You Darn Kids and Your Internet...

Well, here we are, the launch of my nifty little blog. I was debating as to what I should include in order to make my inaugural post memorable. I was torn between littering the page with groan-inducing images from lolcats.com and posting a witty clip or two from YouTube, but I figure using Soda Popinski from Punch Out! fame as my avatar will suffice for now.

When Colin McEnroe said we would "really have to comb through" the State of the Media piece, he wasn't kidding. There is a lot of information to be processed, but I was intrigued particularly by the section discussing the audience for the Online news medium, and how more and more young adults aged 18-29 tend to view the Internet as an informative equal to television. The article asserts that this jump was largely the result of the 2008 election, and I couldn't agree more. I distinctly remember the emphasis on getting teens "out there" during the 2004 election, where celebrities were trying to make teens aware of pressing issues, the platforms of the candidates, and of their right to vote. Between P. Diddy's Vote or Die! campaign and MTV's Choose or Lose, pop icons were out in full force to impression upon the youth that voting was necessary and cool at the same time. The results? A big voter turnout in young adults, where the number of young adult voters went up, but since the total amount of voters went up as a whole, the percentage stayed roughly the same. As evidenced by a Google search, whether or not these campaings were failures is still debated to this day.

Now, connecting this to the State of the Media article, in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there was a whopping 2% increase in voters aged 18-24, the only age group to show a "statistically significant increase in turnout" for the year. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I cannot think of anything similar to the MTV Celebrityfest that tried to make voting hip or cool in the most recent election. Sure, we had Rock the Vote and its celebrity endorsers, but I think the amount of "look at me, I'm famous and I vote, so shouldn't you do the same?" was significantely reduced. The key difference to me was the amount of information that was being pushed online (mainly from the Obama camp), the enthusiasm of young political activists trying to get their own out to the polls, and most importantly, the incredible ease for youngsters to access information and discuss it.

The article discusses how social networking sites like Facebook making material so readily accessible greatly influenced the way young adults view the Internet as a news medium, and I experienced this firsthand. Just look at (I can't believe I'm about to type this) Facebook's coverage of the 2004 election versus the 2008 election. In 2004, the website was still TheFacebook.com, did not allow anyone to even sign up for it unless they had a valid college e-mail address, and sure as heck did not have the advanced "wall features" that we have come to love and hate. Compare that to the website it is now, where anyone can register, we can post links to articles or form groups consisting of others who have the same ideologies as us, and on election day, can even stick a huge .jpeg image of a pin saying "I voted today!" right on our profile in order to impress our friends and let them know how active we are.

The point to all this? Whether I like it or not, the Internet will only continue to grow until it dominates our news coverage. Just like Facebook did, online digital media will continue to evolve. What once was a social-networking site intended for college kids became a political forum for debate, a collection of links to informative websites, but a place where we could still "poke" one another when bored. I will always hold a place for the "old media," partly because I was pictured in the Hartford Courant's sports page in some pretty sweet action shots when I played soccer in high school, but also because of the tangibility of having "the news" right in my hands. But with how digitally driven our youth is, I sadly do not see a bright future for print, while the Internet's future only looks brighter and brighter.