Something that intrigued me while listening to Dr Lobato’s lecture, was the vast number of households/people (specifically in younger demographics) who relied solely on Netflix for watching television. I was thinking that these people may have a limited access to both local and national/international news outlets.
Once someone gets a bit older, they can find out what is happened for themselves around the world without the help of television through newspapers, magazines or probably most easily through the internet. However the internet has no standards like television, anyone can post anything to the internet. And two competing sources or articles posted to facebook will look identical to a reader who isn’t sure which one is backed up with evidence or correct and which one may be completely incorrect/biased etc. For this reason, gathering news from the internet as an adult requires faculties of reason, logic and the ability to discern fact from fabrication. Most people have this ability in at least a rudimentary form. Younger people however (I’m thinking the ages of like mid teens and below) generally haven’t formed the strongest ability to do this, and the younger you get the less able they are.
I think that perhaps children who do not ever watch television (and so don’t watch across televised news programs as streaming services like netflix and hulu don’t have them) will come across their news from sources that may be extremely unreliable, and may even be detrimental to their ability to reason.
Another problem is simply the access to the news. Thinking back to when I was in my early teens, the only time I ever saw the news (and the same was true for most of my friends) was on news shows in between programs I wanted to watch. There was no fast forward like on netflix so I just had to wait until it ended. This at least peripherally exposed younger people to the news and what was happening around the world. I have the feeling that younger people don’t actively search out for the news (on the whole) and so this may lead to an ill-informed generation in terms of global knowledge even though the access to knowledge is higher than ever before.