Overview

SCENARIO
Analyzing Your Media Diet 12
1

• PURPOSE

Understanding what and how much media you consume

• AUDIENCE

You and your instructor

• CONTEXT

Your life

• TEXT

Raw data and 1,500-word analytical essay

Overview

For this assignment, you’ll keep a diary and write a brief analysis of the media that you engage with during a 24-hour period. The scenario is a real and immediate one: your daily life. The topic is just as real, but deceptively trivial: the mass media around you.

There are two primary parts to this scenario:

  1. A notebook that you use to track all of the mass media you encounter during one 24-hour period
  2. A 1,500-word essay analyzing those media, including an in-depth analysis of at least one specific piece of media that you encountered

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-taking technology is convenient for you: A smartphone will work as well as a small paper notebook, but be sure it’s something you have with you all the time so you can take notes while you’re watching, reading, or hearing media. If you wait until later to record information, you’re going to forget a lot of it. You’ll also need to turn in the raw data with your assignment, so be sure you can somehow copy or export the data into a format you can give to your teacher.

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-mails for things like Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes” or “techno music playing in the background at the campus cafeteria.”

2

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.

8:00-8:30 AM Music In car Radio in car tuned to KROQ Not really paying attention, but sang along to “My Generation.”
8:00-8:30 AM Billboards In car Ads for local car dealers, radio stations, anti-drunk driving campaign, etc There were at least 40, but I only remembered these vaguely and didn’t really read any of them closely — I’m driving!
8:00-9:00 PM TV show Apartment Rerun of Nip/Tuck Watched w/roommates. Made jokes about fashion victims (literally).
8:00-9:00 PM 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.
3

At the end of the 24-hour period, analyze your diary entries and write your essay. Your analytical essay should have an overarching point that you discovered while working with your raw data. The first part of the essay should describe what you observed about yourself, about media in our culture, and so on. The second half of the essay should analyze a single media event in more detail. The following sections have strategies and questions that will help you analyze your data.