My experience for this assignment was eye-opening! I wasn’t aware of how often I would open social media reflexively, and seeing how many times I noticed that behavior during my measured intervals was concerning to say the least. Paying attention to the different contexts for when I would open social media, a large factor was the ease of access. Whether it was opening up a new browser tab or simply a swipe and tap, the action was a reflex. Noticing that I wasn’t even aware of clicking open a new tab, typing “y” to bring up Youtube (my most frequent site that starts with a “y”), and pressing Enter previously was shocking. The habit was well ingrained, which only makes it harder to change.
I set up alarms for each half hour during my peak work times (12-7pm) to remind me to log the behavior. The behavior was whenever I would go on to Instagram/Tiktok/play a game/watch Youtube videos/scroll Snapchat news in the middle of working times. Interestingly, having the accountability of recording as many instances of the behavior as I could made me more aware of when I felt the “itch” to do it. I would be more aware of each time I did the behavior, and sometimes resisted it to try to have a longer focus period. Perhaps logging would help me improve how consciously I opened social media.
Below is the feedback cycle and connection circle of my behavior. The feedback cycle was the larger trend in actions that fed one another, while the connection circle revealed a bit more behind the motivation/causation behind certain actions. For the connection circle, I denoted “normal” connections in blue, negative connections in red, and actions that helped me break out of negative habits in green.
As for what I would do differently next time, I think that a more accurate way to capture instances of the behavior would be to have some extension/app made to specifically detect and log those cases. Gathering contextual data, such as what I was last doing on my phone/laptop would be useful when logging the context for the behavior, as I found that I would not remember what I did before (since this behavior is a habit). This exercise has certainly made me think about what would be the best balance between automatic and manual logging, as well as how much contextual information is needed.
