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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

about where they get their news from. Because I know that my dad, for example, is a big Twitter user,” Wakefield said.

With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people spent more hours online, and Wakefield found herself media multitasking with news more often.

“There was like a COVID briefing every day [on] the PBS NewsHour, [...] I would watch it, but I would usually, at some point, keep it on but go to my phone. I’d either message people about what was going on when we started COVID,” Wakefield said. “I would actually go to another social media sometimes and look at current events on there.”

Excessive media consumption in any form is likely to increase anxiety, making the effects of media multitasking even more severe. One study on PubMed conducted in Russia on the effects of COVID-19-related news illustrated that “Time spent following news on COVID-19 was strongly associated with an increased [anxiety] adjusted for baseline anxiety level.” On top of that, many people spent more time watching or reading news about any topic with the increased amount of time online during the pandemic.

“I think the pandemic has definitely increased people’s propensity to consume news in a really rapid, voracious way,” Wakefield said. “Sometimes it feels like the only way to keep up with all those things is to be constantly consuming news media in very small bites essentially all the time.”

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