Doing a daily blog for 7 days actually isn’t that bad, I’m finding it quite enjoyable to have some rhythm around my university timetable and it definitely gives me something to do when I get a little bored.

So today I figured out something cool, and that is this…

How cool is this? This gives me an outline of how much media I use by way of my iPhone’s battery usage. I understand that this is purely my iPhone and not my MacBook, etc. – but I still think its really cool! So, judging by this, I guess today I need to speak about Facebook… right?

So, Facebook it is! It’s currently 4pm and Facebook has used up 28% of my battery life – this is shocking to me as I feel like I haven’t spent much time on it today, but I guess in reality, I have. So I decided to do a little research on this because I believe that subconsciously I am constantly checking Facebook. I found an article from CNN that gave some great insight into supporting my theory, it quotes facts such as:

• “On average, study subjects checked phones 34 times a day out of habit or compulsion”
• “Once the brain gets used to positive feedback, reaching for the phone is automatic”
• “Urge to check lives in striatum, the brain area that governs habitual actions”
• “Habitually checking can also become a way to avoid interacting with people” (Cohen, 2011)

Similarly to Instagram, I get a lot of my news from Facebook. As soon as I wake up in the morning, it’s one of the first things I check – usually even before text messages, emails or missed calls. With the unpredictably of our world nowadays, it’s important to me to check the news before other things in my life. I would agree that, on average, I check Facebook around 30-40 times per day. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m on it for a long time, sometimes I am consciously aware that I am checking Facebook for literally 10 seconds or less – maybe a notification that someone has liked something, or perhaps a memory notification… it really can be as simple as a quick 5 to 10 second check. I know that Facebook is the online media that is perhaps the most detrimental to my life, it hardly has anything positive on the news feed, and is linked to depression and poor mental health. Increasingly I am finding it more popular for people to delete or have no Facebook account, and am finding that these people are generally more happy that they don’t have to put on an online facade.

So, with that, I guess I have a lot to think about with regards to my online media use – especially in the field of Facebook. It’s a deep, dark hole that is hard to break free of, but I guess I’m probably just a little too vain to delete my Facebook just yet.