My media habit — to know what everyone else knows.

Every day, I use my smartphone to log on to Facebook, expecting my Facebook friends and news organizations that I follow would share the news that I should probably know. But I don’t click on the articles very much. I just read the headlines, thinking that that’s enough information to be up to date with what everyone else knows. I only click when I am interested to learn the context or critique of an issue, but even so, I wouldn’t read the whole article because it’s usually too long and informative for my patience (there are probably many more stories that I need to get to!) So I would spend about 15 seconds to read the first paragraph and if I want to know more, maybe up to 1 or 2 minutes to read bits and pieces of the entire article.

I follow the New York Times for U.S. news, and BBC and Guardian for international news since living in London last year. I recently started following the Los Angeles Times after moving to the city, and having been trained to be a critical media student, I try to follow Al Jazeera for non-Western-centric news (but I usually skip over them, probably because there is less personal connection). I also follow Huffington Post Korea for Korean news but I find it less useful because it delivers more entertainment-driven contents than serious news. On second thought, maybe such contents are provided for me because that’s exactly the type of contents I consume.

I mainly consume two types of news: entertainment (my career focus) and politics (since it’s pre-election period). I’m curious — can it be that I consume them more because they are the main contents being pushed at me? But why would they be pushed at me if I hadn’t clicked on them to begin with? So is it like a whirlpool with the same type of contents being drawn from the ocean of information?

I get bothered by this idea because I feel exploited about having someone control what I read, and I also think that I could be missing out on other important news. It also makes me feel nostalgic about the simpler, physical paper days when I knew that what I was reading was what other people were reading as well. The newspaper companies probably had more power then — because everybody read the same thing and the companies decided what gets told and not told (I guess they still do). But perhaps it’s about sharing information with others and being aware of the concern of the masses that make news more valuable to me.

It was only in this class that I learned that the front pages of news websites are catered to my tastes based on my clicking habit and other online activities. It would be ideal for all users to be aware of the business activities of media and be active users instead of passive consumers. Anyway. For me, I wish the news websites would have a separate section with “news I might like” and maintain the front-page to be the same for everyone just like physical newspapers. I might then be less skeptical of being targeted as a customer and come to feel like a citizen who is part of the greater public.

���]L