PEERing at Opinions

By reading blog posts written by classmates, it is apparent that my relationship with news from varying sources is similar to that of my peers. It seems accuracy suffers a bit on major events spread through social networks, but the relevance and entertainment factors for information spread these ways aims more directly at the viewer. This has certainly been obvious to me in the many experiences I can remember where news came to me first through social media. For example, I knew about the deaths of Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse almost instantly because of Facebook. With Michael Jackson, I remember seeing periodic posts from the New York Times on my news feed with critical updates from hospital reports, and I could not escape hearing about Amy Winehouse passing because so many of my friends had made jokes using her lyrics or expressed their grievances within moments of news reporting. Neither of these instances had to do with anything I could control, should be fearful of, or was interested in learning about to better my own well-being, but they catered more towards entertainment than anything.

            Another thing that jumped out at me while reading others’ posts was that my interest in news certainly varies from time to time and I never stopped to think about why I cared so much about certain things and the relevance they had at that time. Leading up to the presidential debate this year, I was more informed politically than I have ever been before. I don’t usually like politics, or many of the people who are in the business, but my duty and desire as a citizen to vote had me all wrapped up in what was or wasn’t a truthful statement, which of my opinions and morals weighed more heavily at that time than others, and what my disagreeing friends’ accurate argument points may have been.

            Additionally, it is clear that through social media, etc. people stumble across lots of news they aren’t looking for, so the types of information they gather (either by searching or by having news thrust upon their Newsfeeds) are different. People have different definitions of news, too, because family news could be displayed through Facebook right next to a post of an article from the New York Times. News tends to linger longer, since the Internet serves as easily-accessible permanent archives. In general, lots of observations I made have been solidified and extrapolated upon through my peers’ blog posts.