In Ashley Duong’s opinion piece, she reflects on how the way we consume news has evolved with the rise of social media, and how this shift has contributed to a growing sense of apathy in society.
📋 Exam Question
Read the text and write your response to both tasks 1A and 1B below.
Recommended length for tasks 1A and 1B combined is approximately 200–300 words. Remember to read the entire text. You may have to scroll.
- 1A
- The text below is an opinion piece written by Ashley Duong, a student of public relations at Boston University.
- State what the main message of the text is.
- 1B
- Knowledge and understanding of language features and text structure can help you understand what a text means.
Explain how language features and text structure are used to enhance the message in the text below. Use relevant terminology and refer to examples from the text in your answer.
- Social media news has made us apathetic
- By Ashley Duong, Aug. 18, 2023
As a 20-year-old college student, checking the news faster than my thumb can scroll is perfect for my fast-paced lifestyle — or so I’ve convinced myself. Since high school, I’ve stayed updated in between classes with a quick search of my preferred news outlet, taking no more than five minutes to scroll.
This summer, after landing a job as a media/social media intern at a big climate policy nonprofit, I took a closer look at my own social media habits — as well as those of my peers. As part of my job, I skim headlines daily, enough to be familiar with what’s happening in the news, but not enough to have a genuine understanding of its importance. The issue is: this wasn’t a new feeling for me. The innate and autopilot action of learning “just enough” about the news stemmed from an earlier habit of mine, consuming news on social media.
Within the last few decades, consuming news has moved from reviewing the Sunday paper and watching the world news at 6 p.m. to a new frontier: our cell phones. We sit on public transportation scrolling through our feed to read about events affecting more than thousands, and at times, millions of people condensed and summarized into brief headlines and 280 characters.
We don’t receive awards or trophies for being mildly involved in the news circulation (besides saying, “I saw that!” when popular news topics are brought up in conversation). In fact, I’d argue that social media’s accessible nature for finding news has made us complacent with a negative trait: apathy.
It’s not that we don’t care about what’s happening, but this “life hack” of speedily consuming news without the effort of reading full-length articles or watching long videos relinquishes our desire to want to learn more. We’ve convinced ourselves that knowing the surface level of our society’s daily news is enough, that we’ve abandoned the shovel and the genuine human curiosity to know more. And through it, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot, able to answer, “have you heard about this in the news?” but not, “what do you think about it? How does it make you feel?”
This man-made apathy can be easily replaced with a different trait: our innate curiosity. Instead of cutting out social media, take advantage of its quick and accessible headlines as starting blocks to learn more. Social media is convenient, but it’s also easy.
I’m asking you to dive deeper. …