(From CNET, by Larry Magid) I both envy and worry about young people who are growing up in the age of the Internet.
I envy them for their lifelong access to a media that's diversified
enough to bring them news, information, and opinion from an enormous
number of sources.
There's something to be said for having access to thousands of media
outlets. Unlike those of us who grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s,
young people who smartly use the Internet to consume news today don't
have to worry about everything being filtered by a small, elite, and
typically white male cadre of journalists working for one of only three
broadcast networks or one or two local newspapers. And it's no longer a
one-way street. Today's news consumers can also be producers thanks to
blogs, social-networking sites, YouTube, podcasting, and microblogs
like Twitter.
But, as I look back at the career of Walter Cronkite, who died last
Friday, I also worry that young people are finding it harder to come by
trusted sources for news and information. The Internet's strength as a
news resource is also its weakness. We never will nor should return to
the days of only a handful of media outlets, but today's diversified
media landscape and especially the Internet, do bring new challenges to
consumers of news.
One of the things I loved about the "CBS Evening News" with Walter
Cronkite was that it was watched by a high enough percentage of the
population that it created a shared experience. When we heard Walter
tell us "that's the way it is," we had something that we could all talk
about the next day. We all knew it was true even if we didn't all agree
on how we should interpret the implications of what Cronkite told us
happened.
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Tags: training, education, skills, technology, web 2.0
Categories: News