I’ve spent the last week documenting my online media use, examining how I use the internet and reflecting on what it brings to my life and work. I enumerated the platforms I used, what I used each of them for, and how many times I accessed them. There were some things I left out: if I listed every time I sent a photo of a cute puppy to my girlfriend, for example, I would quickly run out of room for anything else.

But what my documentation did find is that, at least this week, the vast majority of my online media use has been consumption rather than creation. As someone who dabbles in media making regularly (photography, writing, podcasting, etc.) I usually use the internet for publishing purposes much more often than I did this week. Rarely a week goes by without me posting some photos to Instagram, or writing film reviews on Letterboxd, but this week I browsed Instagram and Letterboxd while barely posting to them at all. Part of the reason for this is that I had a couple of university assessments due this week, so I had less time to spend on my own extracurricular media making. How I use the internet for creation, and why I did less of that this week than I normally do, is something for me to consider and evaluate further.

Early in the week I started off meticulously documenting the platforms I used as I was using them, collating everything into a post at the end of each day, but as the week went on I slacked off a little and just took stock of what I’d used at the end of each day without doing any real-time documentation. It greatly helped that most social media platforms now have a stream or log of your activity, which meant that I could just look through my activity log and get an idea of how much I’d been using each platform, rather than writing anything down myself. I suspect if someone had observed me full-time and noted down what I was doing, rather than relying on the strength of my own recollection, I would have collected much more information than I did. But as it is, I think what I’ve done gives me a good, well-rounded idea of my online media habits.