The Constant Stream of Information in Society is Scary

While liv­ing with my grand­par­ents over the sum­mer, I tru­ly under­stood and saw first­hand how gen­er­a­tions are vast­ly dif­fer­ent when it comes to gath­er­ing news. Like clock­work, my nan­ny and pop would have the news on at 7 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., and nev­er devi­at­ed from their rou­tine. Tele­vi­sion, news­pa­pers and radio were their main ways of get­ting infor­ma­tion through­out most of their life. This was their norm. How­ev­er nowa­days, as a soci­ety, we are used to being bom­bard­ed with infor­ma­tion every­where we turn.

As Matthew Ingram said, with the increased pop­u­lar­i­ty of Face­book and Twit­ter, news can be found any­where at any­time. Although there are pros and cons to hav­ing a con­stant stream of infor­ma­tion, it is hard to tell if it is a good or bad thing.

Sim­i­lar to Whit­ney Houston’s death men­tioned in Ingram’s arti­cle, the news of Robin Williams was report­ed on twit­ter far ear­li­er than when it was announced on tele­vi­sion. How­ev­er there were also reports mixed in that said Williams was alive, which made it hard to fig­ure out which source to trust. The need to break the news first has led to more mis­takes, but that is the risk jour­nal­ists take in order to com­pete in the fast paced industry.

Although I find the idea of con­stant infor­ma­tion help­ful at times, as most of us are too busy to sit down and watch the news, some­times con­sumers don’t remem­ber the impor­tance of a sto­ry because of the rapid way we receive this infor­ma­tion and news.

Bri­an Stelter’s com­par­i­son of our news cul­ture to a fire­work is per­fect. We real­ly do see news as “indi­vid­ual bursts of light that appear out of nowhere and dis­ap­pear just as fast.”

We don’t have time to appre­ci­ate or reflect on the infor­ma­tion that is giv­en to us, which I find scary. There needs to be a bal­ance so the infor­ma­tion is dis­sem­i­nat­ed quick­ly and accu­rate­ly but is also long-lasting.