COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
M edia
D iaries 5 9
Jarred Irby 35 years old Missouri Recorded Dec. 31, 2020
9:00AM I wake up and check the iPhone notifications from a group chat with friends. One of my friends has texted “RIP Joe Clark.” I Google this and learn that Joe Clark, a New Jersey principal, has died. My friends and I share a lot of news in our group chat. We talk every day. It’s been an ongoing conversation for four and a half years. We’re nerds, kind of, and pretty left-leaning. I’m Christian. There’s another person who’s Jewish. Another person who’s Hindu. I think everyone else is mostly atheist/agnostic. I generally trust what people share in the chat. Usually someone’s vetted it. Mostly. We all pretty much think the same, but we will let each other know if we’re being stupid. 9:05AM I get an email notification from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on my iPhone. I’m a subscriber. Josh Hawley, one of my senators from Missouri, is in the news for announcing that he will object to the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s win.
Illustrations by Agata Nowicka
10:00AM At work, I scroll Twitter occasionally on my phone to see what people are tweeting about Josh Hawley. I search Josh Hawley mentions in the search bar, checking to see how the conversation is going in the wider Twitter world. That’s the nice thing about Twitter, that you can see the broader conversation happening in real time. Although I don’t think it’s the best representation of what’s factual, it often tells you how people are thinking and reacting. Most people aren’t going to go, “Well, I did a lot of research about this subject.” More like, “I saw this, and I’m mad.” I had a friend who had his very evangelical, right-wing parents over, and they’re like, “Joe Biden’s gonna put us in cages.” Well, I don’t know how you got to that
conclusion. I would at least like to understand the process of people getting to conclusions like that. 10:30AM I see a Facebook post about a shooting of a high school classmate that happened over the weekend. Surveillance video has just been released by KSDK, a local news station. I found out a few days ago on Facebook that Rico had been shot. Many times, especially in St. Louis—just because it’s a small city, and everyone knows each other—people will act out over this sort of stuff happening. There’s been a significant social media outcry about Rico getting shot. He was really well-liked, especially in the Black community. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of conversation going on in the city about the incident. From the general public, you’d assume it was a terrible situation. But I’ve heard that there were some premeditated aspects of the shooting. I’ve been getting updates from friends, but I’ve been looking up a lot of articles to be able to follow the news story. St. Louis is a very old city, and we have old-city problems. So I follow a lot of local news. 11:00AM I log in to Yahoo News to read a few articles while working and preparing for a Zoom court hearing I have to attend in a few hours. Yahoo aggregates things that are of interest to me. It’s scary—they probably have like eighteen years of consumer data on me. But it’s also clickbaity, which I kind of like. You can see what’s a buzzing topic. It’s mostly mildly interesting, like, “I’ll click on that.” 12:00PM A friend who watches wrestling sends me a link to a YouTube compilation: a year of “takes” from Jim Cornette, a wild wrestling personality. I listen to this while cleaning up and making lunch.
