My Media Diet

How much are we paying attention?

Our phones are such a common part in our lives that we sometimes don’t pay attention to how much we use them. This past week I made a couple graphs looking at how much I use my phone on an average day and how much time I spend on some of the applications in a single week. The graph at the top shows how much time I spent on my phone each day of that week. The day I spent the most time on my phone was, Friday which was 6 hours and 40 minutes, total. This was an eye opener for me to realize that I spend almost a quarter of the day on my phone. 6 hours is 25% of each day and I averaged around 5 ½ hours on my phone each day of the week. Another crazy factor to look at, are the apps that we use. Social media apps like Snapchat, TikTok etc. stride for people to spend all day using their app. This made me curious as to how much I am falling for their marketing strategies. The second graph shows how much time I spent on these social media apps in that same week. I found out that I spend most my time on Snapchat with a total of almost 7 hours in one week. TikTok was the second app I spent the most time on which was 4 hours in a week, other applications like Instagram, and iMessage were around 2 hours.

Social media companies have made it almost impossible to ignore the notifications that they send us. Whether we are getting tagged in a picture, receiving a new message, or even checking the weather, we can check it all using only one device. Social media creators aren’t worried about how much time we spend on our phones using their applications, and neither are the consumers. I recommend that you try tracking your stats for just one week and see how much you use your phone daily, because I can certainly say that I will be keeping a close eye to how much I use my phone in the future.