Final Review

I started this project with the intent of giving out three sets of quiz's regarding the news. First, a preliminary baseline to see what people knew about it without provocation to read it. A second, after a week of supplying people with the means to read it in the form of a newspaper in the student lounges and other popular student infested area's and then two more in the preceding weeks repeat it. The first week of quiz's showed that there was clear room for improvement in terms of news knowledge. The second week I watched for people to pick up the newspapers that I had placed in busy areas. Only one person picked them up in my time there. Others moved papers them on top of trash cans or left them alone entirely. Upon giving the second set of quiz's, there was absolutely zero improvement. Some people had told me they had been embarrassed by their last performance on the quiz and had watched the news in hopes of improving for this week. They did not. If anything their responses became farther off though some became better with their satirical answers. After giving around thirty quiz's, I realized the only thing anyone knew was what literally slapped them in the face. Even if it slapped them in the face, they failed to read beyond the four-word description of the event. For example, almost everyone knew there had been an earthquake in Nepal, but not a single person could tell what the capital city where much of the damage had occurred and were a steady stream of information had been coming from all week. The number of deaths? Every respondent said either, "a lot" or "no idea". When I asked people to comment on the pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed a plane into the side of the French Alps in a mass suicide, four of the ten students knew about it only but only one knew details of the event such as the fact that the pilot seemingly practiced the event by flying the plane up and down.
I didn't come in expecting people to know all that much. This summer, I was talking to a someone who was going to be attending one of the nation's most elite institutions next year (Penn) and we were talking about places that I had traveled to. I mentioned that Rio De Janeiro was one of my favorite cities and her response was, "that's in Florida, right?". I was honestly dumbfounded. At the time, Rio was hot in the news with questions about whether or not they would be able to have the Olympic's in 2016. But more than that, this was a big time city, home of the Christ Redeemer, Ipanema beach, and one of the most scenic and famous views in the world. I asked her about a few more cities and places that I thought of as general knowledge places. A girl going to one of the top schools in the world knew absolutely nothing about the world. To me, this was shocking. How was it possible that someone so smart could be so oblivious to the world that we lived in.
I interviewed two people for this project, Ms. Anderson, the school librarian and Kevin Wiercinski, head of the history department. I asked both of them about how much they thought students at the school knew about what was going on in the world. Both of them responded that, for the most part, the answer was zero. With Mr. Wiercinski, the first thing I asked him about this dilemma was if it had been like that when he had been a kid. The answer was no. The reason, he said, was because now we have so much to distract us. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and hundreds of TV shows. For his youth, there was only the TV and it only had three channels. All news. As a result, the news was always on so he and others always found himself watching it. It wasn't that his generation was more motivated to know what was going on it was just that the news was at the forefront of media not behind ten Snapchats, eighteen text messages, fifteen new Instagrams, fifty Facebook posts and of course, everyone's favorite binge hobby, Netflix. At the same time, he stressed how good that some of these new social media outlets can be in delivering people the news. Where you used to have to wait for a new news circuit to get the latest update, now with sites like twitter, you can get up to the second updates of what is going on everywhere in the world. The paradox of social media is that it has made the world both so much closer, yet so much farther apart. When I asked Mr. Wiercinski if he thought Lawrence Academy was behind other schools in our news literacy he said no. He went on to explain that this was just the day and age we lived in. That is just the way that the world is today. Ms. Anderson, also expressed her dissent in the little that people knew about the news. She talked about in the past, putting up bulletin boards with news clippings and current events that she thought people would find interesting only to find that people were not even interested enough to stop and give it a first glance to see if they were interested.
In the end, I reaffirmed my belief that people in modern society, but those under the age of twenty-five, in particular, have a very limited knowledge of the greater world that they live in. Honestly, I don't feel as if this is going to be a problem that is going to get any better either. As technology advances, we will have more and more distractions keeping us away from worldly events.