Generation Y

                I’ve always heard that my generation is the tech savvy generation, but I never took it that seriously. I guess some stereotypes are true. From what I read on my classmates’ blogs, it seems that we all get the majority of our news from the internet.  We go right to an online media site like nytimes.com, Yahoo news, or BBC or get it secondhand off Facebook or a Twitter feed. Even the news we hear about from friends we tend to look up online to learn more. Similar to me, some have found that college has limited the time they spend on news. I think that without cars and TV’s, we spend way more time online on our laptops.

                I already knew I used the internet more than my parents and way more than my grandparents, but by reading about my peers’ internet usage, I realize how different we really are. While they read the newspaper or watch the news on TV, we are, in between cute animal videos and online shopping, reading about current events online. If a question or story comes up in conversation, our instinct is to get on our smart phones and Google it. And it’s so convenient! Like having an entire library and all the newspapers in the world in your backpack. We know how to find information on any topic with a few clicks; my grandmother can’t even find the contacts in her phone (love you Nani). There is a bit of a gap there.

                So, to get back on topic, my classmates and I read most of our news on the internet. I would say this pokes a huge hole in Hedges’ arguments, not that they were very solid to begin with. The internet is a great source for political news and news of all kind for that matter. It definitely isn’t hurting our civic awareness. Carr may be concerned that we are reading so much online, but that doesn’t automatically make the articles short. Sure, sometimes I jump around just reading the headlines, but I’d do that in a print paper anyway. And once I find an interesting story I read the entire thing. I read a nine page article about a boy with F.A.S.D. whose family fought to get him an aide dog. So take that Carr!