Ruminations on Media Madness

I have been thinking a lot about how we consume media, social or otherwise. Last semester, I had the opportunity to take a class on the relationship between media and politics. One of the strongest and most pertinent topics we discussed was how the rise in media outlets and forms has affected our information intake.

Since the rise and fall of the dot com bubble, people have been heralding this as the age of information. Nowadays, we can get our news fix from millions of sites on the internet. For every niche, nook and cranny of society, there is a news site solely devoted to reaching that segment of society. Instead of building an informed understanding through consuming as many news sources as possible, people are gravitating toward the “experts” that share their same beliefs.

Even with such a vast amount of information out there, people are gravitating toward strong opinion leaders instead of using a limitless access to information for a broader to better understand their world.

 You only need look at the rise of Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and Glenn Beck to see that we Americans gravitate to strongly opinionated new sources. Coupled with the decline in ratings of more balanced networks such as CNN, this has led to a culture of opinions and not knowledge.

How can we as informed citizens possibly understand the complex background and reason behind new events when we are too busy trying to decide whom to blame for their occurrence? If we accept this attitude, then we are doomed to repeat history. I am really not so naive to believe that people weren’t short sighted and overly opinionated before cable and the information age, it just seems that more than ever, we are just lost in this media landscape and instead of choosing to be challenged by what they see on TV, we choose to find the loudest opinion out there that happens to be closest to their own. 

I really wasn’t trying to be too dire when I stated with this post. However, as I sifted through the thousands of channels on DIRECTV, I couldn’t help but question what is the role of media in educating our society.