PODCAST: The news 'likes' of
young people
Today’s generation, namely the
young people, are growing up in a totally different infrastructure as compared
to that of several decades ago. The young peoplde of today are exposed to the
internet from young and are extremely savvy with the ‘new’ technology – which indeed
has brought up the reasons as to why young people nowadays opt not to simply
read traditional newspapers or listen to news on the radio. (Susskind, 2013)
With the improvements made to web coding and
the innovation of communication technologies, social media have become a daily
necessity for the young people. Companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or
Instagram allow the youngsters to simply glance across their news feeds in
order to get updated with the news. With the introduction of RSS or ‘Follow’
feature they are also given the choice as to which news that they choose to
subscribe to making ‘news’ of today, no longer what it used to traditionally be
(economy, happenings, sports) (Schroer, 2014). What more, the internet has
opened up the young generations to the global internet society, making their
interests more dispersed as compared to the past where interests would be
somewhat similar in terms of career, money and family. (Day, 2005)
Following
up on the RSS and ‘Follow’ features of social media, they are able to subscribe
to their interests news. Moreover, today followers are not simply informed of
new things, they in fact, are able to gain benefits from subscription; getting
perks and deeper access to the community. This is different from the more “just
to let you know” style of traditional news in the past which had almost no
personal interaction with the reader.
As
the Human Resource Director of my club, I interviewed new students applying for
committee; having asked them a recent happening such as to give their opinion
on MH370, I was given responses that they simply did not care about it. Asked
why, they said that they could do nothing about it and would rather not think
about it; however when asked about their hobbies, they could talk about all the
latest news and trend about it.
This shows the young generations are in fact
still reading news, the only difference is that they are reading news that
interests them and that is the perks that have been bestowed to them by
communication technologies today. (Schroer, 2014)
References
Schroer
J.W. (2014), Generation Y, Echo Boomers or MillenniumsGenerations, “X,Y, Z and
the Others”, Social Marketing.org. Web. Date accessed: 7th June 2014.
Susskind J. (2013), Internet
Winning the Online News vs. Traditional Media War, IVN.US. Web. Date accessed:
7th June 2014.
Day,
M. (2005), Online players come of age, Australian. Web. Date accessed: 7th
June 2014.
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