News and Media

News travels fast. The cliché way of saying, don’t do anything stupid. But as most clichés are it does have some truth. News does in fact travel fast, and in this day and age news is travelling faster than ever. With the invention of the mail service, telephone, and now the Internet new seems to travel faster than you can say ‘Go’. You put something up on the Internet and people all around the world can access it instantly. Before it seemed that radio and television brought people together now it seems that most people are succumbing to the more instant form of news on the Internet.

News is very easy to access, as long as you are looking for it, but even when you are not looking for it I suppose. Facebook’s new follow feature shows you an up to date instantaneous look at what your latest friends are doing on facebook. But besides just gossip, the Internet provides us with instant access to an abundance of information. As far as I can see it, the people that surround us have a big influence on the news and how we receive it. Previously, before coming to college, I would watch the news every morning and then grab the newspaper before running to catch my bus. My family would talk about the news at night and sometimes I would watch the evening new as well. Sunday mornings were always greeted with NPR and the latest news from around the world. Now, in college my only source of news is nytimes.com and cnn.com or even bbc.co.uk. This seems to be the same for my peers around me. I don’t know anyone who sits down in their dorm room to watch The Nightly News with Brian Williams. While I do keep up on the most recent happenings in the world it is not of the same form as before. While before news was a conversation starter, something to talk about that wouldn’t end in an argument, now it is simply out of interest…and procrastination I suppose. The world of news is changing and in different settings is often accessed many different ways.