SCENARIO | |
Analyzing Your Media Diet | 12 |
• PURPOSE
Understanding what and how much media you consume
• AUDIENCE
You and your instructor
• CONTEXT
Your life
• TEXT
Raw data and 1,500-
Overview
For this assignment, you’ll keep a diary and write a brief analysis of the media that you engage with during a 24-
There are two primary parts to this scenario:
In addition, do some background reading about media consumption (see the Background Texts section). These short readings do not exhaust all of the issues you might observe during your media analysis — they’re just some examples of things you may want to think about as you write your analysis of your media diary.
For the media diary itself, you can use whatever note-
In that diary, you need to create an entry for each mass media item you see, hear, or otherwise experience. This should include a pretty wide range of things: billboards you see on your commute to school or work, flyers you see on bulletin boards, commercials and shows you see on TV (even if you’re not really paying much attention to them), music you hear playing on your own computer or elsewhere, books you read (including textbooks), spam that you receive (even if you delete it after reading only the subject line), traditional junk mail you receive by postal mail, and more. You obviously can’t write an exhaustive description of every single piece, so you’ll need to summarize occasionally in the media diary with a description like “deleted 20 spam e-
For each of those communications, you should make a short entry in your media diary that includes
Here are a few media events from a sample diary. Your diary, obviously, will be much longer.
8:00- |
Music | In car | Radio in car tuned to KROQ | Not really paying attention, but sang along to “My Generation.” |
8:00- |
Billboards | In car | Ads for local car dealers, radio stations, anti- |
There were at least 40, but I only remembered these vaguely and didn’t really read any of them closely — I’m driving! |
8:00- |
TV show | Apartment | Rerun of Nip/Tuck | Watched w/roommates. Made jokes about fashion victims (literally). |
8:00- |
Commercials | Apartment | At least a billion commercials during the show | Geico has finally stopped those stupid caveman ads. Saw ads for at least seven products I own, plus several I really need. |
At the end of the 24-