According to a brave report published this week in The New York Times, you are not reading this. You aren’t watching the news, either. You’re barely listening to it, for crying out loud. You have no idea that a recent study at Harvard University found that most young Americans don’t make it a point to know the major headlines of the day. Gee, could it be because of groundbreaking, unprecedented news flashes like these?
Actually, they haven’t yet figured out why the 18-30 year old “adult-ager” group (my own neologism) cares so little about the world. The report quotes an analyst as saying “The notion is that no young person cares about news, and that is wrong.” Alright. It seems fair to assume we care about Iraq, Sudan, and Social Security in addition to saving Frenchie and bringing sexy back. However, the study released by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, manages to eke out a few possibilities as to why we’re so uninformed: 1.) Sliced and diced tree pulp is tangled and inconvenient. The Internet is quicker. 2.) Network and local news are too slow. The Internet moves at just the right pace. 3.) The amount of news on TV is overwhelming and repetitive, so we program ourselves to turn a blind eye. 4.) A skim of the headlines seems good enough. On to World of Warcraft!
Fair enough. We, frenzied young people, have a lot to get done! The first thing on the to-do list? Wade past the frightful bullshit that defines American television news media. Think of those dreadful stale-as-a-TV-dinner personalities: Bill O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Nancy Grace, Joe Scarborough. Anderson Cooper briefly turned heroic during his upbraiding of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu during the Katrina disaster, but that skidded to a halt when he aired his Paris Hilton special.
Young people retain one very important congenital trait: instinct. It’s only natural that we seek out information from people we trust. Older people have instinct too – they just haven’t grown up with the instant gratification we’re used to. And although around 40 percent of us pick up news from the TV that’s probably blaring all day anyway, close to half of us will actively seek out news from the Internet. The Internet serves our instinct – we can pick what we want from its rawer and realer landscape. If this means turning to bloggers and the primary documents of TheSmokingGun.com, so be it. It’s no surprise we stay away from news on television: It’s phony and pre-packaged.
Despite this information innovation, we’re still the least informed generation for decades. Is it youthful apathy courtesy of Camp Bush which stares daggers at opposition? Maybe. They made Cindy Sheehan, a mother asking all the right questions, out to be a lunatic. They turn a blind eye to war protesters. They silence reporters. When 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program handed President Bush a petition to protest “violations of human rights” last month, he chuckled. Hell, that man scared me straight out of majoring in political science. I watched the news everyday until the night we invaded Iraq. Then I stopped, because we were there, and could I change that?
Still, we’re not all Holden Caulfields, disenchanted and eternally angry at all the phonies in the world. Right now, we’re kids, and kids usually aren’t thinking about the world. We’re thinking about ourselves and the shiny things around us. The study expressed fear about the future if young adults continue to ignore the news. They should’ve seen the droves of Maryland students that stood in line for hours to vote in last year’s midterm elections. Someone of little faith ordered only four machines.
Listen. In the future, the young adults will grow up and it won’t be about “me” anymore. We’ll fall in love, marry and have children. We’ll have friends who move and shake all over the world, not just in the campus bubble. Our families and personal networks will grow. There’ll be cousins in Japan, best friends in Israel and France. And over time, we’ll stop being citizens of our own teeny, carved-out niches, and we will use the Internet – and all the fancy gadgets – to emerge as citizens of the world.
Nandini Jammi is a sophomore English major. She can be reached at jammin@umd.edu.
