Labor Day Weekend News Consumption
Tyriq Grant
Over the Labor Day weekend there were a number of news stories that were big enough that they received national attention. A few of them involving President Trump, others included the Colin Kaepernick Nike Deal, and the museum fire in Brazil.
I do not own a television so most of my media consumption comes from either my phone or my laptop. Social media is a place where everything for the most part good or bad is controversial. Being that I’m active on social media I get most of my news from there.
I found that based on my feed I see more political news on twitter and I get more current event type news via Instagram. I also noticed that because I generally like Instagram more than twitter the stories that I see on Instagram, I have better comprehension off.
When I’m on my laptop I also receive news as well. I found that sometimes when I viewed news on my cellphone I would sometimes get tired of looking at the screen but when on my laptop, I didn’t have that problem. I attributed to this to the fact that when I’m on my phone I’m actually scrolling, as opposed to my laptop where I’m not doing anything while I watch YouTube videos.
The amount of news on my laptop that I was able to consume was less than on my phone due to the length of certain videos I watched. I would have great comprehension of the topic of the news story but I probably would be hesitate to move on to the next one after I watched a thirty minute analysis. When I’m on my phone the content is coming at me so fast that I really don’t have the opportunity to stop it unless I physically put down my phone. Another thing that I noticed is that when I was on platforms like Instagram I was actually liking the content. When I would visit things on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter I would just mostly view the content. I attributed this to my frequent visits to the platform and besides Twitter Instagram being the most fast paced platform. By this I mean due to the logistics of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube where I feel like you’re more concentrated because for the most part its similar content tailored to what you like. Instagram is similar but I feel like there’s more room to branch of into more genres of news and media that you may have not been familiar with.
When it came to Facebook I was reluctant to read any news story that didn’t come from a source I recognized. I found this to be good and bad. If I see something that came from the times I would be quick to read but a less well known source not so much. I thought this concept over and I came to the conclusion that my reluctances is a product of the “fake news” epidemic. Just because I didn’t know certain sources didn’t mean their information was false, I just didn’t want to bother. I feel like years in the past it wouldn’t have been this way meaning I may have probably still viewed it anyway and the deciphered after whether the information was true or not.
Overall, many factors go into how we consume news. Taking a small scope of time to examine those factors and the effects was very beneficial in understanding why not only news but technology as well is so important.