How Balanced Is Your Media Diet?

For our personal health, it is important to have a balanced diet so that we get all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals that we need in order to keep our bodies healthy. In order to help people have a better understanding and achieve a more balanced diet, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) published the Improved American Food Guide Pyramid, which suggests the optimal nutrition guidelines for each food category.

Recently, WIRED Magazine released their own guide pyramid but not for food groups or categories but instead a guide on how we can achieve a balanced media diet.

Media Diet Guide Pyramid
[click on image to view larger version]

Practicing good nutrition keeps your mind sharp, your body fit, and your life long. The same could be said for consuming media. (Seriously, knowledge is power.) When you add it all up, the average American spends roughly nine hours a day glued to some kind of screen, and like your diet, quality is as important as quantity. Here are Wired’s suggested servings for optimal media health.

Based on the percentages showed in the pyramid, I can say that my media diet is quite balanced although I spend more than 9 hours a day. Btw, I think this media diet pyramid would look neat in a tshirt.

How about you guys? Do you have a balanced media diet? If not, what areas are you lacking at or not consuming?

Source: WIRED.com

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3 Comments

  1. Small consolation, Jaypee – Facebook assigned a tab for FriendFeed so there’s a special page for it. Just like what you have in FriendFeed. I find it cramped though because of the sidebar with Facebook ads on the right.

    But all the FF features are there. What I want to see is for FB to fully integrate FF across the board. FF has more characters in its conversation box. FF has live search which you can save for later use. It has rooms. Its DM feature is more robust. And lots more great features.

    FF is the greatest social media aggregator in my opinion. I just hope that FB does not ditch that main feature of FF. If it does – I’d look elsewhere for some new site to aggregate my social media activities in one place.

  2. @Jan – Is that so? Well you better start changing your diet and make it a balanced one. What games are you playing on Facebook? Nowadays, I only play those games on my free time. ;)

    One thing I need to work on more is interaction on social media/networks especially on SU.

    I love FriendFeed even though I don’t post much stuff there, its a smorgasbord of information. I don’t like how FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook coz it only means one thing – the death of FriendFeed. I hope I’m wrong and that they keep FriendFeed running inspite of the acquisition or maybe integrate it into Facebook? We’ll just have to wait and see.

  3. Uh-oh – I think I have a very unbalanced media diet. I have no time for gaming and entertainment. Okay, that’s not the whole truth I’ve recently started playing some games at Facebook. And because I usually turn out to be over the hill in terms of keyboard accuracy I always leave in a huff with my nose in the air, thinking I have better things to do with my time. Ahahaha.

    Much of my time is spent on reading and interacting on the social media – Twitter, SU, Facebook – more so now that they bought Friendfeed. I’m a little less guilt ridden now watching some youtube videos because I can always share them in Twitter or Facebook updates. Makes wasting time there a little more palatable huh? :)

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