Instead of a DAY IN MY LIFE lets do a DAY ON MY PHONE! During the 24 hours media diet activity. I kept track of my media consumption. I really tried to focus on misinformation.
3:30 am: The first thing I do in the morning is take a quick 10 minutes to scroll through TIKTOK and Instagram, and check my message. Most of my messages this morning were from my friend who sent me several videos on tiktok. The videos are mainly funny animal videos and relatable work content videos. I also check my emails real quick to make sure i dont miss anything important.
5:00 am: During my lunch break, I scroll through tiktok again. A lot of the content I am consuming are fan edits of Evan peters specifically or adults, since the new season just came out, I also get a lot of pilates content. I also caught up on some more videos on instagram and tiktok from friends that I wasn’t able to watch earlier that morning. I had about 13 videos to watch from my friends. A lot of my social media is influenced by what my friends send me because I will usually watch the videos they send me first before I consume my own media.
7:20 am: During my next break, I mainly scroll through instagram and check my emails. I like looking through Gracie Nielson and this cafe pop in AZ, Middle child, on instagram because I like their aesthetic content. Most of what I see on instagram is lifestyle, fashion, and matcha content. While nothing seems questionable to me a lot of this type of content is opinion based. I also check my email for package updates and I am subscribed to reddit so see if there’s any posts worth reading. This time there was an update from my game that there was an event happening today. So I quickly went to instagram and checked if it was true. It was!
11:00 am: When I get home, I spend about an hour doom scrolling through TIKTOK. This is where I did come across such questionable content. I am mostly doomscrolling and I barely remember any content I consumed. Which is pretty bad. But one topic I remember seeing because I did a small deep dive into the topic is the Lindsay Clancy case. Some of the videos I saw were from new related accounts and were discussing her final trial. I saw people claiming that many mothers showed up outside wearing pink shirts to show their support for Lancey Clancy. Because this is a criminal case, I am very skeptical of the content I see about it. I wonder if people don’t believe she didn’t murder her children. I also wonder if I’m seeing the full story. I did look it up but didn’t really see much about the occurrence. (if your interested in the case heres a quick summary by the BBC)
I also remember seeing videos about some new matcha cafes that I am excited to try. When it comes to my matcha/ cafe content I take other opinions seriously because they are super opinion based and if someone claims “this is the best matcha in AZ” I have to take it with a grain of salt. I did see a new cafe open in chandler and someone was claiming “bts approved matcha spot”. I did some more research on the matter and found Taehyoung from BTS apparently visited the cafe’s Las Vegas location, but never actually gave an opinion on the cafe.
1:00 pm: I started playing video games at this point of the day. After seeing that an event was happening in Shadows of Saintfour 2 I decided to play! I am also playing through the newest update, it came out 2 weeks ago but I just got around to playing it.
3;30 pm: I check my emails again to see if there’s anything of importance. I am subscribed to the New York Times, they came out with “Have you closed your ‘social rings’ this week?“ I really liked the article about social life and how we can make more time for those we care about and how social circles can affect us mentally. I honestly felt like it was a great article for me and reminded me that even though life gets busy it’s important to reach out to friends, not just for them but for our own mental health. Definitely give it a read!
5:00 pm: After dinner I begin to clean the dishes, and I like to watch youtube while I do so. I enjoy videos from Slushy Noobz and Payton King. I love to rewatch Slushy Noobz episodes videos. I am very intentional about choosing my content. I enjoy content that doesn’t require my full attention. If you haven’t watched any of Slushy Noobs videos I recommend their minecraft video collab with Mattia Polibio, it is a good laugh! (link to video here)
6:00-8;00 pm: I continue to play Shadows of Saintfour 2 and end up finishing the newest update. I switched to playing Waterlily.
8;30 pm: Before going to bed I scroll through tiktok again. I stumbled on a travel video hack talking about a hotel “hack” The video explains that there are some hotels that allow people to rent a room for only part of the day at a discounted rate. It’s called Dayuse and I found this so interesting as someone who travels a lot! I definitely plan to use this next time.
REFLECTION
Looking back at my media use over 24hrs, I didn’t encounter a huge amount of content that was misinformation. There was a good amount of content I saw that could be more misleading because it was opinion based. The Lindsay Clancy videos were the most important content for me to fact-check because it’s a real case happening real time. I wanted to know whether I was seeing old news or misinformation and if it was credible. The hotel travel hack was another good example because it sounded reasonable, but I did have to check if this is a real website and not a scam. One thing I found interesting was that most of the questionable content came from algorithm based platforms like TikTok, rather than the media I intentionally chose. When I was playing video games or watching a specific YouTube creator, I was choosing the content myself. When I was scrolling through TikTok, I was constantly being exposed to new information without intentionally searching for it. Overall, This activity showed me that I should be especially careful with serious news stories, health or lifestyle advice, travel “hacks,” and influencer recommendations because these are all areas where a short social media post may leave out important information