and American Dad almost every night before bed, it seems I have fallen into a ritual as for years I have watched these types of episodes to settle me down before I go to sleep. Now I am at university I have also noticed I watch a smaller variety of television programmes as I no longer have a television, instead I watch things on catch up websites. I used to watch a variety of shows such as the news, soaps, documentaries and comedy sketch programmes. I did however find I now watch a lot more films as a pass time with friends.
The media I feel most passionate about would be the social media apps on my phone, they prevent me from becoming bored and I love exploring different images and comments on the apps. I found now I’m at university I am a lot less engaged with programmes like the news and I never read newspapers or magazines. This diary has made me realise I should try and engage with more types of media, through exploring different websites on the internet like people’s blogs and try to explore new television programmes and films I have never watched before.
There are a number of ways I could make a personal contribution to online content, through my blog I aim to share my opinions of the different forms of media I am interested in like comedy films and social media apps, I want to use my blog to create a name for myself on the internet. I could also try to get my work published on certain review websites aimed at my age group. To make my blog a success I have looked at websites such as The Media Blog by The Guardian and the website Film Rant. I looked at the different posts on the sites which allowed them to inspire the approach I will have for my blogs.Overall the diary was a very useful tool which showed my media engagement and made me realise in order to fully enjoy this unit I need to open my mind to more types of media.
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