Identifying my Media Habits

My dad has always been notorious for his love of buying new and innovative gadgets. Every day, I can see him looking at videos about new phone models and the latest gadgets released by Samsung, Xiao Mi, and other flagship-releasing companies. It’s no surprise then that when you visit our house, you will see a wide variety of devices hanging around. Most of it was owned by him.

Although we own a lot of gadgets, I mostly use our family computer and phone to access the internet and media. Because of my studies, it’s really unavoidable for me to use them every day. I use it a lot for my studies, such as researches and for browsing ideas for my projects. On my free time, I would often use my phone or the computer as a way to entertain myself. I would play games, watch tv shows, or read a comic or book online. I never really had a lot of restrictions when it comes to using these gadgets, so I always found myself using too much of it. I would use it for the whole day, nonstop. It was a repeating cycle and it’s like I cannot stop myself from using it. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but even think how different my life would be if I just stopped from using media entirely in my spare time. Maybe I would focus into drawing and reading books more. Maybe I would have spent more time doing things that are more productive than just scrolling through my phone every day.

The same can be somewhat said with my family as well. Save for my mom, most of us spent our time online. My usage of media was not really so different from my family’s. Most of them use it for their jobs and as a way of entertaining themselves. Since most of us are quite tech savvy, all of us easily adapted in using new media gadgets. There was a time when my mom had a brand new phone and she had no idea how to browse through it. I was able to teach her how to despite the phone being a different brand than mine.

In my family, it was like a custom for the younger sibling to inherit the older sibling’s old phone whenever they bought a new one. It was like a person passing down his heirloom to his son. (I guess it’s kind of funny if you think about it that way.) I would always end up getting the old phones of my siblings, so I was never really influenced by the media gadgets that others use. However, I do get influenced by the types of media that my friends are into.