Media Consumption Over 5 Day Period (Hours)
  29-Aug 30-Aug 31-Aug 1-Sep 2-Sep
TV 1 1 3
Computer for School 2 4 2 4
Youtube 1 2 1
Music 1 1 1
Reading for Class 3 4 2 4 2
Studying for GRE 4 4 4 4 2
Manga Online 1 1 1 1
Leisure Reading 1 1 3
Internet Browsing 1 1 2
Video Games 5
School Reading 2 2 1
Total 16 16 16 16 16

media-chart

To begin, I would say this is honestly not the most accurate depiction of my regular media usage.  I tend to use a lot of my media time in this week for my GRE which was on that Friday.  Realistically speaking on an average week, a lot more hours would have gone into either TV or Online usage.  What also helps with the contribution to my regular media consumption is the student organizations I am a part of where our main sort of purpose is media consumption.  Overall I would say the exercise did make me think about changing some things up with how I use my hours of media consumption.  I would obviously like to have more hours to do leisure reading.  That being said, it is not like I don’t read leisurely.  For example, besides novels that I’m actively reading, I am also an avid reader of comic books and manga, which are pretty much comic books from Japan.  Now while it is not the same narrative as a novel it is still literature in its own right and honestly they are one of the more common genres where leisure reading is done.  Would I say David Ulin’s claim of reading is a lost art is right? No.  Would I say it is endangered? Probably.  The thing is, the one thing that opened my eyes doing this exercise with the big detractor to leisure reading, time.  Because it’s seen as leisure, leisure reading time is often the time that ends up getting cut in favor of time to finish work or the like.  That being said, people still find time in being able to do so.  From my personal experience, the difference from reading from a book versus reading on the screen is that reading on the book will make you more focused on the narrative you’re reading whereas on screen you are left with the temptation to switch to something else in an instant.  Now we’re asked the question a lot of is the book dead? Can the book be killed?   Well, obviously not.  Considering this was posed so many times way before the Internet was created.  They were saying this back when the TV first came on, when movies first showed up, etc.  But, it’s not entirely bad for this question to be asked. That’s because it forces the general public to sort of reevaluate how they value the book.   Truth be told I honestly don’t think this assignment has changed anything about my outlook on whether books are a media or not because I’ve always seen them as such.  What should be looked into with books though is is this whole “books are dying” thing a fault of the books just not being able to keep up or meet the needs of a time where attention spans have shortened and new technology is bombarded at us, or is it more an issue of the person who has lost sight of a book’s true value out of apathy and honestly downright laziness?