Penn State has been the main point of conversation throughout the nation due to a recent scandal. Surprisingly, the scandal has several different vantage points and focuses depending on where a person searches for information. If a person ‘googles’ or searches through news articles, then main focus is the victims. Some headlines include ‘Mother of Victim Says Child was Afraid to Tell’ and ‘Sandusky had Access to Vulnerable Kids’.
However, if you go through different forms of media, i.e. social media, the story may have a different focus. On Twitter, there are many different focuses; unfortunately, most of these focuses revolve around defending and victimizing head coach Paterno. The other focus is being angry with the fact that so many people are defending Paterno. Either, the focus is around Paterno instead of the real victims.
This shows how media is powerful and different forms of it can skew the views of the nation. If a person only read Tweets, they would be likely to only focus on Paterno and the firing of the head football coach, instead of the real story and victims.
Social media will play both a positive and negative role in my career. It is good to get information quicker. It is also useful to get the opinions of several different people to learn the opinions of the general public. However, we never know how credible this information actually is. People will read one post and react to that post as if it were fact instead of looking into the accuracy of claims. Then a false message can go viral and the truth will be hidden by millions of misinformed people. Overall, I think social media helps more than hurts. However, it is important to also ready news articles to try and get a full picture of a situation.
Jennifer Prohoroff/ KIN 577
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