Should We All Just Stop Calling 2016 \'The Worst\'? - 0 views
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Lara Cowell on 03 Jan 17Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."