Where are young people getting their news from?
Where are young people getting their news from?
by Vikram Sawant
The recent Adam McKay directorial ‘Don’t Look Up’ blends science fiction, social satire and frightening insight to show us how today, truth has been subverted by politics and by polarised and flippant media forces. To the extent that social media challenges, memes, conspiracy theories and celebrity trivia preoccupy the young more than even a comet hurtling towards the earth. The two astronomers in the film who try to warn humanity about an approaching danger could be scientists warning us about climate change, or about not taking a global pandemic lightly or the need to be vaccinated as a protection against a potentially fatal virus.
The reason these messages are not reaching as many people as they should is because not only is news no longer presented as factual but as an opinion but also because today, facts have become boring, attention spans have shrunk and nobody wants to read the fine print. ‘Don’t Look Up’ in the end is about indifference to information. And that brings us to a very important question. Since it is the young who will inherit this planet or what remains of it, how are they consuming news? Or what remains of it?
A report commissioned by the Reuters Institute, has noted that “younger audiences are different from older groups not just in what they do, but in their core attitudes in terms of what they want from the news. Young people are primarily driven by progress and enjoyment in their lives, and this translates into what they look for in news.”
Traditional media is no longer a mainstay
The Reuters study indicates that news for the young is a means to “connect their world to the world – and fulfil an array of different social and personal needs – but they don’t necessarily see the traditional media as the best or only way to do that.” Which basically means that the few trustworthy sources of information are losing the battle to social media. News consumption is also happening through a process of osmosis via scrolling past, documentaries on OTT platforms and yes, even TV shows.
The key finding of the report is that young are not actively seeking news. It comes to them in fragments while they spend their time consuming infotainment about lifestyle, culture and follow bloggers and vloggers. “Fun”, “interesting” and “useful” are the elements they look for even in news and no longer think of traditional news media as “relevant” or “dominant.” The point being that they look for news that can serve them in some way and do not seek information that has societal ramifications. This means that serious news is no longer widely consumed and the industry is more or less moving towards a frothier format as passive news absorbers veer to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and podcasts. News aggregators like Apple News, Flipboard, and Upday are also becoming popular.
The dangers of not engaging actively with news
A 2020 report published in The Guardian cites a study by Prof. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Dr Richard Fletcher, Nic Newman, Dr. J. Scott Brennen and Dr Philip N. Howard who studied the ‘infodemic’ surrounding coronavirus and focused on the people in six countries (Argentina, Germany, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US) to find out how they accessed information about the pandemic. And if the different sources and platforms they rely on, were trustworthy, how much misinformation they encountered, and what was the extent of their knowledge about the coronavirus crisis.
The key finding was that across all six countries, most people are using either social media, search engines, video sites, and messaging applications (or combinations of these) to get news and information about coronavirus. What complicates the matter further are political differences and trust deficit in news organisations and in the government, especially in the United States. Add to the mix, false or misleading information around coronavirus and you have a problem. The kind that manifests in legions of anti vaxxers and the “belief” that coronavirus was made in a laboratory! The report was based on a survey commissioned by the Reuters Institute.
How news turned into an echo chamber
A report by YPulse (a leading youth marketing research entity) has found that 65% of 13-19-year-olds and 63% of 20-38-year-olds use YouTube as a trusted news source. 30% of Gen Z and 26% of Millennials consider social media as their primary source for news. Yet how much of what they engage with is news is open to discussion at a time when online platforms have become conduits of propaganda by governments and powers with vested interests.
Smartphones have replaced newspapers and televisions and only 10% of young people regularly keep up with news using a non-digital source. More than half (59%) of Gen Z and Millennials say they keep up with news more via video compared to 41% who say they keep up with it more via text. The majority would rather use video than text to keep up with news, says the report.
Another article in The Guardian written by Katie Bishop compares young people, clicking on Instagram to get the latest news to be as normal and habitual as the previous generation picking up a daily newspaper. So how is it that a site, asks Katie, that has “traditionally been a platform for sharing lifestyle content rather than hard news,” is now ‘updating’ millennials and Gen Z, about “news?” The piece cites Jennifer Grygiel, an educator at Syracuse University who says,” The challenge with Instagram is that it’s a highly visual space, so people share memes that are more about influencing than informing and people need to exercise caution and be aware of who they’re engaging with.” Visual sources of “news” cannot be fact checked easily and are more about amassing influence than dispensing information. As social media algorithms make us gravitate towards content we have liked or subscribed to, we begin to access more of the same and find ourselves in an echo chamber of reinforced biases. This further polarises people and keeps them distracted from real issues and in different “information worlds.”
Is there an upside?
The Black Lives Matter movement, the momentum initiated by Greta Thunberg to keep climate change at the heart of political conversations, the Women’s March in 2017, the 2018 protests against gun violence in the United States post the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootout, the farmer protests in India and acts of dissent led by young people all over the world show that news need not only be consumed but can also be created proactively in order to change outmoded social, economic and cultural systems. And that young people can use social media to galvanise change, amass support and build synergies as was visible during the Hong Kong protests in 2019.
This is why whenever a state driven crackdown happens, the internet is the first casualty. The downside is ofcourse, the rise of misinformation resulting in cults like QAnon and the propagation of fake news that resulted in the January 6 insurrection in the US and tens of thousands of protestors clashing with security forces over COVID-19 restrictions in Brussels this week. As the Guardian article noted, when young people become content creators rather than just consumers, biases, misinformation and fake news can creep in. Experts also believe it is high time social media platforms filtered fake news, became more responsible towards monitoring hate speech and distributed news with more accountability.
Implications, anyone?
What research has thrown up is that in the age of digital media, there is little patience or time for content that is not smartphone compliant, interesting, fun or relevant enough. This means that algorithms are increasingly deciding what the young will watch and therein lies the danger. Unless people make a conscious effort to seek authentic news, what will happen to publishers who are trying to maintain high journalistic standards? How will they sustain themselves if nobody consumes their content? Many are coming up with strategies to mix hard news with engaging visual elements to reach out to younger demographics but the future of hard news, for now, seems uncertain. And that is not good news because it means that we can no longer agree upon core facts about anything. And the premise of ‘Don’t Look Up ‘ seems closer to life than to science fiction because the film could be a metaphor for all of us looking at our smartphones while the world combusts around us.