As a double major student, the hectic schedule has become my daily routine in school. However, I often obligate myself to read news stories every day, and I was proud that I did it well until my 24-hour media consumption log came out. It reveals that I am a passive multitasker in media consumption, which, to some extent, ruined my experience as it diminishes my efficiency and narrows my interest span.
My journey of multitasking starts from early morning. When I woke up, I took out my phone under the pillow and proceeded to check the notification center, in which a sexual abuse case released from Weibo caught my eyes. Then, I went to brush my teeth while watching the interview video of the victim. Similarly, I checked out the latest issue of the New Yorker when I was having my brunch, listened to podcasts while walking on the street, and browsed through Twitter and Instagram feeds at the time I was working on my assignments. While it seems that I have done extensive reading in the past day, I failed to retrieve many essential details and found that I have only spent less than an hour in reading, which is far lower than my expectations.
This is my favorite picture of the week, retrieved from The New Yorker story I read.
To be frank, I was dismayed by the revelation that I became a frivolous reader mostly due to my habit of multitasking, and perils of it are evident from scientific researches. A study from Stanford provides definitive conclusion that heavy media multitasking makes people more vulnerable to distractions and renders lower cognitive efficiency. In other words, people cannot recall or even misinterpret information they gathered from media.
Furthermore, multitasking makes me a passive reader who could only read from a limited span of topics. As I often squeeze my time of reading with other tasks, I rely heavily on push notifications or newsletter emails to find stories. Nowadays, companies develop algorithms that can identify users’ interest from big data and deliver them related stories precisely. This may be beneficial, as it provides people attentive to the topic with more information, but it is surely detrimental to me.
I started to focus on political news since the U.S.-China trade war. Subsequently, for more than a year, most push alerts to me are stories about politics (and all articles I read yesterday are about politics!). Yes, I would like to read them, but not just them. I also wish to learn about architecture, design, and digital culture, but they barely recommend stories from these fields. It may be because these stories cannot prompt people’s reactions and comments as political ones could, which renders lower ad revenue, thus leads to decreased distribution by algorithms.
Reflecting on my media consumption habit shown in the log, I believe multitasking ruined it as I even cannot recall what I have read during the day. Maybe it’s time to set up a specific time every day dedicated exclusively for reading.
(word count: 496)
Xiangyuan Chi 