My media menu: Twelve years later
In February 2012, I described what my media usage looked like back then for Christoph Koch’s “My Media Menu” series. This series is one of the reasons why the technology diary exists. By November 2014, a total of 89 episodes had appeared on Christoph Koch’s blog. After that, the media menu moved to Krautreporter, where it looks like quite a few episodes were published again until around 2017. I don’t know whether you can read them all together somewhere and whether it continued after 2017 because a Krautreporter subscription is not part of my media usage. (Without any particular reason, I was a supporter in the first year of Krautreporter. I vaguely remember being dissatisfied, which is why I wasn’t anymore after that. But unfortunately the details remain undocumented.)
I haven’t thought about this report for a long time and today I’m checking it out again to see what it actually was like in 2012 and what has changed.
“Goodreads isn’t particularly convincing, I only know a few people who use it, and the book recommendations there are only slightly better than on Amazon. But I find it very helpful in getting a realistic idea of my reading habits. Until I started, I still considered myself the same reader I was in 1995.”
Back then I was still a reader and not a reader. I didn’t stop using the generic masculine until much later. In the technology diary you can see when this happened, as far as I remember, maybe 2018? At some point I’ll take a look and then it’ll be more precise here. I found Goodreads very compelling between then and now. I still only know a few people who use it, and I haven’t looked at the automatic book recommendations for a long time. But I’ve read a lot of reviews there over the last few years and that was the main way I found new books. However, I’m currently trying to move away from Goodreads (because of its Amazon affiliation) in favor of StoryGraph. My data is currently being moved and I can’t say anything about it yet.
“I have significantly reduced my paper books over the last few years with the help of the Berlin book table. I have now gone from around twelve full rows of Billy shelves to seven that are half full.”
At the moment there are four completely full ones, two of which are full in several rows. In 2019 there were only four. I don’t know what happened to the other three. If there was an increase, it happened involuntarily, through my own copies, books that were sent to me without asking, and books that I had to buy on paper because I needed them for work and couldn’t get them digitally. But I read a lot more books now than I did in 2012.
Then the text from 2012 deals with RSS feed readers for a paragraph. At the time I was still using Google Reader, which Google discontinued a year and a half later. I never really warmed to Feedly, the tool I tried to replace it with, and it didn’t leave a trace in my tech diary. So feed readers probably disappeared from my life sometime in 2014 or 2015.
“…what I read on the internet now comes from roughly half (guessed and not measured, so it could be completely different) from the feed reader and half from my circle of friends via Google+, Twitter and Facebook. ”
I no longer say “net” since I learned in 2021 that it is an old-fashioned word for internet. Until then I thought it was the other way around.
“For a year or two I had redirected the most important feeds to Twitter (via Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed), but since Google+ was introduced, I use Twitter much less and therefore hardly see this redirect anymore.”
Yahoo Pipes! That was really nice and I still miss it sometimes. It was discontinued in 2015. You could use it to put together other internet things, similar to Zapier now, but with a nice graphical interface. I was very active on Google+ in 2011 and apparently also in early 2012, but sometime soon after that it stopped again. I don’t remember why, it’s not documented in the technology diary. In my memory, Google+ was shut down again shortly after launch, but that doesn’t seem to be true, Wikipedia says it closed in 2019.
A few of the blogs that were important to me back then still exist, but I’ve grown disliked about them (Marginal Revolution, Less Wrong, Overcoming Bias). Others no longer exist (Stefan Niggemeier’s blog, Penelope Trunk). Only one still exists and I don’t think we’re ideologically estranged, but I still never read it: O’Reilly Radar. This also has to do with the disappearance of Google Reader. I probably still read as much blogs as I used to, but not the same ones on a regular basis anymore, just the posts that Twitter brought to me until 2022 and Mastodon since I moved. Then I don’t remember which blog they were on and couldn’t name the blog names. I still mention Facebook in 2012, in 2015 I closed the Facebook browser tab and in 2017 I deleted the app from my phone.
I received several more magazines in the mail in 2012, partly because of club membership and partly because I subscribed to them. I canceled one of the subscriptions immediately after the documentation in the media menu article, another ended a little later on its own, and the member magazines have either switched to digital-only themselves in the last few years or I asked for it, nothing to get more on paper. In addition, for several years my mail has been forwarded directly to Nathalie, who takes care of my paper management.
In 2024, part of the financial side of my media menu is that I regularly support some people on Patreon, Steady and similar platforms. I would have to write this down in more detail in a separate post, at least at the moment it is the main channel through which money flows from me to cultural workers. But I never actually watch the newsletters or videos that come with some of these subscriptions. It’s more about the principle, I want these people to keep making videos, writing books or whatever they do.
“I haven’t listened to the radio since the 80s (traumatic school bus experiences with Bayern 3). The last time I subscribed to a daily newspaper was around 1990. I stopped watching TV when the British MTV Europe was replaced by the German offshoot on German cable, that must have been around 1995. I don’t know anything about audio books and podcasts; for technical reasons, I always fall asleep immediately when listening.”
Little has changed since 2012. I spent a lot of time in my mother’s household and they listen to the radio there for at least an hour every day (BR Heimat between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.). I also managed to listen to medium-sized parts of the “Drinnies” podcast. But I don’t see this as a change in my media usage behavior; one is a coincidence, the other is an exception.
Video does not appear at all in the 2012 text. More has changed here, in 2016 I saw what YouTube was good for and now I use it often, but only in the small preview view on my phone, which is about 6×4 cm in size, and without sound. Theoretically, I follow a few people there from the fields of crafts (carpentry, metalworking, pipe cleaning) and sled dog keeping, but in practice I hardly ever use them; they are courtesy subscriptions for the enjoyment of YouTubers. I’m only there when I’m looking for something specific and then maybe watch a few of the things YouTube suggests. I’ve gotten better at resisting suggestions because YouTube always wants to show me disasters and accidents and I really don’t want to know more about horrible deaths while cave diving. I would rather have the existing knowledge erased from my head. What I’m missing from my media menu in 2024 is a delete YouTube to remove information.
(Kathrin Passig)