Colin Murphy

One Day of Media.

Maricopacon 2026

What is my algorithm trying to do here?




7:00 a.m.: Woke up in a hotel room and my wife  had the Andy Griffith Show playing on the TV. This is mostly background media while I got ready for day two of Maricopacon.

7:30 a.m.: My kid switched the TV to Craig of the Creek on the Disney Channel. The content is obviously more kid focused, so there isn’t much questionable information that I pick up with it passive in the background. I’m sure that if I was actively watching I would find more to comment about

8:00 a.m.: We go to Krispy Kreme, so I am not actively consuming much media besides music during this time. I used google maps to find the location. I’m sure there was an ad dunkin at the top of my search for Krispy Kreme. The music of choice was Ska, mainly Reel Big Fish.

9:00 a.m.: Back at the hotel, Elemental is playing on the TV. Again, this is mostly background noise rather than something I am actively seeking out.

9:30 a.m.: I get to the gaming convention hall in which I’m vending. I’ve noticed a lot of the media being served to me through my social media algorithms is related to trading card games. The biggest topic I am seeing is Magic: The Gathering, including posts about cards, new products, gameplay, and the broader trading card game community. This shows how quickly the algorithm can narrow my algorithm based on what I am currently doing.

10:30 a.m.: After taking a break from my phone, I open Facebook mostly out of habit. One of the first things I see is an Arizona Daily Sun article about the City of Flagstaff moving to settle lawsuits involving crashes connected to a former police officer. Because it involves a legal case and allegations surrounding a police officer, I would want to read the full article and look at additional sources before forming an opinion, however when I click it is behind a pay wall. So I guess I’ll form my opinion based on only the title of the article. At this point I’m feeling cynical.

11:00 a.m.: I also see a Facebook post about Tempe covering all of its Flock cameras and putting them offline. This is the kind of post where the wording and context matter, so I would want to check the original source rather than relying on the Facebook post itself normally. However I’m busy and shouldn’t have my phone out anyways, so I don’t do these things.

12:00 p.m.to 2:00 p.m.: I spend relatively little time on my phone during this period because I am working at the gaming convention. Most of my thoughts are  related to the convention itself. I’m having conversations with other vendors and customers about gaming and trading card games.

3:15 p.m.: While habitually scrolling Facebook again, I see a post from Fox News about the supposed host website for Antifa being shut down. I am not sure why this particular story is being shown to me because it doesn’t align closely with the other content I normally try to interact with. It reminded me that Facebook was recommending it because of the political angle and because the algorithm expected that I would start arguments in the comments. This is one of the examples that stood out to me as questionable.

The rest of the night I stayed off of social media. I played some board games, and some games of Magic: The Gathering.

10:00 p.m.: Grabbed food at the Hotel and went back to the room. The kid put on big city greens on the Disney Channel until he fell asleep. Then HGTV was put on. The show was House Hunters. I played a puzzle game on my phone until I was ready to go to sleep.



Reflecting on the previous days of the week another noticeable change in my social media feed has been related to cars. Last week, I took my kid to see the 25th anniversary release of “The Fast and the Furious” in theaters. Since then, TikTok has noticeably increased the amount of import car content being shown to me. I am seeing more videos about modified cars, tuning, and overall car culture. This shows how my own behavior can influence the media I am served, even when I am not intentionally searching for that content. I do also wonder how it knew that I had gone to the movie. Did it pull from my Google search for a showtime? Did it use location data and showtime along with knowledge of my likes? Or did it use the microphone in my phone to listen? And now I’m feeling paranoid.  I feel like I saw less questionable content than I expected, however it was an abnormal weekend for me. On a regular basis I’m not mixing my algorithm up with events to distract it and I’m stuck with a lot more rage bait.

AZ Daily Sun Article


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