1) According to my Screen Time (or similar) app, I have been spending ___8____ hours a day on my phone lately. This is ___3 hours____ more than normal times.
2) The social media platforms I use most are:
#1 __Instagram____ (Instagram, Twitter, etc.) Time spent per recent day __3__________ #2 ______Twitter_______ Time spent per recent day ___4_________
3) This is how I get most of my news (going through social media/going straight to a news app, radio, etc.): Most of my news I get either through social media or because someone sent me a new article on the latest updates.
I saw this one post on twitter about a week ago, and it was about Netflix’s new advertisements in public places. Basically Netflix put ads up spoiling some of their top shows, for example they spoiled Narcos, Stranger Things, and Love is Blind. Underneath each spoiler alert was the phrase: “you should’ve #stayed home”. This post really resonated with me because I thought it was a clever way to kill two birds with one stone. On one hand Netflix still has their own best interest at heart and is trying to make a profit however they are also providing incentive for people to follow social distancing. Either way it is a win win for Netflix because the more people that stay home the more people probably indulging in a little or a lot of extra Netflix. I think why this stood out to me because it’s very empowering to see how individual corporations are making their contributions to help flatten the curve. It is not only a witty way to do so, but it is also effective because I know people hate their spoilers.
Last night my Dad, who still gets the physical New York Times, showed me an article that really resonated with me personally because it spoke to what the class of 2020 is currently going through entering into a recession post graduation. The article by David Yaffe and jaclyn Peiser was titled For the Class of 2020, a Job-Eating Virus Recalls the Great Recession. The article not only talks about interviews and internships being cancelled and postponed for graduates seeking future careers but it discusses the possible future setback that many 2020 graduates will surely face, some possibly having effects even a decade after this is all over. They interviewed a couple senior whose futures have now been put on hold indefinitely, and the worry in their words really resonated with me. Although I am lucky enough to have received a job offer in this climate I am worried for my friends, my brilliant friends, who had huge plans post graduation and now those plans have been put on hold indefinitely. For seniors all around the world this pandemic is hitting particularly hard and we’re all trying to grapple with the reality of the future we are facing. This NYT’s article was the first article I saw that really empathized with the human struggle and impact this pandemic is going to have outside the health industry.
I’ve realized throughout these past weeks that I’ve stopped consuming news in the traditional sense, from direct news outlets, and I’ve purposely tried to distance myself. Instead I’ve used my media consumption to focus on more lightheart memes or jokes surrounding the situation. I don’t find these to be insensitive but instead there is a sense of community where people can all still appreciate humor even in hard times. I find myself using instagram less and less because everyone is just reposting more news, so it has become a sort of echo chamber of everything I’m trying to distance myself from. However I still use twitter because although there is news, there are also more memes. I do not think my change in media consumption has shifted my general views, political, cultural, or social, but instead just reinforced what I already believed.
Jessica's ASCJ 200 Blog 