Lately I have seen several articles floating around that are criticizing “Millennials,” a term used to reference people born between 1981 and 1999. We get criticized for many things, but the comment I see most often is that we are self-centered and don’t care what goes on around the world.
It’s true we spend a lot of time reading information on social media sites rather than stories on news websites.
In 2012, Stateofthemedia.org said Facebook users each spent an average of 423 minutes on the site in December but only 12 minutes reading the top 25 news websites.
It is much easier to scroll aimlessly through a newsfeed on Facebook or a timeline on Twitter rather than visit news sites such as CNN.com or BBC.co.uk, and most of us do it without thinking.
I am guilty, as most people are, of checking my phone when I have downtime. I toggle between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to read about what is going on around campus, in my friends’ lives or to just kill time.
When I am scrolling through, I see a lot of posts about “baby bumps,” boyfriends and college stress or whatever ridiculous things celebrities are doing.
For Example, Miley Cyrus’ provocative Video Music Awards performance on MTV made big news last month. Forbes magazine reported that during her performance, more than 300,000 tweets per minute showed up on Twitter, along with the more than 10 million Web searches that took place on Google.
I can see why our generation gets criticized for not caring about things that matter. In contrast, on Sept. 23, the situation in Syria had little more than 100,000 searches on the Web, according to an article in Forbes magazine by Alex Kantrowitz titled ‘Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Drove Over 300,000 Tweets Per Minute’, even though our country’s leaders were preparing for possible military intervention.
The findings don’t mean that people are not interested in current events such as the recent unrest in Syria; another study emerged that actually stated the opposite.
A Sept. 30 article titled “Americans are tweeting about ‘Syria’ almost as much as ‘twerking’ – sometimes more” by Caitlin Dewey in The Washington Post states, “In the past 90 days, according to analytics tool Topsy, users sent 7.7 million tweets about Syria. That puts Syria in the same category, in terms of Twitter interest, as the term “twerk,” which generated a combined 9.5 million tweets in that same period.”
We as a generation spend more time on social media sites than anywhere else on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t stay up-to-date on current events. It seems that users find it is easier to combine our personal lives, pop culture and news all in one place.
CNN has more than 13 million followers on Twitter, so it seems that among the personal posts of our friends, stories about climate change, health care, political races and, of course, Syria, exist.
Why does it matter how much time we spend on social media sites versus actual news websites? We are still staying current and getting the information we need.
In this day and age, it is easy to get distracted by the little things in life, but it is also easy to stay connected.
We as Millennials have the best of both worlds. We can stay connected with our friends, family and pop culture as well as have easy accessibility to things that matter.
