New Media: Positive or Negative?

As a young adult and a recent college graduate, I find myself using new media every single day. Social media in general is where a lot of my time is spent. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my Facebook, browse tweets on Twitter, and watch new videos from the users I subscribe to on YouTube. If I do not complete this ritual, my day simply doesn't feel right. I never used to feel this way, but I don't think I could ever go back to how I used to start my mornings.

I grew up in a small town where high-speed Internet wasn't available and cell service could only be achieved by driving 30 minutes outside of town, so my morning ritual was vastly different when I was in middle/high-school. I remember waking up every morning extremely early to watch the news with my parents before my Dad went to work on the farm (how cliche, right?) and my mom had to wake my little sister up for school. Then I would get on our land line (gasp!) and call my friends to see what they were wearing, what gossip I had missed from the night before and what we had planned for after school. Then I packed up my books and my portable CD player and headed out the door for the day. Those were slower, simpler times. Today, though, that's just not how the world works.

Today we have everything we need at the touch of a button. If I want to know the latest breaking news stories, I can follow a trusted media source on Twitter and receive headlines instantly. If I want to know what my friends are doing or what the plans are for the weekend, I can check their status updates or write on their wall, and check my event invitations on Facebook. These forms of new media allow people to remain in tune with what is happening in the world whether it be international, national, or local news, nearly effortlessly. You don't have to go out and buy a newspaper or sit down in front of the television waiting for newscasts. New media allows for people to maintain their fast-paced lifestyles and remain knowledgeable on what is going on in the world. In this way new media has had a positive influence on me and my life in general, but I do see how it can also have a negative influence as well.

New media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram allow for people to instantly post anything and everything that one wants. There are no rules that say you can only post things that are factual and unbiased. Because of this, people must be critical of everything they read. Just because someone says something via social media does not necessarily mean it has any factual basis in reality. For example, I saw on Facebook a that someone had posted this quote as a status update: "Well behaved women rarely make history." This person attributed the quote to Marilyn Monroe. A few weeks later I saw someone post the same quote attributing it to Eleanor Roosevelt. The truth is, the person who really said this was actually neither of those women, but Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard University professor. Although this was a somewhat harmless mistake, it should serve as a lesson that not everything we read on the Internet is true.

Access is another reason that people may find new media to be a negative influence. Not everyone can afford devices that allow them to partake in new media, and besides the financial burden, generations that did not grow up in the digital age may just flat out refuse to partake in new media. This lack of access leads to something known as the knowledge gap and is one of the biggest reasons why part of the population is uninformed and indifferent to what is going on in the world. I could rant about this topic for hours, but we'll save that for another day.

In my opinion, if you have access to new media and are willing to give it a chance, it has more of a positive influence than a negative influence on individuals and the population as a whole and I think it will continue to have more of a positive influence in the next few years.


--Samantha