Adam Hogue

3/3/16

Considered by some to be the worst generation yet to walk planet earth, “millennials” are categorized as any person born between the years of 1982 and 2004. This group is often considered to be lazy, narcissistic, oversensitive, demanding, unappreciative, out of touch with reality, and uninformed. A 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that on average, millennials correctly answered only 7.8 questions out of 12 on a quiz regarding news and current events, the poorest score of any generation.

This could perhaps be due to millennials’ habits and practices. They can often be found either protesting at a rally, criticizing people who do not agree with their ideas (particularly older generations and other cultures), or with their faces buried in their smartphones, constantly tweeting, posting, sharing, liking, and updating, regardless of how insignificant the information.

The effects of millennials’ behavior can be observed anywhere there is a social gathering. Whether at school or at a dinner table, the art of conversation is no more, forever replaced by the false sense of friendship provided by social media. These millennials, this group of insouciant imbeciles, would rather get their friends lists, or number of followers from 1,000 to 1,001, than to make one friend with a genuine face-to-face conversation.

As to be expected, millennials have impacted our society in more ways than just skinny jeans and hipster haircuts. Pop culture routinely adjusts itself to please these mass consumers (disregard that it’s their parents’ money with which they do the consuming). The movie industry has shifted from legitimate plots and storylines with real characters to, “let’s see how many special effects we can create with CGI.” Likewise, nowadays, anyone who can rhyme two words together and put them to a drum machine thinks that he or she is going to be the next great “musician.” Youtube is full of inept halfwits who feel compelled to share their inadequacies with the world, and God forbid anyone attempt tell them the truth about their actual lack of talent; those people are just “haters.”

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of our lives that millennials have polluted with their actions is the way in which we receive our information. The need for studying or reading textbooks for information and answers has been replaced with the internet. Why put the effort into learning or retaining anything noteworthy when an internet search engine can provide limitless amounts of information within seconds? Google’s search engine has successfully replaced Golier’s Book of Knowledge.

Along with this accessibility of immediate answers comes the decline of traditional broadcast media. With this growing age of technology and instant access to information, many millennials rely on their smartphones for news rather than a 9 p.m. broadcast from a local news station. With the option of having alerts sent straight to their phones, the need for regularly scheduled news programs seems to be waning for millennials.

Summer Morgan, a volleyball player at the University of Memphis, still catches the occasional local news broadcast, but said that she does not heavily rely on it for her information.

“I have it set up to get notifications on my phone for news stories,” Morgan said. “I mean, I’ll turn on the TV at night, like the 10 o’clock broadcast when I’m going to sleep, but yeah, for the most part I get it through notifications.”

Travis Offield, a 24 year-old University of Mississippi graduate, falls into the same group as Morgan.

“Most of the time I just don’t have time to sit down and watch the news,” Offield said. “It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s just more convenient to get that information from my phone than to try and catch an actual program.”

This proposes the question: are millennials killing traditional mass media, or is mass media failing to evolve to meet the needs of the public? As it turns out, millennials are not completely out of touch (with everything). They do not completely disregard the news and current events in the world; they simply receive their information in a nontraditional way.

Mass media has taken steps to address these issues, such as offering live streaming news to users’ smartphones, and if they can somehow continue to stay in conjunction with the needs of the ever-demanding public, or even a step ahead of it, mass media sources may not disappear completely anytime soon.