Every generation has had its own dire warnings for adopters of new technology. My grandmother was fond of saying I’d be doomed to a cranium full of scrambled eggs by my incessant cartoon consumption on Saturday mornings.
From my adult vantage point, I’d argue that those seemingly inane cartoons held the keys to life in their neatly-packaged social observations. But as a kid, I just rolled my eyes.
That’s why I really enjoyed this piece by self-proclaimed “amateur sociologist and professional human” Andrew Hanelly who proclaims “social media is the newspaper.”
He makes a great point when he notes “nobody ever took a look at a room full of newspapers and said ‘wow, look at them rot their brains.’ In fact, people who were plugged in to the world around them were generally considered to be smart and sophisticated – more worldly.”
Is social media really equitable to reading a newspaper? Seems so. Pew Research notes that more and more Americans are getting their news from social media sites.
Is it the message, or the media, that holds merit? Good content is just that, regardless of form. Perhaps it’s time to take a fresh look at our opinions of “kids these days” and understand that, in Hanelly’s words, “it’s not that smart phones and social media will ruin or advance our society, it’s what we choose to do with them that will ultimately determine our fate.”
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