Critcal Media Literacy

Assignment

1. This week track your media usage every day for three days in a row.
2. First, write down your most used platform or channel - writing down what you use it for.
3. Continue to add more channels and platforms, ranking them in order of use how often and for what reasons you use each type of media or media channel. You can complete your journal entry one of three ways.

Media Use Journal

My media channels
applications listed from most used

Daily overview

I use my technology pretty much the same way daily. I start my day at my desktop, where I primarily use the Brave Browser with the uBlock Origin extension. This combination blocks nearly all advertisements from my view and even blocks YouTube ads. I generally navigate to listen to music while having morning coffee. I look up whatever may be on my mind that morning in the browser. I check in on Slack channels and check my email. I also open up Canvas and complete readings and class meetings. I do not use Social Media, except for LinkedIn, and do not check in often these days. Music generally plays throughout my day. I have stopped following the "News" as it tends to be negative, so that is no longer part of my daily routine.

June 7 - June 12, 2021

Mac mini

• Browsers (Brave and Safari): Web browsing and online shopping. I use it for job and internship searching. It also connects me to Canvas for classwork.
• Slack: I use this to talk to friends, network, and for class discussions daily.
• YouTube Music: My go-to source for music. Since I use a content blocker, the advertisement-based service has zero advertisements. And it is free. This is technically a browser-based application.
• Disk Drill: This is disk recovery software that I have been using to recover data from old hard disk drives, as I migrate them to a new solid-state drive network-attached storage.
• Grammarly: I use this application when drafting out responses to just about everything. I like the simplicity of having my grammar checked, but it is also distracting for first drafts.
• Zoom: The official UC Denver meeting application. Currently, I have one class that holds weekly Wednesday afternoon meetings. During the meeting, we are updated with weekly lesson objectives and complete groupwork synchronously here. If someone is unable to attend the work becomes asynchronous and is submitted to a Canvas discussion.
• Adobe Creative Cloud: I produce media, both for class and independently. I primarily open up Illustrator and Photoshop to complete projects. This week I created a logo in Illustrator but also needed to convert some images using Photoshop. I also do video editing, but not this week.

iPhone

• Browsers (Brave, Safari, Firefox Focus): When I am out and about, sometimes I feel the need to look stuff up. Depending on what it is, I use the browser that provides the layer of privacy I desire for the search. Safari has the lowest protection. Brave and Firefox Focus are about equals here. Firefox Focus doesn't retain any cookies or history, so for general searches, this is my go-to browser, followed by Brave. When sites "are broken" from the privacy-centric browsers, I switch to Safari.
• YouTube Music app: I listen to music while I am out and about. Since I only travel by bicycle or by walking, it's the perfect time to listen to music.
• Canvas Student app: I check in on class assignments while out walking or sitting in the park. Refresh my mental to-do list; so I can reflect and prepare.
• Slack app: I use this primarily to talk to friends and check in on class challenges on the go.
• Gmail: Personal email service - This opens links into browsers that look like additional apps, but are just email messages.
• Shazaam: When I hear a song I want to remember and it isn't playing on my device, I use this app. Messages app: I talk to friends and family through text messaging. Phone app: I rarely use the phone app, ironic.