Yesterday I was at the TEDx Vancouver conference, and heard a talk by Coleen Christie, news anchor at CTV News, and it sparked some thoughts in my head.
Let’s start with a few statistics she mentioned. 70% of North Americans get their news on social media, and 50% of North Americans don’t trust the news they read, hear or watch. Our attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter, and news needs to be entertaining to grab our attention.
This is the part where social media comes in. Coleen believes that social media won’t give us accurate, unbiased news, because our friends, family and neighbours are the ones posting it. To some extent, I agree. But I’d like to offer a new perspective. Maybe social media is helping us give us news in a more efficient way, because we can choose to “Like”/”Follow” several news sources, e.g. CNN, BBC News etc, on Facebook/Twitter, or other platforms? And maybe our social network is helping us determine what news is trending or relevant, by sharing or tweeting about this? From personal experience, I know it has helped me to like news sources on Facebook in order to keep up with current events, and leads me one step closer to breaking through the information clutter that we are exposed to every single day.
This being said, Coleen raised an important point that resonated in the end. People tend to get news from the same sources, e.g. only from Fox News (hope that’s not you!), and we aren’t critical enough about what we learn. Therefore, she encouraged us to choose multiple news sources, be critical but also trusting, and we will reach a “New Age of Enlightenment”.