As the ever-changing world of technology continues to evolve,
we move along with it, navigating our way through the media maze, but we all have our
unique ways of accessing the news in today’s society. Whether it be a large earthquake, an EU referendum or Kim and Kanye's wedding, most people take
interest in finding out about the world around them and the current events making
headlines, and seek out this news in different ways.
Personally, I am extremely interested in keeping up to date
with the news of the world, as I feel it is vital to know what is happening to
other people in other areas of the world, and to be able to learn from, and be
involved with events happening elsewhere; in my opinion it would be ignorant to
not keep updated with current events. I like to know about the serious things
such as politics, tragedies and crime, however, I also
enjoy hearing about pop culture, celebrity gossip and music and fashion related
news.
I access my news in many different ways, one of these ways
being the television. In the morning when I’m having breakfast, sometimes I might
flick over to the news to see what has been happening in the world. Other times
I might pass a newspaper in a shop and have a gaze over the biggest headlines.
Another way I access news is through the internet, where I might see a news
story on a website or in the advert section. However the main source of news
for me is Twitter. Every day when I wake up, the first thing I do is check my phone
for notifications, after doing that I go onto Twitter and open up the trending
section and see what the most tweeted events of the day are. I find this to be
extremely useful and reliable, because I know if millions of people are talking
about it then there must be truth to it. This is an example of Dan Gilmor’s
idea of the consumer becoming the creators from his book ‘We the Media’.
The idea that millions of people come together to spread
awareness of a story turns us into the journalists in a way, because it gives
us a voice, an opinion, and an ability to spread the word. With 313 million
users active on Twitter monthly, word can spread incredibly fast. I have found
out about many of the top news stories via Twitter, for example, I heard the
news about the death of certain celebrities such as David Bowie, Prince and
Alan Rickman through Twitter, however one thing Twitter is common for is creating
false death stories, so I always have to validate them online when I see one on
the app.
One experiment my class conducted was where we all
downloaded the BBC News app on our smartphones, chose topics that interested
us, and reported back a week later on our news consumption. I wrote down the
findings of 5 other students and two teachers. The information I gathered was
in a table that featured sections asking about their age, what categories they
picked, how often they checked the app and what stories they learned about. My findings
were that the older test subjects (teachers) tended to check the app many more
times a day/week than the member of my class who are between 17 and 18 years of
age. Also I found that the teachers had chosen more categories than the class,
and included more serious topics such as Politics and Education, whereas the
people my age had chosen things such as Entertainment and Music. Furthermore,
most of the males that I took information on had chosen Sports as a category.
This experiment has helped me to learn a lot about our news consumption.
The first thing I realised is that the older people taking part in the
experiment would check the app a lot more frequently than the younger ones, but
I believe this to mainly be down to the fact that the younger generation are a
lot more active on social media, so come across news this way, and feel less of
a need to check the BBC app. The next thing I learnt was that boys and girls
had different interests, for example the boys I took notes on all had some type
of sport as a category, whereas the girls had more of the celebrity news as a
focus. However a lot of people still had a lot of the same big news stories remembered,
such as the Olympics in Rio and Brexit, which says to me that even though we
all have separate interests, we all hear about the main stories and care about
them to an extent.
In today’s society, we are becoming curators of our own
media; we can create, and view news as we please. We are the media. As part of the
young generation today, I can support the fact that we have grown up in a world
where news is easily accessible on many formats, and through the use of social
media, we can stay updated, as well as make others aware of our own stories,
however big or small. Older generations may be able to do exactly the same,
however, having not grown up in the same way as we have, are still adapting to
these changes and are not quite as accustomed to things like social media as
the younger generation, many still read newspapers, which a younger person with
a smart phone might never do, as it is simply at the tip of their fingers and a
google search away. Overall, I have learnt that we are all collectively
significant in the media and have to power to control and consume it in
whatever way available to us.
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