Like many other liberal-minded, progressive-leaning, global citizen-aspiring Tufts students, I try to follow the news. I read the New York Times and the Washington Post as much as possible - that's what my parents read, and they are smart people, so those must be the best, I figure. I also like the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Boston Globe (gotta keep it local), with slight dabbling into The Huffington Post. (News, blog or both? It's pretty entertaining either way.) When I'm driving my dad's Subaru Forester around suburbia when I'm at home, I almost inevitably have NPR on.
On principle, I prefer reading print to online, for old time's sake. Nothing wrong with supporting a dying industry, am I right? I also really just love the feeling of flipping through a newspaper on Sunday morning with a cup of coffee. It feels so ... classic. But in reality, online is a lot quicker and a lot easier to access. Plus, it's the future.
Recently, though, my new Droid Smartphone has been a game-changer in terms of both social media and news access. Candy Crush! Incredibly addicting, except I've been stuck on level 29 for about three weeks now. Snapchat! So random, so meaningless, so funny - I love it and I hate it. But to be honest, it's one of the main reasons I got a smartphone - I didn't want to be left out. Instagram! One of my guilty pleasures. It's like Facebook, but trimmed down to one artsy, filtered picture and a few clever, or more often dumb, hashtags. Is it #throwbackthursday today or #siblingsunday? Oh, and follow me if you want to see some nice sepia-toned beachscapes and cute puppy pics. #butactuallythough #mylife #college #YOLO!
And of course, there's Facebook, my oldest and most familiar friend. I will admit that I'm pretty solidly addicted at this point. It is just so useful for getting people to come to parties, for the occasional stalking of an acquaintance or crush and for easy procrastinating. Plus, now I can Facebook chat everyone from my phone! As well as send emails, listen to music and basically do all the same things I used my computer for - except writing papers and watching movies.
When it comes down to the news, though, Twitter has been revolutionizing my lifestyle. In addition to getting constant news updates from my Washington Post and NYTimes apps, I almost exclusively follow news sources on Twitter: CNN, Al Jazeera, the Tufts Daily, you name it. Scrolling through and inhaling the bite-sized headlines is an easy way for me to feel like I know what's going on. It's overwhelming how up-to-date I can be.
That said, I also follow some friends and other funny celebrities. But their tweets inevitably get buried under the massive barrage of news in my feed. And I rarely tweet anything myself, other than to re-tweet an interesting human-interest story or inform the world of an awesome meal I had.
To sum it all up, like most people in the "digital age," I am constantly assaulted by tons of information in different forms. As I navigate and sort my way through this confusing mess that is the media, I want to try and figure out what it all means. As the medium of the news shifts rapidly, how is its content changing? What is the future of journalism? How do the media's corporate interests make us all into consumers, and what is the role of advertising? (Shout-out to my class Media and Society and all my other homies at the Daily taking it with me.) Clearly I have lot of #questions and #thoughts - please bear with me as I try to figure all this out. And please excuse the excessive hashtagging. #sorrynotsorry.
Lily Sieradzki is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Lily.Sieradzki@tufts.edu.
