After visiting the community centre, it seemed appropriate to monitor personal internet habits to see how I use it and why I feel the need to go on it everyday. Also, In order to understand what the market of aged 8 plus children want out of the internet it is useful to understand what different people use the internet for. One person being myself, one being a teenager in the higher age group of 15 who would be deemed maybe "too old" for CBBC and one being an 11 year old.
What is essential is how technology is ubiquitous and is accessible at any time. In today's society you do not need to be sat at a computer to access the internet. Now, ipads, laptops and mobile phones allow internet access on the move. We now live in a "global village" (McLuhan, pg6, 1965) which is where the internet and new technologies have transported the world.
My Internet Habits:
In the name of research, for one day I have monitored my daily usage of technologies that I own. The table below shows my consumption of the media.
Personal Media Consumption: Georgina , 19 years old | ||
TV 3 hours 20 minutes | Mobile (Social Networking) Twitter for 10 minutes Facebook for an hour | Laptop Switched to Laptop so I could work anywhere in the house. 1 Hour. |
Mobile (Internet) 10 minutes (Searched on how to spell a word) | Mobile (Talking) 40 minutes | MP3/ IPOD No minutes |
Mobile (Texting) Received 10 Sent 15 | PC 3 hours and 30 minutes Completing work and browsing on: | Console Gaming 30 minutes on the Wii |
Newspapers 1 Read, The Guardian 2 Articles read online via Facebook. | Blogging 1 hour 30 minutes for university work. | Online Video www.youtube.com |
Reflection on My User Habits:
I remember having my first computer aged 8 but it did not have internet connection. Now, a computer without internet connection through a child's eyes is deemed useless as what is there to do. Back then, when my computer had no connection to the virtual world so many of us live in I played on the same game with bad graphics that crashed multiple times de to the low specification on the computer. Ultimately, it is easy to see how much times have changed as now, I take for granted the internet and computers.
What is recognisable is that many of my friends and I are constantly multi-tasking on the internet and never just going on one website at a time. This is the opposite of what I found while at the community centre as the children picked one website and stayed on that.
Truthfully, I use the internet for educational purposes such as reading on-line journals and keeping in touch with the university network but the purpose of the internet for me is all about personal gain including keeping in touch with people and on-line shopping. Sherry Turkle stated:
"Online life, then and now, can serve as a kind of identity workshop. But in the intervening years, something fundamental has changed. These days, our smartphones are always there as portals to the virtual. When a conversation turns difficult, when a situation is tense, we can always bail out of where we are." (Turkle,2011,online)This quote is important in understanding my own internet habits as I use my mobile phone to interact constantly with people and log on to Facebook and Twitter without even realising. Also, the uses and gratifications model (made by Blumler and Katz) can be applied as I use the internet as a from of escapism which comes under entertainment within the model.
A smartphone that can connect to the internet, plan daily events, call, text and video call people and play games. This is not only a example of convergence of the highest form but also shows how easy it is to access new technology and the internet in seconds.
User Habits of a 15 Year Old:
Media Consumption: Samantha Aged 15 | ||
TV 4 hours | Mobile (Social Networking) Facebook for an hour | Laptop 1 Hour |
Mobile (Internet) None | Mobile (Talking) None | MP3/ IPOD Listened to ipod for 1 hour. |
Mobile (Texting) Received 20 Sent 30 | PC 5 Hours mainly on Facebook and Youtube. | Console Gaming 1 hour 3o minutes on the Wii |
Newspapers None | Blogging None | Online Video www.youtube.com |
User Habits of a 11 Year old:
Media Consumption: Samantha Aged 15 | ||
TV 3 hours | Mobile (Social Networking) None | Laptop 2 hours on Tiny Chat (Webcam) |
Mobile (Internet) None | Mobile (Talking) None | MP3/ IPOD None |
Mobile (Texting) Received 10 Sent 8 | PC 5 Hours mainly on Facebook and Stardoll | Console Gaming None |
Newspapers None | Blogging None | Online Video www.youtube.com |
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