Comparing the News

Looking over everyone’s blog posts, it seems that the majority of the news that they get is from the internet. This makes sense because the internet makes news a lot more accessible, especially to college students. Being in college, it is difficult to get a newspaper, watch the news on tv, or listen to the radio. Therefore the majority of our news comes from the internet, from sites such as the New York Times or CNN. It wasn’t all that surprising that most of the internet news sources that people put down were reputable sources like the Times. I think that we’re smart enough to know the difference between someone blogging about the news on their own personal website from a paid writer writing a professional article. Although I do find it interesting how some people pointed out the fact that even though these sources are reliable they can still be biased to certain view points, especially politically.

When I compare my classmates’ comments to my own they all seem pretty similar. It helps that we are all kind of in the same boat being in college where for many of us the internet is our only link to the outside world. Another point that I saw was similar was people who talked about getting a lot of their news from their friends. This is something that I also found because many times I find out about some sort of breaking news from one of my friends and then go online to research it. Some differences that I saw were that some people do still read the paper and watch tv to get the news; whereas, I can never seem to find the time to do either. I think that with the internet we are better able to keep up with civic literacy. We are better able to follow current events and stay informed about what is going on in the world outside of college. This is very important because soon we will be out of college and we will have to deal with what is going on in the world. I think that each of the writer’s would have a different opinion on how most of us getting our news from the internet. Hedges would see it as negatively affecting our literacy, commenting on how the news is solely entertainment-based and making us incapable of individual thought and discernment. Carr would see it as having the potential to change the way we think about current events. I think that there can be many different assumptions made from the increase of the news on the internet, but the true effects that it will have on the future of literacy will be difficult to see.