Good Media

Unplugged: A Respite From Media
Andrea Rock, contributing editor

Wow.
They did it!
They took a 24-hour respite from all media.
And how did they manage?

Not well, according to a study by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA), in partnership with the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change. The study engaged 1000 college students from around the globe in a 24-hour period of abstinence from all electronic and print media. When the time was up, the students were instructed to blog about their experience: whether they survived the 24 hours without media, how they felt about it, and, most importantly, what they learned about their own media consumption habits. Highlights of the findings are quite disturbing:

  1. A majority of students from every country failed to be able to go 24 hours “unplugged.”
  2. The students consistently used terminology that described their media usage as addiction. A typical response was: “Although I started the day feeling good, I noticed my mood started to change around noon. I started to feel isolated and lonely ... I noticed physically, that I began to fidget, as if I was addicted to my iPod and other media devices, and maybe I am.” “Media is my drug; without it I was lost,” said a UK student. “I am an addict. How could I survive 24 hours without it?” A US student noted: “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.” An Argentinean observed: “Sometimes I felt ‘dead,’” another simply said: “I felt sad, lonely and depressed.”
  3. Students feel so “connected” to their cell phones that without them, they feel they have lost a part of themselves. And they consider digital technology to be essential to the way they construct and manage their friendships and social lives. “There is no doubt that Facebook is really high profile in our daily life,” said a student from Hong Kong. “Everybody uses it to contact other persons, also we use it to pay attention to others.” A student from China wrote: “I love to visit social networking sites such as Facebook...or some websites like that, to see what something new with my friends, what they’re saying, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, or even to see some of their new pics.”
  4. Students construct different ‘brand’ identities for themselves by using different communication tools to reach different types of people. They phone their mothers, use text, IMs and Skype Chat with close friends, and Facebook is for their social groups. To communicate with professors and employers, they’ll use email. In essence, they use the various social media to construct their unique personae in an attempt to control what others think of them.
  5. For many students, going without media for 24 hours revealed a deep, hidden loneliness. Many couldn’t imagine how to fill up their empty hours without media. “When I couldn’t communicate with my friends” by mobile phone, reported a student from China, “I felt so lonely as if I was in a small cage on an island.” Beyond loneliness, some students realized that they had been substituting ‘virtual’ connections for real ones — that their relationship to media had become a surrogate friendship. A Chilean student wrote: “I felt lonely without multimedia. I arrived at the conclusion that media is a great companion.”
  6. The ‘news’ to today’s students, means ‘anything that just happened.’ There is no difference to them between worldwide events and friends’ everyday thoughts. They don’t seek out news and commentary. Rather, the news “finds” them: a feed or sidebar on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and others. They don’t discriminate between traditional newspapers or news websites and the news found in social media. One student’s comment reveals that their opinions are formed by headlines alone: “140 characters of news is all I need.”

The implications of such dependence on media should make all of us aware of our children’s, and our own habits of consumption. How would we do during a similar, 24-hour respite from media? It might be an exercise worth the whole family trying!

To see the whole study, and the source of all quotes in this article, go to:
http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/
http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/