Social Media has become a staple of our lifetime. Born out of a simple way to connect with people, it’s grown into a highly competitive market, in a constant struggle to steal users from one another. It’s influence has permitted it’s way into many aspects of our life, and has often changed the way we approach things. One of them is news consumption.
News is an important factor to any person’s awareness of the world around them. Many forms exist to proliferate the information to people. A growing trend amongst people my age is using Social Media as a main source of information. This can sometimes circumvent major news networks since they may not cover the same events or they may not be able to keep up.
Social Media has caused a speed of spreading information that can’t really be matched by newspaper & video broadcasts. Such a quick, powerful platform comes with the pitfall of being too fast. It’s very easy to create rumors that can spread like wildfire before it can be verified, you can see this in the countless death hoaxes and allegations such as the supposed allegations of “riots” after the 7-1 loss of Brazil at the 2014 World Cup.
What often makes things worse is that people have a desire to be “in the know.” Knowledge has always been power, and people always want to be the smartest in the room, even if that means “knowing” false pieces of information. What better example than Jomny Sun’s “realization” about how Will and Jada Smith named their children.
While many people saw through the photoshopped google search, some people responded with “ I already knew that: or something to that effect. Now we have a compounding situation. Not only are we dealing with a tool that spreads “news” quickly, we have users that spread it faster under the guise of being “more informed” than the rest.
Such a concoction of speed of information and a need to be the worst informed, we see a problem in new consumptions via Social Media. Continuing at such a rate is dangerous is cause for concern. We need to go through the relative burden of finding well-vetted, definitive news sources rather than 140 character blurbs. Before we can brandish news and knowledge, we need to do our searches instead of waiting for it to come to us on our feeds.
