Your phone is buzzing every once in a while, one Facebook notification letting you know you have just received a friend request from some long lost family relative, another buzz to inform you of a Snapchat you got from a friend thousands of miles away, this time two consecutive vibrations from a text or maybe an e-mail.
You lazily check the notifications, place the mobile device back on the table and turn your attention back to "Stranger Things 2" playing on your laptop. Then, all of a sudden, your phone is buzzing off the fritz, with notifications from multiple news apps like CNN, BBC and NBC News, coupled with their corresponding Twitters, all arriving within seconds of each other.
The phone is practically dancing on the table at this point, so you quickly check it. Each of the notification bubbles reads, “BREAKING NEWS, "Truck Driver Kills Eight In Lower Manhattan Terrorist Attack.”
Not even five minutes later you get a call from your sister in France checking in to make sure you are safe, she says she just received a notification on her phone that there was an attack in New York City.
I used to hate when my dad consistently had CNN on the TV when I was an adolescent, but now, I always have CNN at the tips of my fingers (literally). I get updates through the CNN app, and mostly, their Twitter account. Twitter has become such a large outlet for the news and bite-sized current events and politics articles. Especially now, with our current POTUS being the tweeting fiend that he is.
Personally, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my Twitter account for any local, national or global news updates. I get little snippets of the most noteworthy moments during the White House daily press and media meetings, Al-Jeezera in 280 characters or less updates me on the coalition in Yemen and Donald Trump lets me and the world know that he still dislikes the “fake news” outlet, CNN.
With millennials mostly dominating on social media platforms and mobile devices, plus with news using such platforms as a news source, you can definitely say that it attracts a younger audience, in general. As well as gaining a younger audience, they reach out to a greater population at a time.
Slowly but surely, people have been shying away from cable and TV, thus turning to social media as a news outlet. With this change, the way news is broadcasted must format their articles in a quick and easy way to digest.
We have seen this steady change before in how printed news needed to keep up with technological advances in radio and television. And yet again, here we are with journalism gravitating to social media compared to its TV counterpart.
We always seem to have our mobile devices on our persons. In the past, I honestly thought that that was a negative thing, that in this day and age we are completely disconnected from the world.
However, I have really begun to notice that we are now more connected to each other than ever. With social media and technology, the world’s population is becoming closer together, more aware of its surroundings and informed on important global events.
