What forms of new media do you use daily?

If I have to go a day without using my phone in order to check my sports pages that I love, then I am apt to go crazy. I constantly use the internet to check up on anything sports related to keep me sane. I browse Facebook daily, even though I believe I have posted something maybe a total of 3 times in 8 years since I  have had it. I really just get on every morning to see what people posted and how outrageous some of the posts really are.  I do use it to interact occasionally with friends and family but I have most of their phone numbers so texting works just as fine. I frequently check while I am at work and it a slow period of the day. I have no idea how to use Twitter or Instagram or any other cool social media outlet and I don’t think I really want to learn, as I have a hard enough time keeping up with what I do use. I am really not into all the gadgets and technology buzz that everyone else seems into. I have a pretty new phone with millions of apps and features on it and I hardly use any of them, let alone even know what most of them do. I am pretty simple with the technology. If I can keep up to date with sports and the occasional random Facebook updates, then my day is complete. I tend to  gravitate more to the video games on a daily basis then I do anything else.

How has new social media influenced your perspective of events?

Using social media to stay up to date is possibly one of the most difficult things to do. First, you never know what story to believe, you log onto Facebook and you have certain people posting articles about the latest topics, you have other people challenging those posts and articles, then you see a web page that has completely different information. It is very hard to trust anything nowadays that you read as you never know who is reporting actual facts. Most media outlets now are trying to be the first one to get a story out and  if that means part of their story is fabricated and they have to backtrack later, then that is what it is. Social media has influenced my perspective of events by allowing me access to multiple platforms to seek out what information and news I am looking for. Also, social media has afforded the opportunity to be updated quickly in a real time fashion with any breaking news. It is very hard however to really believe what you see on say Facebook, Yahoo or whatever news outlet you are viewing, when you see multiple stories on the  same subject and they all talk about different things. Take for instance the missing Malaysian airline that was reported. The first thing I saw about that was on Facebook as someone posted an article which stated that the plane had been missing but there were parts of the plane in the water and a dive team was searching. Then the next few hours, articles came out about how they had no information about the missing plane and another about how they felt the plane may have gone off course and landed somewhere else. They prematurely stated that everyone was dead before any research was conducted.  Its articles and news like this, that make it hard to truly believe  anything you read. .

Are these positive or negative influences?

Social media has both positive and negative influences when it comes to news and the impact on my life. I follow Facebook and get most of my “breaking news” from articles that people post on their and in a way, even though I never watch the news on tv, I feel like I am somewhat in the loop of what is going on. If I read something that I find interesting, I will take the time to Google more information about it and will continue to gather more facts to fully understand it. This is what I consider the positive of social media and how news is reported and how it impacts me. The negative is the fact that with social media, anything at any time can be reported by anyone. To many times I see a Facebook posts about someone ranting about something they are uninformed about and making themselves look ignorant to everyone, then they backtrack and posts something about how they were just frustrated or they try to use bogus facts to back up their claim. The dangers in social media such as real time transactions are a huge negative for news and for me. To be fully honest, I really don’t follow current events that close, because I feel that everything we ever read about is negative and there's never any positive news being reported and also, I am really not one who worries or cares what is going on as long as it is not impacting me or my friends and family.  It is great to be able to have the ability to keep up with what is currently going on in the world today, but I really have too much going on in my life to spend a lot of time reading about it and really getting involved with it.