What
better way to start off a blog than with a nice dose of hypocrisy?
My
friend Noel down in Florida posted this on Facebook just this past week:
How
clever and timely of Noel down in Florida to have posted this—he must have
sensed I would need a topic for this blog.
Now,
I have a confession to make: I absolutely hate it when people “share” things
like this on Facebook, so much so that I’ve actually begun to hate the word share.
I want to see friends’ photos and hear about what’s going on in their
lives—that’s why I go on Facebook—not to see the latest “share” of a recipe
they’ll never make or household project they’ll never complete, Photoshopped
kitten or puppy doing something cute, vintage drawing with sarcastic comment, command
to “share if you agree the President is (or is not) doing a good job,” or sappy photo of someone holding a hand-scrawled sign saying he was allegedly left
on the hospital steps thirty years ago and is now looking for his parents.
Sure,
some of those things are cute or inspiring (but most are annoying). And one can’t help reading them as one wades
through the Facebook news feed searching for a morsel of personal news someone has
posted. I make it a rule to never
comment on these incessant “shares,” and I certainly have never posted one, nor
will I ever.
But
I did save this one to—dare I say it—share with you, the students of John Bowen’s
Social Role of the Mass Media class.
“What
is News?” asked Discussion Board Question 1 in relation to the Duck Dynasty controversy. I think Duck
Dynasty definitely belongs in the right column. Are these items newsworthy? Some of them certainly are. Some of them certainly are not. Entertainment news, perhaps…some might even
say gossip or frivolity. And everyone occasionally
indulges in a little escapism, a little junk food, a little fluff, and a small
dose of it is probably needed to maintain one’s sanity in the face of all the
items in the left column. But it’s when
the items in the right column outweigh those in the left column that we have a
problem, when the audience becomes consumed with the immaterial at the expense of
the germane.
Is
the media to blame for producing such content, or is the media merely giving
the audience what it wants? Is coverage
of the topics in the left column socially responsible journalism? Conversely, is coverage of the topics in the
right column socially irresponsible journalism?
I suppose we will tackle these and other weighty questions over the next
sixteen weeks.
In
the meantime, please don’t share anything with me. Unless it’s chocolate.
Good points raised, Stephen. I, too, generally pass over the type of Facebook posts you described but interestingly, just a couple of weeks ago I saw the list your friend shared with you and that you shared here. On the first day of class last week, I read the list to the freshmen in my Intro to Broadcast Writing class and asked them to summarize the issues in the column on the left. NO ONE could come close to doing it. Even their guesses were off-base, showing not only did they not understand the facts of the issue, they didn't understand what the issue, itself, was. One student even said to me, "I don't worry about stuff like that. I figure the government's taking care of it all." AND SHE'S A JOURNALISM MAJOR! What scares me the most about the majority of Reporting majors I'm seeing is that to them, the immaterial IS the germane. It all goes back to the issues of media literacy we were talking about in class. Until we can engage them in consuming important information, we have no hope of training them how to write important information.
ReplyDelete"The government's taking care of it all." Scary on so many levels and a bit Orwellian, to say the least!
ReplyDelete