While in the past, global news took weeks to travel from the source to the public, the technology age has made live footage — of the Egyptian protests, for instance — just a remote or mouse click away.
News is now more accessible to this technologically savvy generation than any before, and Political Science and Communications professor Diana Mutz sees “no evidence suggesting that this generation is any more apathetic than previous generations at the same stage of life” towards global news.
The definition of the term “news source” has also evolved and now includes social networking cites like Facebook, Communications professor Marwan Kraidy said.
The results of video interviews conducted both on and off Locust Walk showed a varying degree of knowledge regarding global happenings covered in television and print news.
In concordance with the global trend of dying print journalism, most students interviewed prefer online news to a tangible paper. College freshman Phil Golub is one of many students who keeps bookmarked tabs of his favorite news websites on his browser and takes advantage of the “WiFi everywhere” to pull out his laptop and “see what’s going on in the world” at any time. Golub, like many other students, cited CNN.com as his favorite news source.
Because students can access their favorite TV shows online, many lack televisions — and thus access to broadcast news. “If I had a TV I’d be more likely to watch the news,” College freshman Allison Perelman said. Still, Kraidy speculated that for students the hierarchy of preferred media source is the internet, before television, before print.
Students that have televisions in their rooms are just as picky about their sources as those who revert to online media. College freshman Hillary Barlowe watches The Colbert Report and The Daily Show because they are “targeted at the youth,” and she likes that they are “political and opinionated.”
On the walk, students who could not answer the questions cited school work and otherwise busy schedules as the reason for their lack of devotion to the news. As professor Kraidy explained, “most people pay attention to the news when they feel it is relevant to their lives, and students are no exception.”
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