Social Media: When You Want the News Right Here and Now.
I had some time to kill this afternoon, so I did what I usually do, I picked up my phone and logged onto Facebook. While scrolling through the news feed I saw something a friend of mine posted in which she wrote that she was relieved to know that her sister was not on a train that had wrecked in Hoboken New Jersey earlier that day. Train wreck in New Jersey? I hadn’t heard. I had been running errands all day and nowhere near a TV, and while I had been in the car much of the time, I hadn’t been listening to the radio. What had been a major piece of news and on the minds of much of the country for most of the day, was — at three o’clock in the afternoon — “breaking news” to me. Anxious to be in the know, I merely had to type the letters H and O in Facebook’s search field and the words “Hoboken Train Crash” immediately appeared at the top of the list of trending stories. One click and I was directed to a full page of links to posts from various news sources that had been covering the story throughout the day. In as much time as it takes to literally utter the words, “what happened,” I’m already reading the full story online covered by the New York Times. That’s when it hit me, despite my own stubborn reluctance, and my love for the more traditional news outlets, I have evolved with the rest world that doesn’t any longer have the time or patience to wait for information when they want it. When I want to know something, I want to know now, no matter where I am.
Having grown up in Chicago, my go to source for watching the daily news has always been WGN, or as we natives refer to it, “The Old Number Nine,” and since it’s on several times throughout the day, I can always tune in at some point. I like also having it on in the background when I am home, this way I can conveniently tune in while also tending to other things.
And while I still love the now seemingly old fashioned routine of sitting down and reading the newspaper, I find that there is little time to fit it into my daily life. In fact, such an event these days is usually reserved for Sunday mornings, which as it happens, is the only day of the week that the paper is delivered to my home. There will however, always be a piece of my heart that nostalgically aches for the days when I would walk with my grandfather to the corner newspaper vending machine — or, “paper box” as he called them — to get the morning paper. I doubt memories of sitting next to him while on our phones would be remembered as fondly. You know now that I think of it, I don’t know of one “paper box” anywhere in the whole town where I live. If I had chosen to read more about the Hoboken train crash in the daily newspaper, I would have had to drive to the local store to pick one up.
Like many, I don’t always have access to TV or a newspaper, but no matter where I happen to be, I am certain to have my phone, and with it access to social media. As a result, within seconds I can search up any story no matter where I happen to be and I don’t have to wait for the paper to be delivered or until I get home. Furthermore, not only can I get the story, I can also learn how people feel about it. And while I personally don’t often like, share, or comment on many news stories, I do value the opinions of others and getting more than one side of the story.