Personal Narrative: My Total Mediated Communication
On average I sleep 8 hours a night, that takes my day from 24 down to 16. In 16 hours there are 960 minutes. My total mediated communication in a waking day is 43.229%.
As a college student, I would expect majority of my communication to be using technology because that is how I have time to communicate with friends and family, and that is how majority of assignments are done. When I take a look at the number, it is shocking because I feel like I am always talking to people, whether it is in class participating or having actual conversations. In this day and age when people are having a face to face conversation, their head in usually stuck in their phones at the same time. Demographics play a huge role in how much one communicates in a
mediated or non-mediated way. In Raleigh, North Carolina there is a huge population of college students, there for mediated communication is how we communicate. If one were to take a walk into a Stein Mart on a Wednesday afternoon, you would see significantly less of this, if any non-mediated communication at all. The average age of someone who shops in Stein Mart is about 50 years old. They grew up in the day and age where the only way to talk to someone was to see them face to face. Since this is how they were raised, this is how they still communicate. Being in college means a faster paced life, less free time and I pray that I get to opportunity to see my friends in person, and not just a picture on Instagram. Recording these numbers and calculating how much of my day was spend on my cell phone or on the computer was shocking. It makes me take a step back and want to make the plans to have dinner with my friends or to get in the car to go home to see my parents, rather than just seeing them thru the screen of an iPhone. In this day and age I think that we need to get our faces out of technology and go see what the world is doing around us. Have a non-mediated conversation with the person on the bus sitting next to us.
As a college student, I would expect majority of my communication to be using technology because that is how I have time to communicate with friends and family, and that is how majority of assignments are done. When I take a look at the number, it is shocking because I feel like I am always talking to people, whether it is in class participating or having actual conversations. In this day and age when people are having a face to face conversation, their head in usually stuck in their phones at the same time. Demographics play a huge role in how much one communicates in a
mediated or non-mediated way. In Raleigh, North Carolina there is a huge population of college students, there for mediated communication is how we communicate. If one were to take a walk into a Stein Mart on a Wednesday afternoon, you would see significantly less of this, if any non-mediated communication at all. The average age of someone who shops in Stein Mart is about 50 years old. They grew up in the day and age where the only way to talk to someone was to see them face to face. Since this is how they were raised, this is how they still communicate. Being in college means a faster paced life, less free time and I pray that I get to opportunity to see my friends in person, and not just a picture on Instagram. Recording these numbers and calculating how much of my day was spend on my cell phone or on the computer was shocking. It makes me take a step back and want to make the plans to have dinner with my friends or to get in the car to go home to see my parents, rather than just seeing them thru the screen of an iPhone. In this day and age I think that we need to get our faces out of technology and go see what the world is doing around us. Have a non-mediated conversation with the person on the bus sitting next to us.