Today marked the final day of documenting our media usage, and it began the same way almost every other day this week did. I woke up and browsed my notifications, responding to a few. I had uni today and when I arrived home in the evening, I posted again on Instagram, this time a picture of the cityscape that I had taken on my iPhone 7 in the afternoon.

I captioned the photo “my love for this city is boundless”, and shared the photo with my small platform of followers. I went onto Facebook and shared a video about legalising LGBTIQ marriage and then headed to bed. I didn’t caption the video, as it was highly self explanatory, however this action of sharing carried a lot of weight for me as I rarely to never share anything on Facebook at all.

Below is an image of the applications that most consume my battery usage, which accurately represents the applications that I most use. Note the percentages of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, in relation to the other apps.

I thought a lot about what I had learned about myself and the ways that I had communicated and connected with online media over the space of a week. I had come to several realisations about what platforms I favoured and why I favoured them (particularly Instagram and Snapchat). I developed a more profound understanding of how online media has embedded itself into the fabric our everyday lives, particularly in the form of social media. Staying connected has become so essential to existing, particularly as a millennial, even to the extent of communicating with the same person on several platforms at once. Communication has evolved into this lifestyle, with our catalyst resting in our back pockets and the palms of our hands. Social media means something different to everyone, but this week I realised what it truly meant to me. It is an entity that exists as part of my life, but online medias limitlessness is something that I am fully capable of separating myself from.