Thoughts Before Beginning the Activity
Before starting the assignment, I was thinking about how often I would be writing inside the journal. I was predicting that I had would have a massive amount of hours by the end of the 48 hour period. Teenagers and young adults like myself are always checking their phones whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, looking at missed phone calls, messages and etc. I thought it was crazy that every usage of my phone, I would have to record the number of times, the dates, the time, the length of time, address if it was a social interactivity, textual activity or both, what kind of activity and what activity was interrupted.
Quantitative Information of Phone Usage
Times I used my phone: 9
Hours/minutes spent using phone:
- Textual interactions- 15 seconds
- Social Interactions- 9 minutes and 20 seconds
- Activities that were both social and textual: 0 minutes
Number of times of the following I checked:
- Facebook- 4
- Twitter- 1
- Snapchat- 3
- Text Messages- 2
Number of times I checked my phone during following activities:
- Class- 2
- Workout- 3
- Hanging with friends- 2
- Studying for mid term- 1
- Sleep- 1
Results and Experience
Using the notebook and pen while using my phone showed how many times I would use my phone. Surprisingly I didn’t even use my phone much while doing to this activity. Overall, I used my phone for 9 minutes and 35 seconds during the 48 hour period. I was expecting that I would use my phone for a numerous of hours. I have noticed that I used Facebook more than any other social network and I still find myself today that I use Facebook a lot more than Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. I have been on Facebook 44.4% of the time while Snapchat was 33.3%, twitter 11.1% and texting 22.2% out of the nine times I had used my phone. This was a surprise yet I used a different technology other than my phone during the 48 hour period. I mostly used my Macbook to do things that I would do on my phone for instance, messaging, calling, going on social networks and etc. I felt that since I was going to be using a notebook and pen to record the amount of times I use my phone for 48 hours, it was going to be exhausting and mind bothering to do so I decided to use my Macbook. Using my Macbook made things easier for me not having to worry about writing down every usage of my phone since I am pretty sure that I would forget to do and basically it does the same things that my phone can do. It’s very fortunate to have technology like this so that you can have different ways of communicating to others unlike years back.
What I’ve learned about myself using communication technologies
I learned that not only do I use my phone or Mac for texting as a form of communicating but, I also go one social media networks to communicate with other people. Jenkins mentions different forms of participatory culture and one of them is affiliations. From what he describes, I center myself around Facebook and other social media networks like that and it’s easy to tell as to how many times I used Facebook during the 48 hour period. This says that I like to use social networks a lot but, I use different technologies to do what I usually do on my phone. Other than my phone I would use my iPad or Macbook.
Relationship with my phone
My relationship with my phone is strong but in this activity, it made me think of different options that I could use to communicate to people and go on social networks. I would use my phone if I was going off somewhere. I would use my Mac or iPad when I am either at home or somewhere that I will need either one of these things.