Another assignment this week in my SLIS class was to record and reflect on our experiences with media throughout the course of a day. Again, since the topic is relevant to the general theme of Reading Freely, I share it here!

My mornings begin with email, my main source of news. I subscribe to different outlets like The New York Times and The Spectator, and they send out different pieces throughout the day. I generally look over the headlines and then click if I see one that interests me, like The New Yorker’s  “What Was Hamas Thinking”, or The Spectator’s “Return of the Hawks:  Israel Redefines the GOP Primary”.  I also receive substack newsletters, some of which are commentary on the news.  I prefer reading news via email, because news websites are visually distracting, and the easy access to other articles drains my attention from the article I’ve clicked on.  There are some news sites I visit, though, in part because they’re more of a “once a week” source instead of a daily source. One example is al-Monitor, a website collecting news from the Middle East.

My phone, a Pixel 6,  is not a source of news,  as I don’t have any news or social media apps on it. I sometimes see articles when I go “back” from the home screen, but this newsfeed appears to be curated from my Google account, and thus tech and gaming news always dominate. The top story today, for instance, is about updates to Google Assistant and Google Wallet; immediately below that is a review of Cities Skylines 2.

I sometimes encounter news in areas where I’m not intending to, like reddit. Reddit is a website where people can follow different ‘subreddits’ that collect discussion around a given topic, like PC repair, the Boston Red Sox, or Star Trek.  Reddit frequently inserts topics from  subreddits I don’t subscribe to into my feed, so today I spot a screenshot of an AP news headline about President Biden endorsing a bill to send money to both Ukraine and Israel.  One of the reasons I quit using Twitter early in 2023 was because it politicized my feed too much. I frequently see the headlines at work, on Yahoo and MSN’s news portals, but I don’t monitor news unless there’s severe weather happening. 

When I get home on this particular today, I’m too tired from a long day of helping patrons and trying to solve technical issues to do thing serious like listening to a podcast that would touch on the news. Instead, I listen to music, read, and eventually fall asleep watching YouTube.  Sometimes I watch news on YouTube, or commentary on the news. One channel I like because of its  international perspective  is WION, or “World is One News”.  During baseball season, I also watch highlights from the teams I follow (Red Sox & Braves), and search for news for particular players, like Shohei Ohtani.

In general, I think my media consumption is more active than passive, as I actively seek out news from specific sources, either for quality or for a balance of perspectives, and I deliberately get my news in ways that lets me focus and reflect on it.  However, I’m also aware of what in anthropology might be referred to as the observer effect — the tendency of a subject to alter its behavior when it knows it’s being observed.  In my case, I suspect if someone were recording my screen for 24 hours and I was unaware,  there would have been a lot more idle browsing of reddit and news-reaction videos on YouTube.