On this beautiful morning, it concludes my 24-hours of studying my social media and news intake. In the following blog, I am going to talk about social media outlets that I use as well as how I feel they influence me and my day-to-day life. I start my day like any other day and wake up, grab my phone, and sit down to enjoy breakfast. The first thing I do is check my texts or group chat from my fraternity brothers. When I eat my breakfast I typically watch Netflix, specifically NCIS, which is a show based in Washington D.C. (Which inherintely comes with politics of some sort).
Typically, I watch Netflix, but, I also have a student-based Hulu account which also bundles with Spotify, my other source of media. With the student account, there are still advertisements and every so often there is one that involves something with the president, but nothing more than that. During the weekdays, I spend less time on my electronic devices, but over the weekends I have more time to myself.
As I am writing this, I struggle to find myself really being influenced or even interacting with the “regular” amount of news content. Most of my day, I try to stay off social media because I have never been a typical millennial who has to check Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram every 10 minutes.
Not being an active user of social media, I feel that I sometimes deprive myself from the current events and other newsworthy events because I am living in my own bubble of my world. During this timespan where I am being hyperaware of the content I take in as a consumer, I was able to see that I do get advertisements and some political news but they are videos lasting no longer than 30 seconds.
Whenever I have some downtime throughout my day, I like to use Tumblr and most advertisements are usually about products such as apparel or services such as auto insurance. However, I do follow some blogs there where people do reblog news posts but most blogs do not include their sources.
W
hen I get home for the day, I typically make dinner, clean up the apartment, and do homework or I try to do something creative such as baking. For some of my baking recipes, I use Pinterest. Pinterest does have advertisements but nothing that is even close to a 2 o’clock news story.
Overall, I do not feel that news has much of an impact on me or my way of thinking. Throughout the rest of the year, I do want to increase my overall news intake to learn more about the world around me. Because of the lack of sources for most of the news media I encounter, I would rank an average of about a 2 out of 10 for credibility because I have ran into some Onion-like articles that look so real but most of the times they turn out to be satire or fake news.
