We media and Democracy- Brooke

What have you learnt about your own media use and how you access news content?

I haven’t always kept up to date with the news, other than what I’d occasionally hear via the radio when I’m sat in the car etc. But I never seemed to take much more interest than that. Until more recently when I started watching ITV news at 6(pm), the good thing about watching news via the TV, is the stories are air the same day they take place, which enables the world to become more aware and similarly more democratic. Even more recently I downloaded the BBC News App, which has actually proven very useful as it sends me constant daily updates on news stories. I was able to filter these by choosing topics I am interested in (my chosen 3 were: UK, World and US Election) which is what the BBC App notifies me with, however I am also able to view all the other news stories once on the app, sometimes only reading the headline, however very often reading beyond and getting the full story which the BBC have portrayed to us. It is now been found that we have become a society which filters the information we get, due to how much the media cover. In many ways this is good as we are able to pay more interest into the stories and events which interest us, however there are also negative aspects of these features as it limits our knowledge of much more that is happening around the world.

Thinking about it there are also many other way where I get my news from, but I just don’t fully realise it, this is through the format of social media, e.g. Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Facebook for example uses cookies to filter the news which is shown on people feed, by what people look at whilst online. Also people online share news stories, or stories which seem to be from the news, without actually checking if the web address which they get the information from is genuine, therefore untrue stories and biased opinions on certain issues are escalated and spread throughout social media. This always makes me question the reliability of some people’s information.  Snapchat on the other hand also have begun providing news on their app, however more often than not the information which they provide is information you would read from a magazine, or in that category of new, which again you can never be sure if the source is reliable. With these type of media distributors I have learnt that they don’t create the information, they just find their material from others and copy it.

However looking at the positive aspects of social media news is that the situations are open for debate and opinions from a huge audience, which is where conspiracy theories begin. We are also given information from citizens that big/traditional media companies aren’t obligated to post. Citizens also point out inaccuracies in news reporting which tends to make people in general more optimistic about what they believe.

More recently I have realised how much the way we access media has changed over generations, the way I access media is certainly very different to the way my grandparents would access media. For example when my grandparents were my age the most popular form of news access was newspaper format, the news which people read on their was news from the day before, and the news wasn’t open to debate as much as is it now, so people’s views on different situations were limited. Also not everyone in those days could read so the rich wrote what other rich people read, which meant that people who were illiterate weren’t as up to date on the issues around the world. Which meant in those days it was less democratic. When looking at the ways my parent’s accessed media the variety had advanced slightly, for example TV news was then developed which meant that Newspapers and TV were the most popular formats of receiving media, and the thing with TV is that the news is reported the same day, and you don’t have to be literate to listen to the news, making the world more democratic as a whole. In comparison to now there are so many formats where we can access media, social media networks are now the biggest distributors of news, however they aren’t the producers of it, so what sites like BBC first write is then copied and then changed with the opinions of others involved. This has caused the demand for things such as newspapers to decrease, with mainly older generations purchasing them.