Social Media: The New Fox News?
Twitter has been the source I use to gather my news and current events since I owned my very first smartphone in 2013. Prior to that, I never considered myself to be one to sit down and watch the evening news on my local channel, but if my parents happened to watch them while I was in the room, then I really had no option but to listen as I finished my dinner.
The way Twitter has simplified access to news and current events has really facilitated the reach of information in real time that individuals desire. A cool aspect that people like about Twitter is that you can personalize what news you’d like to know about. Whether this is staying with local news, or even wanting to know about world wide news, Twitter really caters to your wants.
I am currently residing in Salinas, California, a town approximately 30 minutes away from Gilroy, a location where a mass shooting occurred. Gilroy hosts their annual Garlic Festival every year, and though we all thought 2019 was going to be the same as all of the previous years, it turned out to be the complete opposite with a major shooting. My first recollection of this event was seeing a video through Twitter. Individuals who had attended the Gilroy Garlic Festival had automatically posted the news.
Having this shooting happen so close to home, was a major wake up call for community members in my society. It was tragically beautiful how such a horrible event was able to bring people close together. A quote that really stuck out to me was, “The knowledge gap declines when an issue has a strong local impact and when there is conflict in a community” (Rosenberry & Vicker, 2017). For those who are unfamiliar with the knowledge gap, it simply refers to the higher class obtaining more knowledge due to the fact that they have more access to educational resources than someone of lower class. When using this Gilroy Festival shooting example in correlation to Rosenberry & Vicker’s words, I can say that major events that truly impact a community definitely get around. Whether you get your news through Twitter or like to sit down to watch the 6:00pm news every evening just like my parents, the Gilroy Festival shooting was an event that everyone knew about.
Moreover, a news event that went viral that took place in my city, was a photograph of two young girls sitting outside of a Taco Bell trying to use their wifi to finish their school work during the pandemic. I also first heard about this through Twitter, but the news spread incredibly fast. Because news outlets noticed that the photograph received major attention from people on social media outlets, they decided to shed light on the issue. I’m curious to question, had this not been so popular through social media, would news outlets even find the need to feature this story as its own segment on television?
An event that I did find out through my local news is the River Fire, which happened to be a major wildfire that took place directly in my city, Salinas. It was inevitable to not see this in our local news because it’s an event that impacted our community so much. I didn’t see this event a whole lot on Twitter as much as I did seeing it presented on our local news, but this can make sense since our news channels cater to major events that happen locally, rather than globally. Wildfires are cases that happen all over the world, but because this was the first time that it had affected my community directly, it was more known on newspapers and local news channels rather than on social media itself.
When analyzing the way in which I inform myself about news and current events, I can easily say that Twitter is my go-to source for these events. However, it’s interesting to see the dynamic of word being spread when it affects your community directly, rather than the spreading of news from a different part of the world. You somehow know about news in your town a lot faster than something going on in a whole different country. It is evident to say that social media has played a vital role in continuing to spread news, whether it is locally or globally.
