Breaking News Alerts: A Self-Experiment
Until the beginning of this year, I had not used breaking news alerts on my smartphone. I had always considered it, but decided against it for several reasons. Amongst other things, I was worried about getting flooded with breaking news alerts and simply wanted to be able to choose when to look at the news myself. At the start of this year, I decided to start using breaking news alerts by CNN on my smartphone and put my expectations to the test.
Using breaking news alerts on your smartphone brings plenty of advantages. In my opinion, it is very important to know what is going on in the world. Breaking news alerts are a very simple, effective and fast way to achieve this. You simply take a look at your smartphone and directly get the most important information without having to search for it. This is particularly useful when you are on the road and might not have other possibilities to access the news and you have already used up most of your phone’s data volume.
One of my biggest worries was to be flooded with too many breaking news alerts. At least with the app I am using (CNN), this is not the case. Most of the days, I got 2–3 alerts at most. While I did not consider all of these alerts to be breaking news-worthy, most certainly were. In the short time span that I have used it, the people behind the CNN breaking news alerts have done a very good job at choosing the right amount of breaking news and also the most important breaking news. I can imagine, however, that this is not the case with all apps.
Nevertheless, getting breaking news alerts does also have disadvantages. Knowing something directly when it happens can be a good thing, but I have made the personal experience that it can also be stressful, annoying and even depressing. As I use the alarm clock on my smartphone to wake me up in the morning, looking at my phone is essentially the first thing I do at the start of a new day. Consequently, many of my last fourteen days have started with reading about awful things that have happened in the world. Of course I want to be informed and know about these things, but before confronting all of this, I simply need some time to actually wake up. It is also quite terrifying when — because of these breaking news alerts — one of your first thoughts of the day centers around Donald Trump.
For now, I will continue to use breaking news alerts on my smartphone. However, I cannot deny that there are still some things about them that bother me. Knowing about something directly when it happens has its benefits, but sometimes ignorance is bliss: It can also be nice to choose the time you want to look at the news yourself.
