Does the Internet Generation Know Current Events?

At a meeting in 1939, United States Representative Frederic R. Coudert spoke about how Sir Austen Chamberlain, brother of Prime Minister Chamberlain, disclosed an old Chinese curse relayed to him through diplomacy: “May you live in an interesting age.”

Surely, we live in an interesting age, as illustrated by the recent death of , and our informing of such the same day as the event itself. Within seconds, we learn about world-changing events that in the past might have taken days to learn about. When we have such immediate and comprehensive coverage of worldwide news, one would assume that our current generation is being primed to be one of the most up-to-date and informed to date.

Sadly, this hasn’t exactly panned out.

To provide an example, early this year in school while discussing TIME Magazine’s decision to not make Julian Assange its person of the year despite an overwhelming voting for him, 10 of a class of 16 did not know who Julian Assange was. Of those 10, about six were somewhat flustered to learn he was "The Wikileaks Guy." The remaining four, one fourth of a high school honors level class, did not know who Julian Assange was.

Is this a failure of our media? Many have pointed out flaws in how our major news agencies hold their priorities, arguing that tabloid stories have overtaken true world-changing news such as Wikileaks. Has my generation been exposed to less news about current events than generations before us, and more about celebrities until we don’t know which to pay attention to? While certainly a major factor, I doubt that this could be the sole cause; when our president announced that Osama Bin Ladin was killed, Facebook postings went up in milliseconds, demonstrating that my generation has the power to catch onto news remarkably fast, when we want to.

Is it a failure to pay attention? In the past, receiving the daily paper used to be a ritual. People attentively read to ensure coverage of every subject. In an age of 24-hour news and constant online focus, perhaps some of us have stopped reading some of every topic every day, and started reading a lot of a few topics all day, or a little of a few topics every couple days. Without having our news intake structured for us, can our youth be trusted to pay attention to the world around them?

Or is it even a problem? Is it a standard phase for our youth to become less focused on events that have less direct focus on their increasingly fast-paced lives? Is it another stage we’ll grow out of, yet to be fully understood as we enter a new and increasingly digital age that changes the way we consider some of our most basic behaviors? Even if it isn’t, what can we do to stop it? We have the tools to make our youth the most informed generation in history – how do we use them?