Rebecca Von Tersch
Anita Beroza You do it all the time, but do you notice it? Media multitasking occurs when a person consumes multiple media forms on different devices simultaneously, like Twitter on a phone and Netflix on a laptop. While this does not always include news consumption, it can increase negative responses to current events when it does. Mira Wakefield is a Carlmont senior who is the President of the Junior State of America Club on campus. As part of her role, she stays up-to-date on current events for club discussions. Part of that is being aware of where she gets her information. “I try very hard to be cognizant of where I’m getting my news, specifically news that I’ll relate to others,” Wakefield said. “I always try to check myself when I relay a current event and remember where I originally heard that.” But Wakefield was not always so conscious, especially when she was younger. “I would scroll not necessarily on social media, but just on news app where the news alerts pop up on your computer,” Wakefield said. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become sort of
more cognizant of the reputability of certain news sources, and also the way that that can kind of bombard and desensitize, I’ve started to go directly to the source.” The way a person consumes media and what they consume can affect their feelings towards current events. According to a study conducted by Amy J. Lim, Edison Tan, and Tania Lim in PubMed, this is especially apparent in fake news consumption. “Fake news is more likely to elicit death-related thoughts than real news,” which causes “people [to] share the news articles to feel connected to close others as a way of resolving the existential anxiety.” While this news consumption and distribution methods can be unhealthy, they often feel efficient. For people who are busy, they might seem the most appealing. “If you are a kid, or you’re a teen, you’ve got a lot going on, you’ve got school, you’ve got friends, family responsibilities, extracurriculars, you want to stay informed; you want to know what’s going on in the world around you. But you don’t necessarily have time to sit down, you know, every morning with your cup of coffee and read the newspaper. It makes sense to head to Twitter or to Instagram,” Wakefield said. The adverse effects of consuming news from social media are well-documented with respect to accurate perceptions of events: while nearly half of U.S. adults get their news from social media, according to Pew Research, fake news is more likely to spread farther and faster than true news, according to a study published by Soroush Vosough, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral in Science. However, this does not diminish the fact that getting updates on current events from social media is also associated with negative responses to news, and not just in teenagers. “That might be a bit of a misconception that older generations do more time with their news and are more direct
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