Social media distract viewers from the news that matters

More than a million people have tuned into YouTube to watch a young woman being swept away in downtown Montreal during the late-January flood. And more than 90,000 people have watched the YouTube video of a “baby” being picked up and swept away by a large bird in Mont Royal (something since revealed to have been a cyberprank.)

It makes me wonder what makes something go viral and how quickly.

Gawker Zimmerman, 30, of The Daily What feature on Tumblr, explained the difference between something going viral and something making headlines. “When I talk about Internet bent, it’s sort of, what’s viral vs. just what’s making headlines? … When something goes viral, it tends to be something that is not expected to go viral.”

It seems as though the more we are on social-media networks and such sites as YouTube, Reddit and Facebook, the less we are likely to pick up a newspaper and read about more important things.

This leaves a sour taste in my mouth, as adolescents are more likely to have seen or heard a parody video of a celebrity than have read about the civil war in Syria, in which more than 50,000 people have been killed.

Take a second to ignore Facebook notifications and read instead the headlines on political, environmental or cultural stories on sites like CNN. Or pick up a newspaper. If we transferred the energy that people put into browsing pointless YouTube videos everyday into reading global stories of real societal impact, there might be a chance that we as a generation can help provoke change in the world.

So set your Internet browser to CNN or The Gazette, rather than Facebook or Twitter. Read news headlines. Spark a conversation about something that matters. This way, maybe we can spark the change that our world so desperately needs.