BREAKING NEWS! Journalists Warn Of Loss Of Free Speech

BREAKING NEWS! Journalists Warn Of Loss Of Free Speech image from http://www.koeppeldirect.com The internet exists for a variety of reasons, but the reason a huge portion of it is free (other than your Wi-Fi bill) is because of advertising. Advertising ensures that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are free for public usage. These have premium services, but they are overwhelmingly unpopular and not heavily used by the general public. As such, big media companies know that they can make money by the number of clicks they get on a page. The more people click on the page, the more the ad is seen, the more the company can charge for space on their page. It’s just like the two million dollar Super Bowl ads. As such, people invest lots of money in market research to see what gets the most clicks. Recently, YouTuber content creator CGPGrey posted a video talking about media interaction and specifically with anger and sharing. His video explained how anger-provoking material was spread around and why certain emotions brought out by content were more likely to be shared. Overwhelmingly, Grey explained, posts that provoked anger, or indeed any emotional response other than sadness, showed increase in sharing. This is why your Facebook feed is flooded in puppies, quizzes and anger-provoking hate spam. This idea is not old. If you know anything about the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you’ll know that they were characterized by sensationalism or “yellow journalism.” This form of reporting is taking simple events in everyday life and blowing them way out of proportion. image from memegenerator.net Some have blamed wars of the period largely on newspaper tycoons wanting to sell newspapers. Phrases like “Remember the Maine” resonated in this era of bad reporting. If you believe, however, that the news does not do this today, I have some ocean front property for you in Montana. With the rise of the Digital Age, social media, and the internet, yellow journalism is alive today. While sensationalism is formally shunned by journalists, media agencies still utilize it as a means to get clicks: the more clicks, the more ads views, the more money made. So headlines are getting increasingly sensationalistic. Conjectures that belong in the body of the article are seeping into headlines. Bare bones get put into the summary that do not reflect the complexities of the issues at hand. All this is fine, some would argue, so long as people write about the whole issue and people pull from a variety of sources. However, statistics from the New York Times Video Study in 2013 suggest that Millennials do not spend a large amount of time on individual pieces. They move about from topic to topic, tab to tab. Attention spans are not down, but target switching between topics is up and if another, more interesting topic comes up, they are likely to switch to that. So while the need for clicks is met, the information sent out is jaded and not complete. People do not have all the information they think they do. So the journalists and media are claiming that as long as you do your research and read the articles in their entirety, you’ll get a better picture. Sadly, this is too true. (image from joyreactor.com) Millennials, it’s on us now. We have to engage. Our attentions are vied for by a variety of media now. We get 24 hours in a day and have to decide how to spend that time. If you do not spend time finding out about issues and really finding answers, you are not going to be able to participate in your democracy or the world at large. You have the ability to access more information in 20 minutes than most people in history could hope to see in their entire lives. Be a good global citizen and educate yourself. Find outlets and sources of information that are useful to you. That might be a big outlet like CNN, an independent non-media group, or somewhere else, but find sources of information. If you do not choose to find information, you are as good as censoring yourself. If you have the privilege of reading this article, you have an ability some would die for and indeed have. Be an active world citizen, find information and act on it.