Ten Days in the Media: The Diary of a Prod-User

As a science student there’s nothing that excites me quite as much as data analysis, and what a wonderful excuse this is to do exactly that. This media Use Diary provides a comprehensive analyses the way that I interact with the media compared to other aspiring journalists in my cohort, looking into how much I contribute versus how much I take from the media and the degree to which the new media dominates my engagement with journalism and communication. Essentially, I will be used as an example to demonstrate ‘prod-usership’ in the new media, defined as “modes of production which are led by users or at least crucially involve users as producers” whereby “the user acts as a hybrid user/producer, or produser, virtually throughout the production process” (Axel Brun, 2006*). Hopefully by the end of this analysis I will take away some important lessons about my interaction with the media. 

The raw data 

The above table represents the total number of minutes that I spent interacting with different media platforms over ten days, coming to a grand total of almost thirty hours. This information is illustrated in graph 1, which represents the division of that time between different media platforms. Four major media platforms make up more than half of the media that I use; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging sites and Youtube.

Facebook

Granted, I have a problem. Over a third of all the media that I interact with is done on this single website. So what’s so special about Facebook? Like many other Facebook users, I use the site to see what is happening within my network of friends and acquaintances, all from the solitary comfort of my computer chair. Most of my time is spent on chat with friends and family. As a teenager I sub-consciously value being socially active more than I value my own life (not to mention my grades) and as a result I end up spending copious amounts of time aimlessly reading what people are up to, where they were last night and who is in a relationship with who. It’s a bit like an interactive soap-opera.

From the perspective of Journalism and Communication, Facebook’s most important feature is the ability to build and sustain social networks. However, news distributed via Facebook (similar to the way news is broadcasted through Twitter) is a growing trend, especially with the advent of the page ‘Facebook + Journalists’. Let’s face it though, engaging with the work of professional journalists is not the reason I use this site. 

Twitter

Before I started this course I did not have a Twitter account. As graph 1 illustrates, it didn’t take me long to get the hang of this new media and now it constitutes 10% of all the media that I use. I am now officially a twit, and I am proud of that fact. Unlike Facebook, I don’t use Twitter for social purposes. I use it as a major news source, and as such I am a ‘lurker’ with a grand total of one tweet. In my opinion, Twitter is the most useful website to any journalist; it provides a constant flow of current news from as many quality sources as you are willing to subscribe to, and also allows the user to build a network of sources. This is a site that I enjoy using, and one that I would like to use even more as my career in journalism progresses. 

Blogging Sites

I have enjoyed reading blogs for a long time, but actually writing a blog was entirely new for me. I find myself reading other blogs and writing my own in half-hour sessions about three times per week. This leads to blogging sites making up around10% of the media that I interact with. I can certainly see myself spending even more time on blog sites in the future. These sites encourage creativity, develop writing skills and allow writers to specialise in writing for niche audiences.

Youtube

I use Youtube for a variety of purposes. First and foremost, I use it to view the latest work of my favourite vloggers, which include comedians, entertainers, reviews and science and technology vlogs. Occasionally I will use Youtube as a news source if a big story has recently broken. Overall this makes up around 11% of the media that I interact with. Some science vlogs (Scishow, for example) have proven helpful in writing my own blog, and as such Youtube represents an important platform to interact with from a journalist's perspective. 

Am I normal?

With this data in mind, I can compare myself to trends seen with other journalism students. 

Like 94.7% of my peers, I had just one Facebook account. Some comfort came in the fact that I am among the 91.9% who spend most of their browsing time on Facebook, and within the 29.6% who spend between one and three hours on the internet per day (personally, I recorded a mean of 2.4 hours per day). Perhaps my apparent addiction isn’t so bad after all. My internet usage was fairly similar to that of others, the main differences being that I tend to use Twitter more, I rarely use Skype or banking sites, and I spend far less time emailing than other people do. Like most others I listen to less than one hour of radio each day - usually when driving. In many regards I am quite normal indeed.

However, unlike myself, a third of the cohort own an internet-enabled smart phone and had been using Twitter and Blogger before this course evens. This suggests to some degree that I am already behind in regard to modern trends in the new media. 

Furthermore, it can be seen that I use old media (television, for example) far less than most other people do. The total amount of time that I spent watching TV over ten days was significantly less than what most people watch in a single night. This is likely the case for two reasons. Firstly, television was the chief source of news for most people, while I primarily use online sources like Twitter and online news sites. Secondly, I watch most television shows via the internet; a significant 7% of my time was spent watching TV online. Clearly  my ignorance of television-based news journalism is unusual. Oh dear. 

Old Media vs. New Media

The rise of the new media under web 2.0 is a major issue in journalism and communication, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at which media platforms I engage with more often. 

Graph 2 very clearly shows that I rely heavily on new media platforms. Old media made up just 10% of the media that I used. This is evidently a consequence of the fact that the services originally provided by old media platforms are now available on the web. In my case, I now rely entirely on the internet as a source for television, newspapers and information for research.  According to the recorded data, most other people are similar to me in this regard. Both the exponential growth of the new media and the subsequent decline of the old media are here demonstrated. 

Production vs. Consumption

Prod-users make the internet what it is today, but not everyone produces as much as they consume. This was the case for me; graph 3 shows that I use twice as much media as I produce. 

The data for this graph is based on the estimations of how much content I produce on different platforms. On sites like Facebook and Blogger I spend more time contributing to the media (using chat, posting comments or writing blogs), while I spend more time using the information put out by Youtube, Twitter and news websites. It is clear that in many regards I am a ‘lurker’, using a variety of media platforms without contributing anything to the discussions that they host. 

Conclusions and lessons learnt

 There are some broad observable trends that give an overall indication of the way that I use the media and how I compare to others. With this in mind, I can identify ways to best use the media to improve my skills as a journalist.

Firstly, like my peers, I tend to use the media primarily for social networking and entertainment (demonstrated by my extensive use of Facebook and Youtube). While both these sites are good platforms for modern journalism, Twitter, Blogger and news sites are established hubs for the work of quality journalists to be published, questioned and responded to. As an aspiring journalist, my media usage should be focused around sites like these as opposed to entertainment-based and social websites.

Secondly, I am a new media addict. Even if many areas of the media are rapidly moving online, professional journalism thrives on the hundreds of TV channels and radio stations being broadcasted every minute, and the thousands of newspapers and magazines published each week. The more I use online media, the less I experience the traditional forms of journalism that still play an important role in our society.

Finally, I should produce a greater amount of content for the media. Looking at other journalism students, about one third have been blogging and tweeting extensively before this course even began. I am not going to improve my skills in journalism simply by reading the work of others. Anyone can be a prod-user, but journalists are required to put an emphasis on production. This will undoubtedly become easier with mobile connection to online media via a smart phone – a tool that most of my fellow students are well trained at using.  

To sum up, my use of the media reflects both the movement of journalism and communication online and the rise of prod-usership. By comparing my usage to that of other students, I learned important lessons about which key areas of the media I should be using to better myself as a journalist.

* accessed at www.snurb.info/produsage

Three Biological Theories that Changed the way we saw the Natural World

Cell Theory

It is often taken for granted that, for the vast majority of human history, we had no idea about the microscopic world that underpins all life. As Robert Hooke discovered in 1665, it turns out that everything that is alive is constructed from building blocks which came to be known as cells – individual packages of gloopy matter that move, breathe, eat, grow, reproduce, go about their cellular business and then die.

I wonder what it would have been like to sit at a table with a compound microscope for the first time and peer into an undiscovered realm; an invisible world that had always existed but had never been explored. Imagine looking at part of your own body from an entirely different perspective, only to find that you aren’t one living thing, but innumerable units of life all carrying out different jobs in order to sustain your existence.

A handful of soil is home to a greater number of bacteria than the total number of humans who have ever lived. According to recent research, there are ten times as many bacterial cells in your body than there are human body cells. Yes, you are more of a bacterial breeding ground than a human being, but without trillions of bacterial palls our bodies wouldn’t know how to function. It’s easy to forget that worlds too small for us to see, and too small for us to imagine, are home to the majority of living things on Earth. Everything that we know about organic life is from a perspective far removed from where most of the action is happening. 

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection

No list of biological theories could be complete without this bad boy.  Darwin’s famed theory sits at the very heart of what we know about life on earth. ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’ was the title of the geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s aptly named 1973 essay.

This was one of the greatest paradigm shifts of modern science; Darwin had the audacity to suggest that the church was wrong through his eloquent use of reason and evidence. He referred to three important observations that he made in his travels. Firstly, beasties in the wild tend to have more babies than could possibly survive. Secondly, no critter is exactly the same – there is always variation to some degree. It can be reasoned that some babies are born with characteristics that would help them to survive in their environment, while others would be born with characteristics that make life hard for them. Finally, and most importantly, trait differences are inheritable.

This means that the lizard born with big teeth and sharp claws is more likely to survive long enough to settle down with a nice, strong lizard ladylove and have big-toothed, sharp-clawed babies together. The poor lizard born with no teeth or claws will have difficulty surviving in a lizard-eat-lizard world, not to mention the challenge he will face in finding a spouse to pass on his genes with. This is the harsh world of natural selection: as the weak are cut back, species become increasingly adapted to their environment with each generation. Evolution is a process that had been hidden in plain sight to biologists, and Darwin had the genius to recognise it.  

The Gaia Theory

We’ve all heard the term “mother nature”; whether it be in the film Avatar or in frequent use by angry hippies to invoke some sense of sympathy for the ecosystems that we choke with pollution. But what if there was actually a scientific basis behind an entity constituted by all life and non-life on Earth, capable of maintaining the biosphere?

In 1979 James Lovelock suggested just this, and he called his theoretical discovery Gaia. Since then, Gaia has been described in many different ways. There have been innumerable misconceptions and many accusations that there is insufficient evidence to call the concept a theory – some go as far as deeming it “unscientific.” Even if there isn’t sufficient evidence for Gaia to be considered by the scientific community, it’s still pretty damn interesting. The idea is that Gaia – this unimaginably complex chemical system – is capable of evolving, maintaining and self-regulating the conditions necessary for life on Earth.

Lovelock makes reference to self-regulating systems such as the salinity of the ocean, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere, self-sustaining ecosystems and global carbon-dioxide processing – all of which are maintained and regulated by the biological functions of living things (photosynthesis, for example), each of whom has a role analogous to organs in a hugely complex body.

This whole idea gets more interesting in Lovelock’s later work, where he described humans as a type of global infection; in the short time that we have been around, we’ve upset the chemical equilibrium ideal for life, causing mass-extinction. Just to make you feel better about yourself, according to Lovelock in his most recent work we are heading towards putting Gaia in a “coma-like state” that will take hundreds of thousands of years to recover from. “We are responsible and will suffer the consequences,” he says. Whether he is a brilliant scientist or a crazed fear monger, he made biologists stop and re-consider the way that living things interact on a global scale, and what role Homo sapiens should play in this. 

Week One: Instant Journalist

Journalism is very strange to me. It’s like nothing I have ever studied before. In a bachelor of science I would go in knowing how to count things and in the end I come out as a scientist of some description; in a bachelor of Laws I would study the law for a period of time and at the end I would get a certificate that meant that I could be a lawyer; in journalism I was a journalist from the moment I walked through the doors of the Schonell lecture theatre.

Perhaps this is because journalism is not so much about learning content, but rather practicing an art. It sounds pretty pretentious to call journalism an art, but ‘art’ is a good word to use for things that you can’t quite define. A simple Google search will yield a definition along the lines of “the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television.” That’s like saying that the term ‘artist’ can be defined as a profession in which someone uses paint to make pictures on a canvass. Perhaps Google’s definition of a journalist would have been fitting in the 20^th century, but technology has expanded at such a rate that the identity and role of a journalist must change accordingly. Journalists don’t have to write for newspapers , journalists don’t have to have a degree in journalism – some people are, by definition, journalists and they don’t even know it. So what the hell is journalism?

“It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.” - Tom Brokaw.

Dr Redman seems to agree: whatever it is, journalism is about telling factual stories. And I think that is the most important thing I learned this week.

There is an art to telling factual stories; you have to get a balance between informing and entertaining the audience. A good journalist can do both. Unfortunately, I gather from my eighteen years of interacting with the media that too many journalists put their emphasis on the latter. Perhaps a wiser version of me from the future will disagree, but in my humble opinion the primary goal of a journalist is to eloquently inform. Entertainment is unquestionably important but it should come later. Let’s say an article is informative but boring; the audience may lose interest. However, if an article is a riveting wad of superficial rumours, the journalist loses both their credibility and their role in society. Oscar Wilde reminds us that “by giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

This week I also realised the importance of journalism in democratic societies. People need to know what is going on in the world – the good stuff and the bad stuff.  I found an interesting quote by Charles Kuralt: “I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.”

I’m glad that I decided to study journalism. Language can be hard tool to use, but I like using it – especially when I get to use it for the purpose of informing the public about what’s happening in the world. Moreover, I’m glad that I decided to complete my journalism degree in tandem with a bachelor of science; telling factual stories seems to be intrinsic to both. Dr Geoff Garret, Queensland’s Chief Scientist and guest speaker at UQ last week, reminded the audience of the imperative role of scientists as good communicators. Scientific research is fairly useless unless people know what is being discovered. As an aspiring scientist, I can practice communication right now, so welcome to my blog - my little space on the internet where I can tell you about all the nerdy science things that I like and reflect upon my first baby steps into the big, nebulous realm of journalism. Enjoy.