For my rewire experiment, I decided to implement a simple change and see just how much my daily information intake changes based on that. I began by thinking about the ways I’m exposed to news, and realized that I don’t really have a consistent way to stay connected to global events. For international news, I rely on stories popping up as I scroll through different media like Reddit and Facebook. For news about my home country and the Middle East, I am even more limited in my exposure as my main go-to platforms do not cover this part of the world, so I rely on my social media circles and again, exposure through random scrolling. While the pages I choose to follow and the circles I choose to keep have not failed to keep me up to date on significant events, it’s become apparent to me that there are some flaws in using this approach. First, I am not as connected to Jordanian news as I’d like to be. Second, my exposure to “international news” has devolved into an oversaturation of Trump. Third, the nature of these platforms make it easy for me to skim through the latest global events in favor of seeing the latest in NYUAD confessions or r/aww. While it’s true that both Facebook and Reddit allow me to cater my experience towards my interests, with reddit dedicating a whole subreddit to world news, they’re still extremely distracting platforms that are easily susceptible to echo-chambering, good for entertainment with light news exposure rather than the other way around. I decided to find an unbiased source of international news to replace Reddit and Facebook for whenever I feel like scrolling through something, and found this chart on Quora:
Choosing to unquestionably trust the chart for the purposes of this experiment, I chose Reuters. (I also wanted to try the Al-Ghad app for Jordanian/Arab news, but it never loaded).
Scrolling through Reuters was definitely a more focused and informative way to get my news, and it seemed like a step up in international news coverage when compared to others. A large percentage of the articles are still focused on the US and UK, but I also encountered news about Yemen, Syria, Saudi, Germany, China, and more within a day. I learned about some of the international response to Khashoggi’s murder, the latest occurences regarding Houthis in Yemen and opposition to ISIS in Syria, and news on corporations like Careem and Nissan. When I briefly opened Reddit to compare, I noticed two political posts, one about a US congresswoman and the other about mass arrests in the UK.
Replacing Reddit/social media with Reuters definitely made me aware of more relevant world events, but it was also a ‘dry’ experience. On the one hand, I can just get the facts and go on with my day, but on the other hand, I miss out on the user interaction that the other less-serious platforms make available, which can provide everything from further analysis and different viewpoints to memes relevant to the news article in question. Additionally, while Reuters covered a variety of businesses and countries, a lot of it still seemed to cater to US interests rather than a digital cosmopolitan’s. All in all, this experiment paved the way for me to continue looking for a method of obtaining news that I’m satisfied with, whether that involves social media, news media, or a mix of both.