Changes in Technology to Changes in News

Laurie Ewart
le060610@ohio.edu

Changing Technology

Since I began college it had been repeatedly discussed that our generation is reliant on technology. It's true and I am completely okay with that. I feel that it is just the the world we grew up in. It's similar to how our parents grew up with well-published book; I'm sure their parents said they had it easier because they had better materials.

Thinking back on how far technology has come since I was little is amazing. I was actually just discussing how with a classmate what my parent's first cell phone looked like. I remember it was the size of a normal phone and was held in a bag, hence the name "bag phone." Thinking back on it compared to our iPhones today makes me chuckle. They were essentially using a house phone as a mobile phone back then, and today our phones provide us with access to almost anything we can imagine.

Changing News Outlets

In the same way that technology has changed over time, so has the way we get our news information. In my opinion, this is a cause and effect situation. Because technology has come so far, it has allowed us to get our news from several different sources.

I am guilty of using Twitter for my largest source of news. But Pete Cashmore discusses the possible downfalls of this in his article, "Twitter, first, not always right." Cashmore talks about how major news stories are being released via Twitter much faster than major news stations. For instance when Whitney Houston died, people were tweeting about it around and hour and a half before AP released it. You can find all the details here.

While this is amazing and shows how Twitter can get us news faster, it also raises the question of "Is first always better?" In my opinion, no. Racing to be the first to release something means you are much more likely to release information that is inaccurate. There have been a countless number of celebrities that have reportedly died via Twitter, when in actuality they were still alive.

Instances like these show just how important it is to choose credible news sources.

Photo Credit: Wired.com

I am very careful when choosing which news outlets I follow on Twitter. Yes, I do follow some local news organizations that may make some mistakes here and there, but I am aware of that. The accounts I follow on Twitter for major stories are very respected. 

Granted, I may not be the first to hear about a breaking story, but I am confident that they will tweet it within a reasonable amount of time. I would rather wait 30 minutes longer to get the news and be more confident that it is accurate than to hear it from a random Twitter user and not know if it was factual. If the latter happens, I still have to wait for a news organization to tweet it before I believe it. So, in the end, it doesn't matter until I hear it from a credible source.