As we likely all know by now, this week started off with some major world news. Nearly 10 years after 9/11, the United States made good on its promise to take down Osama bin Laden.
Much like the Kennedy assassination, many Americans will forever recall where they were on September 11, 2001. I was only 16 years old at the time and found out in my third-period French class. Madame Burkart alerted us that something was happening in New York and the entire high school was called into the auditorium to watch the live footage. My evening was spent glued to the TV with my parents and on the landline phone with my sister who was away at college.
So where was I when it all came full circle? About to crawl into bed, actually. As I checked my phone before plugging it in for the night I saw that I had a text message from my mom. It said simply: “Osama is dead.” I was reading the text message two hours after the fact so I didn’t want to call back and risk waking my parents but I Googled “Osama bin Laden” on my phone and clued in my husband.
A friend of mine in upstate New York told me that she saw the news in her Facebook News Feed minutes before CNN announced it live.
Another friend of mine in Florida was fast asleep but awoke to picture messages from her sister in D.C. who rallied at the White House on Sunday night.
What a difference a decade makes.
Nearly half of all Americans now get some form of local news on a mobile device and for the first time more people are getting news from the Web than newspapers, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Washington, D.C. In cases such as this where people like my friends and I are getting more information, faster and from more sources than ever, it seems to be a good thing. The Millennials are getting involved!
Sites like CNN.com and the online versions of reputable newspapers are convenient and useful but after news stories are shared and linked and blogged about and copied-and-pasted, should reliability and misinformation be of concern? Does news + technology + social media = one global village or one giant game of telephone?
Overall, I feel lucky to be connected to what’s going on in so many ways. The only caveat? As all researchers know: Consider the source.