Who needs the press?

In modern society, we rely more on the middleman rather than the press itself to gather news information. We can’t be bothered to check reliable news sites every 30 minutes to find out what is happening in the world. Instead, we go on Facebook, check our twitter feed, and watch the simpsons. We don’t really know what is going on until an individual posts a status, a tweet, or our television program is interrupted with a breaking news story. We live in a world where we are spoon fed everything. Our phones get push notifications, which is a perfect representation of how news is pushed towards us. We only need the press to make the story. We don’t need them to give it to us. I agree with Jeff Jarvis overall. I saw how this played out with the whole Kony 2012 situation. Everyone on my Facebook feed was posting “Stop Kony!” and sharing images of the children forced into being soldiers. How many of these people actually saw such a thing on the news? None of them. How many heard a celebrity or friend talk about it? All of them. I’m not going to get into the gritty details of Kony 2012 because it holds some controversy. I just wanted to share it as an example of how the press isn’t as important as it used to be for a way to get news information. We use the middleman, people, social media, and word of mouth, to find our news stories.