How My Classmates Get Their News

After reading my classmates posts about where they get their news I have noticed that a lot of us find out about the news through Facebook or word of mouth. Just like me, a lot of my classmates will find out about a news story on Facebook and then will look it up somewhere else, like The New York Times. We all vary in how much we read the news. Some of my classmates will try and read it daily but others will just read something if it pops up on Facebook or a friend tells them about it. After starting this class, however, a lot of us have started to read the news more because it is technically a requirement. I think that a lot of us appreciate this requirement though and want to start reading the news more as we grow up. Civic literacy and how it relates to how we get our news is a difficult topic because some might say that we are not civically literate because we don’t read the newspaper every day but others might argue that we are more civically literate because we know about what is going on in the world even though we might not read the news daily. We might not know every detail about what the government is doing right now but just by word of mouth or social media we know a lot more than we think we do. Hedges would be disgraced at the fact that we find out about the world through Facebook but is it really such a terrible thing where we get the information as long as we do get the information. Does it make a difference if I am reading an article on The New York Times because of a friend’s status on Facebook or if I am reading the newspaper because I read it every day? I think we are proving Sullivan’s point about how information spreads so quickly on the Internet and how when he blogs he might be responding to someone’s comment or might be looking up an article because someone recommended it to him via email.