Like any other smartphone bearing person, I begin my days snoozing the alarms and falling prey to attention-grabbing Twitter notifications. In order to avoid anymore tabloid-y, halfcooked news, I avoid social media for a bit and tune into two of my regular NPR podcasts. They provide with a synthesis of facts and relevant commentary on the happenings around the world and the daily dosage of the American political brouhaha. Post that, I get my pop culture fix from Instagram (which is often inundated with directly forwarded memes from my best friend), like a true Gen-Zer attending college. Irrespective of the purpose (academic or leisure), my love for books has stood the test of time and they still form a focal part of my daily information bundle.
While I try to tackle implicit bias ingrained in social media’s infamous algorithms that expose people to selective news by going on a plethora of media websites, I also rely heavily on The View to provide me with varying perspectives on current hot topics. The Co-hosts’ differing perspectives often trigger in-depth searches for other forms of media on Google and YouTube. Eventhough I often end my days with a book tucked in the bed with me, I make it a point to check in on major headlines back home in India throughout tuning in on live broadcasting of morning news through Youtube livestreams.
In terms of interactions, I barely leave comments or virtually interact with media. Instead, I prefer paraphrasing information from pieces to people in person and having group discussions about the concerned topics over meals. I am also a firm believer in force-feeding people information that I feel is vital for them by sitting them down and reading an entire article out loud to them. For me, the priority is to educate and have a conversation with the community of people that directly surround me.
As a student of Journalism, I have always made an active effort to make my media diet as wholesome and holistic as humanly possible. In this age of implicit media biases and the blurring of boundaries between opinion and news, anyone who wishes to be rightly infomed has to be very conscious of the media they come into contact with. Throughout the years, as every traditionalist teenager succumbed to the pressures of social media and online media, I refused to budge from my fortress of print and TV broadcasts. However, moving to America has drastically changed the way I engage with and receive my news. Due to the limited time availability and the inaccessibility of print media, I have made a shift towards digital platforms that are freely available on the internet and can compress a bunch of information into a format that makes it digestible into my limited breaks between classes. Since this change, I have tried to preserve at some minimal amount of consumption of filtered and authentic sources of media (like print, traditonal broadcast). Currently, my media diet is wide ranging, highly nebulous and cuts across multiple modes of communication, where I am trying to figure out the mediums that suite my appetite and best fulfil my academic and personal needs.
Featured Image via Tehran Times
Atharva Tewari 