Millennials and their media consumption.
It’s a fact that the way my generation becomes informed is too much different than the previous one. I am talking about the millennial’s generation, which is characterized by being born in the time where technology was undergoing its greatest advance.
This technological environment caused that this generation has only been using internet in a way to inform themselves, forgetting about the older media. The number of young people who affirm that they are not TV or newspaper consumers (especially print newspapers) is increasing since the last decades. They prefer to read publications on the internet or online newspaper in their computers because it is easier and more practical. You can go directly to the information that you care about, for example, if you are interested in knowing about the last mach result, you only have to click in the “sports” section and there you can find all you want. Moreover, if you read the newspaper online you have access to videos, you can see what the most read stories are and also you can see the headlines easily and click in the news that you are interested in. There’s no doubt that this way is much easier and more efficient.
As I have just said, this generation opts for the use of internet and also, the use of social media. How many of us have ever known about actual news through social media? I admit that more than one time, I find out about recent news or about something actual through facebook or twitter.
But it’s true that, as we have grown up in the time of technology, we know that the information on the social media isn’t always truthful. Actually, we are a very critic generation, we don’t believe all the information that we read in the social media, in fact, we reconfirm the information searching in official sources (like newspapers websites) to make sure that what we are reading is 100% reliable. We are aware of the large number of fake news that is posted on facebook and in other social media, and we also know where we have to look for reliable information.
Furthermore, another characteristic which define us is the aim of instantaneousness, it means that we don’t like waiting for the information, we want everything to go quickly, without losing any minute of our time. And this, sometimes, makes us look for the easy way to get informed. A practical example of this is the big use of Wikipedia. We all know that this isn’t the most trustful website on the internet but in some occasions we don’t care about it. And who have never used it? I recognize that Wikipedia saved my life several times.
Millennials have changed, in some way, the method we communicate with each other, and the way we become informed about the present, but this doesn’t end here. Behind us, it comes a generation who had born in the prosperity of technology. A generation who has come to stay and change the media.
