Leaking OUR Sources (not just mine anymore)

As was expected, most of my classmates get their news from the internet but I was interested to find that that is not always the case. Several of my classmates actually do read the paper (in paper form even) though they talk about the fact that they get funny looks for it...an indicator for the rest of my generation I should say. For the most part I think we associate traditional news sources with people of the generations before us (i.e. parents). 

We, on the other hand, tend to use very non-traditional sources for our news, such as Facebook, (ah, good ole FB what aren't you good for? ha, well according to Hedge you're not good for the fate of the world I guess), the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. We like sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit. We bounce between news sites like NY Times, CNN, USA Today rather than devoting to one site or the other. 'Variety' seems to be the word of the day. Although Carr would just say that's a nice way of saying 'short attention span' and Hedge, well he'd start ranting about the end of the world or how much better he is than we are or something...

I also noticed similarities in the ways we read. We tend to fall victim to the "agenda-setting" ways of our media system(sorry that's my Politics and Media class poking through...a lot like this class actually, in some ways anyway). To explain, our media system has its ways of 'setting the agenda'; that is to say that the media often influences what we view as important or relevant in today's news. For example, it seems obvious that the giant colorful story that appears on the front page of the paper is much more important than the one without pictures that is buried in a tiny corner in the back...usually somewhere near the random (slightly awkward and weird) advertisements. But you have to think, who decides whats important or not? It didn't just appear on the front page, a person, a real flesh-and-blood person with human fallacies decided that that was the best story to go there. That was what needs the attention of the public. 

The same applies for the Internet. We usually don't go farther than the first page or so of the website. We read the big "flashy" stories and leave it at that. Again Carr would thoughtfully mutter something about how he can't finish a book anymore and well we know what Hedge would say. Don't get me wrong I think Carr and Hedge have valid points(well maybe not Hedg- ok, ok, I'll stop, I promise). We have to think about these things, think about what we are reading and perhaps what we're not reading in the news. I will agree with Hedge on one point...most of the problems with the Internet stems from us simply taking things at face value.