It's Impossible to Avoid the News

Earlier in the semester we had a discussion about whether or not you can avoid the news. I argued that you cannot avoid the news, and my example was when I was our of the country without a computer or a phone over Spring Break, I still managed to hear about the tsunami in Japan almost immediately after it happened. Whether it's via the Internet, TV, radio, newspaper, or word of mouth, news gets around and travels fast.

Another example of this is the death of Osama Bin Laden. The night it was announced Osama was dead, I was in the libary studying for an exam. I noticed a lot of activity on my Twitter page and decided to take a break and read some tweets. Sure enough, Osama was dead and the whole world was talking about it. #Osama was trending just minutes after his death was announced. The entire world was aware of this. Years ago, who would have thought that the way anyone would hear about major events like Osama's death would be via social media cites?

I asked a few of my friends how they learned about Osama's death and the majority of them said social media cites like Twitter or seeing people's status updates on Twitter. Forget about waiting for the newspaper to publish the story the next day, why wait for that when we can get an instant stream of the world's news?