JOUR 1111 Media Dairy & Analysis

Over a ten day period spanning from 17^th March to the 26^th, I recorded my various uses of media in a media diary. All times recorded are in minutes.


Table 1.1

Table 1.2

The diary data shows that interaction and reliance on desktop internet for general use and media news has heavily outweighed any other media. The reason for this is for the obvious accessibility of every type of information on the internet. As shown in graph 1 and the table, I have spent approximately 2085 minutes using desktop internet over the ten day period. This calculates to 3 hours and 28.5 minutes per day connected to the web. This time was predominantly used on Facebook, YouTube and other websites of personal interest to me, most notably Foxsports.com.au and okayplayer.com (a music website).

My data indicated that time spent on desktop internet fitted around when I was away from university. It is difficult to compare the time with the UQ survey, as its data does not disaggregate internet time between the use of desktop and hand held internet devices.

The use of a hand held devices was my other way of connecting with the internet when away from home, particularly when travelling. My iPod receives a work over whenever I am on the train or bus each day, and I regularly use Heytell – an audio messaging application.

When comparing this to the UQ public survey, the data shows that, when adding the times recorded for desktop and hand held internet use, I am just within the 13% group that spends 4 to 5 hours a day on the internet.

Table 2

	Total time (mins)	Average time per day (mins)	Survey Comparison (mins [%])
Internet	2465	246.5	240 – 300 (13%)
Television	640	64	1-2 (29.9%)
Radio	0	0	0 (16.7%)

I generally found myself using the T.V purely for watching sport and sport news, and occasional viewing of world news. Overall I spent around 640 minutes watching television, which comes to just over an hour per day. In comparison with the UQ data, I am the majority 29.9% that use television for between 1-2 hours a day. This is something of a commentary on my personal relationship with particular areas of journalism. I commit to far more time of sports news then I do of domestic and world news.

I was surprised at how little time I spend engaging with hardcopy media. My recordings indicate that approximately 80 minutes was taken up by newspapers. There is no comparative data from the public survey that I can use. Hardcopy media is the least accessible forms of media, and I simply don’t go to the effort of buying newspapers often. However, my use of newspapers tended to be on weekends, and was generally sport oriented.

Radio use was something on which I was fairly confident I would not be spending too much time. It has always been a form of media that I have ignored. The main reasons for the avoidance of radio are probably the ads and the tiring personalities that distract me from the more worthwhile aspects of radio. Whatever the case, I did not spend a minute listening to the radio, joining the other 16.7% of people in the UQ survey.   

My media diary has illustrated my overall relationship with journalism and communication. Frankly, my connection with journalism is strictly interest based. The only time I interact with journalism is when I am interested in the topic, which tends to be sport, music or video gaming. I aim to broaden my relationship, by being more critically engaged with the profession. Further, my recordings show new media’s dominance over old media. This imbalance is not because I dislike old forms of media, but rather it is due to new media’s level of accessibility. This appeared to be a trend in the UQ survey, as new media was favoured over old to find news.