Lauren Nery
One hour of media consumption for me since I like to watch YouTube videos can go by fast. I watch one video and with the next one automatically playing, I tend to just watch it if I don’t have anything better to do (which is almost never true). I began this morning of teleworking with, of course, watching a video to make myself laugh before having to stare at a computer screen for even longer. The video I watched was about 15 minutes, and from there I finished the work I had to do in the morning, probably because I knew I needed to write this blog after and wanted to feel more responsible with my time. During my time to eat lunch, I went down to my kitchen and ate and watched probably about another 30-45 minutes of videos, one after the other. While I was watching the videos – comedy videos from channels like Cody Ko and Noel Miller – I was genuinely laughing out loud and thinking about their jokes now makes me smile a little bit. Was watching videos a productive use of my time though? Probably not. Did I gain any valuable information from watching their videos? Probably not.
I spent my hour outdoors this weekend at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach. I enjoy coming here during the warmer months of the year, which made the walk with my boyfriend this weekend a little uncomfortable. The morning before we went to the state park, we got some flurries that did not make their appearance when we arrived. The hour long walk I took was enjoyable in the sense that I got the opportunity to get out of the house and spend some time walking familiar trails. However, when it was over (mostly due to the cold) personally I wasn’t devastated. Even with my hatred of the cold, I noticed that in the car on our way home my boyfriend and I were laughing about things that happened on our walk. Though I gained no literal information like the identification of plant species that we saw, I gained a silly memory that I’ll keep close to heart.
Documenting this experience taught me that thinking intentionally about my experiences using social media and spending time outdoors will better shape my beliefs about the two. I realized how much more I gained from an hour walking (and mostly goofing around) in freezing temperatures in comparison to my hour of comfortably watching videos designed to make me laugh. Though neither activity gave me cold, hard information, what I gathered from the experience taught me about how I could, and should, use my time.