Isabel Schnaidt Blog #2

People often stress the difference between “old” and “new” media. For example, Tim O’Reilly coined the idea of “Web 2.0” to revamp the internet as a place of interactivity and new applications (Fuchs, 2017, p. 35). However, how much of a difference between old and new is there, really? To learn about this, I interviewed my 56 year old dad, who was excited to finally have my permission to tell me all his “back when I was your age…” stories. When I asked him if there was any area in particular he wanted to talk about, he launched into discussing what news media was like in his youth. Not only did he not have the Internet to look up news, but there also weren’t any dedicated news channels. Instead, the news came on three times a day, at 6am, 6pm, and 10pm, and that was that. If you missed it, you missed it.

In his opinion, this is partly why newspapers remained relevant for so long. TV news came on infrequently and for a limited amount of time, while newspapers allowed for much deeper engagement with current events. For my dad, the newspapers were also appealing because they had high school and college level sports scores and the classified section (or, “Paper Craigslist,” as he called it, and which he remembered mostly as a place to sell kittens). He remembered that his parents loved the newspapers and that he still got the New York Times every day when he went off the school in West Point. He estimated that at least half of the houses in his neighborhood had the paper delivered daily. 

Newspaper classified sections

In comparison, it is super uncommon for anyone to still be subscribed to paper newspapers in the current times. When I asked my dad if he knew anyone still getting them, he said that he knew one person who still gets the Washington Post, and that’s it. After 24 hour news channels started in the early 90s, there became less of a need for newspapers. Combined with the boom of the Internet, my dad posited that there is little need for newspapers today.

In the digital age, many people use social media as a way to get news. My dad didn’t touch on social media specifically, but since a study by Whiting and Williams (2013) found that 80% of people use social media to seek out information, it makes sense to assume that a significant amount of this “information” is news and current events (p. 366). This is a much more peer-to-peer way of getting information, where individuals share what they know with each other, rather than everyone getting the same information from the same source. I think this has the benefit of bringing a diversity in opinions, but it can also lend itself to the spread of misinformation. Therefore, while social media might make gathering news more interactive, it clearly has some dangers, as well.

My dad also noted that magazines were much more common when he was my age, but they’ve been replaced by the Internet now. He explained that Newsweek was a magazine that a lot of people used to learn the news, and a quick Internet search tells me that Newsweek is now in digital format. He compared Buzzfeed to People magazine, saying that it was the online equivalent. When I told him that I still read People magazine on Snapchat's discover/"For You" page from time to time, he seemed surprised that the same publication was still running. This really goes to show how a lot of companies are adapting to the new media landscapes in order to stay alive. In addition to being digitized, these magazines are often embedded in social media popular with their demographic (like young adults on Snapchat) and contain ways to interact with the stories they post, such as through quizzes or providing things to forward to friends. 

Snapchat's original discover page

In our discussion of news, my dad also briefly touched on radio, saying that he listened to music and sports shows on it. The University of Michigan used to not broadcast their games on television, so my dad would listen to the radio as a way to stay informed with the team. When I asked if that was boring (unable to fathom sitting through that myself), he told me that it was the only option he had to stay in the loop. While I know that there are still a lot of things broadcast on the radio, I feel like in the modern day, people only really choose to listen to the radio in the car. Even then, as more and more music streaming services are being released, the number of radio listeners, especially young adults, continues to drop. Additionally, if I were unable to keep up with a broadcast on television, I would prefer to check social media to stay in the loop through other people’s reactions. However, that’s not to say that radio is dead. Despite the drop in millennial listeners, radio is still going strong.

Beyond the fact that the news has largely moved from newspapers and thrice-daily broadcasts to 24 hour news channels and the Internet, my dad also pointed out another difference that he noticed. In his opinion, the news when he was my age did a better job at policing its biases. While he admitted that everyone is somewhat biased (so the news channels of the day surely were too), he explained that those older news stations seemed to “pride themselves on their objectivity.” He elaborated by saying that “something like Fox News would have been shocking at the time.” I thought this was really interesting, because now it is common knowledge to know which news channels are super biased, and what way they lean politically. I have to wonder if the news in my dad’s day actually was more objective, or if there are now just more channels (like social media) for people to counter false news claims on.

After hearing my dad talk about the news from his youth, it is clear that a lot has changed. The advent of social media has enabled a constant stream of information that comes from a variety of sources, which has benefits and drawbacks. This constant information stream allows us to be more informed, but it also causes us to feel a need to be constantly plugged in, which isn’t always good for mental health. Additionally, the variety in sources can make misinformation a lot more common, from both accidental misunderstandings to intentional manipulation. However, social media also enables a greater potential for protest. For example, the #MeToo movement has such a strong and unified voice primarily due to the use of social media (Vega-Castaneda & Castaneda, 2019,  p. 99). If there was just one news source, it would be harder for that unified voice to arise from women across the world. It can also be used to organize real-life protests, like the Women’s March on Washington and the many Sister Marches across the country (Vega-Castaneda & Castaneda, 2019, p. 95). These marches were only possible due to the use of social media.

Women's March on Washington

While we spent most of our time talking about the news, my dad also wanted to talk about libraries. He emphasized how important they were at the time, saying that “if you didn’t have an encyclopedia in your house and you wanted to know anything at all, you had to go to the library.” Where he lived, however, you may not have needed to physically trudge to the library every time you needed information. In one anecdote, he told me that the city he grew up in (Ann Arbor, Michigan) had a very progressive service where you could call the librarian to ask a question, and they would look up the answer for you. He distinctly remembered reading a Tolkien book and calling the librarian to ask what a “mace” was.

This kind of call-in service was something I had never heard of, and I thought it was pretty neat. In fact, it seems almost like the precursor to Googling something on your smartphone, just without the Internet. This call-service definitely had more limitations than our phones, of course. You could only call when the library was open, and you were also relying on a human source with the potential for error. One librarian who had no easy search function available could make mistakes, whereas smartphones pull together disparate information from multiple sources, allowing the user to fact check the sources against each other. Still, this service was an idea that was way before its time.

The last specific medium that my dad wanted to talk about was the computer. The change that he wanted to highlight was the invention of the Internet. The first time he used a computer, he was a senior in high school. His school had one Apple computer, which he believes was the Apple III. The one time he used it, his whole class inputted the equation of the circle and watched the computer graph it. My dad claims that the whole class thought “it was the most amazing thing [they’d] ever seen.”

The Apple III

At that time, my dad had no idea what a computer network even was, as the Internet was not commercially available yet. In fact, he admitted that he barely understood the computer itself for a while. When he went to West Point, he took a computer programming class in his first semester, but it took him a lot of time before he actually “got” it. In his college years, personal computers were becoming more common, and when he was a junior, the freshmen were issued Zenith 286 computers, which didn’t even have hard drives, but used floppy discs.

The Zenith 286

I was surprised that I had never really thought about the fact that there was a time when computers were used without the Internet. At that time, even emails were not available for widespread public use, which is hard for me to imagine (Shah, 2016). The amount of information that we can now move around using the Internet is staggering, especially when you consider that the smartphones we carry around are like tiny computers. My dad always tells me that the idea of smartphones were like sci-fi when he was my age.

The last comment my dad made was more about the general state of technology, which is that the media at the time “was much more of a push than a pull.” By this, he meant that today, you can search and “pull” the answers that you want from the Internet, but when he was my age, he was “pushed” information constantly, and the only way he could directly seek out what he wanted to know was by going to (or calling) the library. However, he also added a very insightful comment, saying that despite the current constant availability of information, “you sometimes think you’re pulling, but are actually being pushed.”

I agree that the new media allows for more agency than the old, but I also think that a lot more information is “pushed” on us than we might think, by both humans and algorithms. For example, pandering to “imagined audiences” is one way that information is being pushed. This happens when social media users present what they believe appeals to what they imagine their audience as (Marwick & boyd, 2010, p. 115). This often means that the information we see on social media is directly targeting us in order to benefit the person or company who posted the information. Additionally, our data is frequently used by corporations that have an interest in monetizing it. This often results in the use of algorithms to manipulate what is advertised to us online using our demographics and online activity. Tactics like this can even influence real-life events and politics, like in the case of Cambridge Analytica.

Overall, this conversation with my dad highlighted a lot of the differences between his and my experiences with old and new media. While I’d heard a lot of his stories before, there were still some things that surprised me, like his ability to call his local library with questions, which really reminded me of a pre-Internet concept of smartphones. Looking at all the information he told me, I think the biggest difference between old and new media is the more dispersed and peer-to-peer nature. This has some positive implications for things like protests and learning opinions beyond those of just the dominant ideology, but it can also lead to misinformation and manipulation. So while the new media may provide us with many more opportunities, it’s important for us to make sure we use it in a responsible way.

References

Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13(1), 114–133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313

Shah, S. (2016, May 14). The history of social networking. Digital Trends. Retrieved from https://www.digitaltrends.com/

Vega-Castaneda, L. & Castaneda, M. (2019) Teaching and learning about difference through social media. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351238212

Whiting, A., & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: A uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research 16(4), 362-369). doi:10.1108/QMR-06-2013-0041