48h Condensed Tracking Notes

First 24 hours of tracking

I started the tracking at 8AM, October 25th. This was a little earlier than planned. During the first day I spent approximately four hours on digital activitites; and 25 minutes of these were spent on actual social media use. The 25 minutes usage of social media was divided into 17 minutes on Facebook, six minutes on Twitter and two minutes on Instagram.

I spent most of the day at work teaching younger students about the term brainstorming.and the construction of it. For this I use my laptop actively to do a presentation and Q&A sessions. During the small breaks I used my smartphone to check the latest updates on Facebook and Twitter. I have an implemented service on my HTC phone that presents updates from different social sites, for me mainly Twitter and Facebook, in a common and structured collection. A few family members had made some Facebook updates that either involved my name or my picture, or interested me in a way that I wanted to react on it (like it and/or comment on it). A friend had laid a private message for me that I answered as well.

When I got home I turned on my computer and logged into the gaming community service Steam where a couple of my friends were online playing the same game, Infinite Crisis. I decided to join them and we teamed up in the game and through Skype (group call). In the time distributions given above I include Steam and Skype as social media tools and not social media sites.

The last thing I do before focusing on getting some sleep is to through the updates on my primary social media sites that I haven't seen. My primary social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I have several other social media site accounts, but for now I don't think I get much out of using the additional ones, I guess. Do I get much out of using the primary ones? Uhm. Hmm.

Second 24 hours of tracking

In the morning when writing down notes about this day's first encounter with social media it occured to me that I have a sort of morning ritual that my mind isn't very fund of deviating from. Every morning I go through the updates that I haven't seen on my primary social media sites. I feel mentally unsatisfied if I haven't done this before I eat my breakfast. In some sense I feel left out and not sufficiently updated, just like finding out that someone has been keeping information from you that you would like to know. The difference here being that I don't know beforehand if there is anything at the social media sites that I would like to know, and the lack of knowing seems uncomfortable for me. Thus with non-digital social interaction I presume that I already know what I want to know, and if not, someone will tell me eventually; but with digital social interaction I presume that there is something available 'out there' that I want to know, but don't right now.

This day I was at a meeting in Northern Denmark. I left home at 7:30AM. I was home again at 3PM. During these 7h 30m I didn't check up on social media sites once. The only digital encounters I had was that I read and replied a couple of important e-mails. Then something else occured to me just as another board member put his smartphone in front of me and told me to look at a certain twitter update with a corresponding picture: I can't necessarily blame myself and me alone for the cause of digital encounters I have during a day. Sometimes the cause might fall onto others as well. Interesting. This happened several times during the meeting breaks. When I got home I didn't really have any urge regarding social media sites, although I did go through my primary ones anyway. Later on i visited my parents for a couple of hours. Then it happened again as my mother, and later on my little sister, showed me some things on different social media sites that I just had to see. I wrote down all of the encounters, of course, and it turned out that during this day I spend a total of 20 minutes on facebook of which 15 minutes weren't based on my own initiative.

The rest of this saturday, before I went to bed, I didn't encounter or interact with any social media sites. Other digital activities, e.g. watching TV and playing videogames, is a whole other story.

End of tracking

I've picked up some interesting data by doing this tracking of my own digital activities. Only 48 hours of tracking can and have revealed aspects and things one haven't thought about earlier and maybe wouldn't have thought about otherwise, e.g. habits and routines. I think the tracking has done me good in the sense of getting rich and useful data for later assignments. Furthermore I haven't used as much time on social media sites as I was expecting which makes me a little less worried about the media diet (media fasting) that is to be completed very soon, November 4th to 8th.

My video camera is transferring the recorded video bits to my computer at this very moment. As soon as I have looked it through myself it will be edited and uploaded to this blog.