I’ll admit that for someone who studied journalism at university, I don’t keep all that up to date with the news. I do like to know what’s going on in the world but day to day the news just isn’t that appealing. To fill an entire newspaper and the now extra pressure of maintaining news sites 24/7, means that often the stories just space fillers. Unfortunately this lack of seeking out news, combined with a generational love of social networking, means I tend to hear about big stories through Facebook before anything else.
For example, I first heard about the Norway massacre in July through a Facebook page. I woke up one morning, went about my usual routine, checked my Facebook and found hundreds of people ‘liking’ pages that expressed outrage and sympathy at the horrible event. It was only after this that I went to a news site to find out what had happened. Much the same thing happened with the London riots. My newsfeed started filling up with pages based on the problems and then I looked to the news to inform me of the actual details.
We are even getting to the point where people are spreading false celebrity death rumours via social networks. It seems, rather than double checking these outrageous claims, online users are simply accepting them as fact. Earlier this year, a page titled “R.I.P. Snoop Dogg” surfaced on Facebook and it currently stands at 120,243 likes. This is just one of many.
So, what is happening to the way we receive our news if we are learning about world events through Facebook first? We are stepping into territory where information doesn’t need to come from a more certified source than someone who had enough spare time to make an online page for us to like.
Not only this, but we are turning serious events into nothing more than an opportunity to make fun or, using the stereotypical Aussie term, “take the piss”. At the time of the London riots many pages mentioning them in a joking way started clogging up my newsfeed. I will admit some of them made me laugh. However some of them made me sick. “In England they call it a riot, in Australia we call it a house party” is one such example of the latter reaction. Firstly, fellow Australian’s, I don’t think any of you can claim that your house parties are as reckless as those riots, and if they are, I doubt you wanted it to get that out of control. Secondly, this is a serious event that you are belittling into nothing more than a mockery. Grow up please, and find some respect while you’re at it.
Hopefully we will grow out of this phase and prove skeptics wrong about being the ‘me’ generation by paying attention to current affairs. Hopefully we will be more interested in world news than Facebook statuses - my future career may depend on it, after all.
