When I’m at home and feel like watching TV, my go-to places are Netflix, Hulu (maybe), and Netflix. Since I don’t have cable, I don’t watch the news.
How, then, do I stay informed? The same way as every college student with a full schedule: Social media. In my downtime, I look at what’s trending on Twitter and I scroll through my Facebook feed and find news articles. You get a wide range of information that way — everything from the latest police shooting to the latest Hollywood red carpet looks.
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The media industry knows this. Print publications know that they are a dying breed, and to stay competitive, many newspapers and magazines are making the big move to the Internet and social media. But that’s not where the competitions ends. On the Internet, it’s still an ongoing fight for our attention: With so much information ready at our disposal, the only way for a writer, article, or video to get any substantial amount of views is to go viral.
This entire phenomenon, the modern face of journalism, is a bit different from what I’m about to call “millennial journalism”, but it provides the foreground for it. In a world where viral is everything, we resort to not-so-sneaky tricks and maneuvers to get our voice heard. Now, there are popular Internet platforms built around showcasing "the millennial perspective", where the only qualifier is to be born in a certain generation, and where these tricks and maneuvers are our lifeline to success in a new industry.
I've read through these platforms. (Ahem, I write for one of them.) We see them everywhere: EliteDaily, Mic, Mashable, NowThis, Vox, etc. They pitch news, stories, op-eds that are by millennials, for millennials. And the trend I'm seeing is that with our thirsty pursuit of accessible information — as one Wired contributor writes, "We want information and we want good stories... As long as we can find them on our phones" — we sacrifice the quality of the information we consume.
Many self-described millennial platforms allow its contributors to write freely and unchecked. Some mild editing may be involved, but the point is to let the world see an opinion that's raw and authentic. The result is articles that, upon closer inspection, seem to be no more than longer, poorly-researched, and published Facebook rants. (Crap like this, for example.) From this standpoint, we're hardly better than publications like CNN and Fox, whom we millennials purport to despise for their untrustworthy reporting and insidious bias. We're given these platforms that highly value our opinions, but don't fact-check or hold us accountable to them in any way.
There is good and bad, however, in this microcosm of open-ended space we've created. The fact that pretty much anyone can get published on the Internet means that we're exposed to a variety of perspectives. We can see ideas that don't necessarily align with our own (which is always a good thing). This provides an opportunity for engagement and growth that would not have been available had our communications been limited solely to physical interaction and our immediate social circles.
And yet, this is the Internet. Yes, we do have the chance to engage with millions of people with billions of ideas, but the reality is that half of the stuff out there is hardly worth engaging with, so we're left with a lot to sift through and end up back where we started: Asking ourselves what's going on in the world, and whom we can trust to tell us.
We are supposedly the "information generation", the ones who, because of technology, get to know everything. But it's hard to know everything when, on one hand, Google and Facebook algorithms make sure that what comes to us has been carefully filtered and tailored to our interests so that we only read and see things that reinforce our own views; and, on the other hand, when we do encounter something we disagree with, it's so heavily biased, badly researched, and unprofessionally written that it does nothing to change our opinions anyway. This happens in a back-and-forth motion, and the opportunity for civil discussion and engagement has been lost.
How do we get it back? How do we push back against that insatiable need to go viral, to prioritize pageviews over credibility? Perhaps this may require a redefining of the too-broad "millennial perspectives" idea. But whatever it is, I wouldn't want us to live any longer under the illusion that millennial media is a more fresh and modern take on things. It's simply the old industry with a new, younger face.
