A New Civic Platform?

Right now, I want you to think about how you obtain information about the world around you. Do you read a physical newspaper? Do watch CNN, MSCNBC, or FOX News on a television? Do you read journals about current events? Here’s a question: how often do you actively seek information about a particular current event or civic issue?

While our generation may go information hunting the “old-school” way every once and a while for particularly important topics, I think we are all taking part in the gradual overthrow of traditional news sources without even realizing it. Who, you ask, is leading this coup d’état? Facebook. Twitter. Reddit. Snapchat. The list goes on. I think we can all can relate to this experience: you are sitting quietly, maybe in the morning after waking up, in between classes, in the middle of a homework assignment, before bed, staring fixedly at your phone, tablet, or computer screen, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook or Twitter, and you see a news story about a meth lab in Texas or a woman who lived to be 110 or a prodigious boy-genius who can count down from infinity to zero. You get halfway through the article and suddenly you realize you don’t care at all about what you’re reading. You exit out, continue scrolling down the newsfeed, and repeat the process again and again. Perhaps for some of us, myself certainly included, this is how you get up to date on the state of the world.

This raises the question, does our behavior control technology, or does technology control our behavior? A study by the American Press Institute provided an interesting insight into this very question. Most people assume that our generation lacks interest in staying up to date on politics and civic affairs, noting that we spend more time on social networking sights than television news or online newspapers. The American Press Institute’s survey sampled 1,045 adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in 2015. It found that 69% of the subjects get news daily through social media, and 45% regularly follow “hard news” topics. This means that a significant portion of the news has deep civic importance. Perhaps most interestingly, the overwhelming majority of people in the survey said that social media gives them access to a diverse array of opinions, creating a balanced viewpoint. This certainly damages the validity of the notion that social media allows people to filter out the ideas they do not like. Perhaps the internet offers more variety in perspective than watching a single news channel or reading one paper. 

Needless to say, it is wrong to view this small piece of research as the definitive analysis of online behavior. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic wrote an interesting response to these findings. He noted that the most viewed stories on Facebook in January 2015 were, “109-Year-Old Woman Gives A Remarkable Reason For Her Long Life,” and, “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think.” These types of stories riddle users’ News Feeds, and they certainly don’t count as heavy-weight journalism. Additionally, less than half of Facebook users say news is their main motivation for checking the website throughout the day. Finally, a study done by university professors for PEW throws some doubt on social media’s claimed diversity of opinion. They found that well-off and well-educated people are far more likely to engage in online activities dealing with politics or current events. This is also true for offline engagement. In other words, social media fails to bring any new players to the table, which seems rather disappointing for its revolutionary potential.

These studies seem to present contradictory findings, but, in my opinion, they really don’t. Based on the facts, social media is a place where people claim to find real news but also spend plenty of time reading garbage. It is a place where affluent people come to find diverse opinions but exclude important demographics. To explain the former paradox, I argue that individuals in our generation spend so much time browsing through social media that they can’t escape learning a thing or two about important events, even if they spend most of their time on other topics. News today has a certain osmotic quality. As far as diversity goes, I think people tend to view their social media feed as the embodiment of the outside world without realizing that it only constitutes a small sliver. It just seems like so much when it really is not. Social media certainly has changed the news landscape forever, but whether or not it can affect the civic outlook of an entire generation is anyone’s guess.