Why Media Logs Are Important

"Keeping a media-use log allows you to frame your media use in your own terms, to tell your own digital story."

If a historian were to try to rediscover you in 100 years, what sources would they use to investigate you? What would be the primary source documents they would use to understand your daily life? How would they investigate your digital footprint?

Every media company from whom we buy our digital services keeps records of our use. Our utility bills, our email records, which movies we rent from Netflix: these records form an intimate portrait of who we are and what we care about. If we look at our digital records as part of history in the making, the documents pertaining to our media consumption become primary sources in constructing our present understanding (the present process of encoding memory) of ourselves. By viewing our digital documents as primary sources that tell a story about us, basic documents take on new meaning. Receipts or phone bills: they are not just hapless pieces of paper, but actually meaningful texts that can help us reconstruct a narrative of ourselves.

(Incidentally, I experienced the importance of utility bills as more than just bills while living in Japan. I realized they, like every other piece of Japanese writing I encountered, were an opportunity for language learning. To understand my phone bill, I'd have to understand the characters in which it was written. Thus, living in a foreign language environment leads me to look at my utility bills through a new lens: not just a tool for paying a company, but also a textbook for my language learning. Though I still can't read a lot of my utility bills, enlisting this process in the future might help me to become a better reader of Japanese.)

However, any historian or biographer knows that another meaningful way to construct a portrait of any individual is through a close reading of his or her diary. A diary or journal provides a window into the events, thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions of someone's life. Moreover, they're encoded in the author's original language, framing one's life on one's own terms. Presumably the symbols and language contained in one's diary reflect meaningfully about how they see the world. Future discussions could center philosophically around whether or not diaries are truthful representations of their author's lives.

In the so-called "digital-age," there is a need for both media-literacy and critical reflection on our the use of our digital media. In this process, both types of data are important: the quantitative measurements and the records produced by media companies, as well as diaries, blogs, or journals that tell the story of our media use on our own terms.

Keeping a media-use log allows you to frame your media use in your own terms, to tell your own digital story. At the same time, we should hold ourselves accountable to the raw facts about our media use: the cost of our electricity or how many hours we log in front of the computer or TV every day. And our media company's records provide us a meaningful account of all this. We should have access to use these records to think critically about our media use, and we should take advantage of the access we have if we are serious about media literacy.

Moreover, it's important for us to share our information with each other. Currently, big media companies like Comcast or Google have a wealth of information about our habits and activities. That information is a source of power. If we want to gain collective independence from the few media companies that control most of the information flow, we should de-monopolize their hold on our personal information by making the records for ourselves.

Thus, daily digital storytelling through diaries, blogs or other social media have the ability to help us raise our awareness of our own media usage, and contribute to a field of information which can be a source of power. Increasingly, it's important we understand our digital footprint.