The Vast Majority

As I go through my classmates’ different news sources I see that we as a class have a common “fall guy” as I like to put it. The majority of the class seems to be interested in searching the known news sites such as CNN, ABCNEWS, FOXNEWS, etc. It may be the fact that the lack of televisions on campus force students to go to these sites, or maybe the commonality or recognition that comes with these news sites give a comfort to students that they can trust the material they are getting from their trusted news site. This, however, I see as a misconception due to the fact that different sites/stations have their different approaches and biases.

Hedges and Carr would both see this as the fallout from the advancement of technology. Both would perceive these methods of getting the news as I interpret it as a sign of the times; less radio and television, and more surfing the internet and doing less research. With online news, the reader has the option of what they want to read about. The web page is organized so that instead of having to read the whole paper to find out what you wanted to know, now you can just look under the organized tab or column and search for the specific article you were searching for. Nevertheless, Thompson would see this as the advancement of the human mind to be able to organize a system that would assist people to find out what they were looking for as quickly as possible. The ability to find out about the world in a matter of seconds is a revelation that we are more civilized as a nation and have more information to indulge our minds into.

Even though my fellow classmates use the internet and television more and more every day, there is no doubt that word of mouth is still a valid and popular method. This should excite people like Hedges and Carr to show them that the ways of old has not changed and that there are still original ways of getting the news. So in retrospect the methods of obtaining news has changed in the fact that it is more accessible; however, it has not depleted the ways of the past in which nobody gets their news from word of mouth.