Nostalgia vs. convenience: the printed & digital word

By TEDDY COOPER
Sheridan High School Student

Editor’s note: The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade honors English class, taught by Tanya Busailah.

Though we may not think of it as such, language is a technology. It is not something that is inherent to any creature; it is something that is created in order to facilitate the flow of ideas, and as with most technologies, it is subject to change.

One such change is how language is written, and more specifically, how the ideas within languages move through the use of printed newspapers and books or digital representations of the same ideas. While newspapers are still widely used, they have lost much of their ability to spread ideas and generate sustainable income, due to the emergence of other technologies, such as the television and the internet, which have become many people’s sources of facts and information about the world around them.

In order to effectively spread ideas, the medium by which they travel needs to be accessible and appealing to as many people as possible. Many of these newspapers are written with the local population in mind as that is often the largest portion of their audience, allowing them to be successful within the city or county that they write for. However, the ability to appeal to a larger population is not always reliant on location, and if you are trying to grab the attention of a broader range of people, catering to a single population is not as effective.

For ideas being transported by the internet, there is more than just a city, county, or even country that it needs to appeal to. These ideas move under the influence of algorithms that dictate what will be presented to the users of the internet.

While it is incredibly difficult to write for an algorithm, it is not an inability to do so that has made newspapers fall into disuse, it is the fact the algorithms themselves appeal to individuals, providing them with news and ideas specific to them. This largely removes the need for one article to appeal to many people, and replacing it with the ability for many articles to succeed by appealing to one specific view or idea without needing to account for opposing views.

Since algorithms are designed to promote the ideas that get the most attention, this results in the spreading of ideas that are the most exciting and, oftentimes, full of misinformation. This is because anyone is capable of creating a website, blog, or social media account without needing any professional experience. Because of this, content can be created that does not provide truthful information or appeal in a positive way, but instead aims to get as many people as possible to view the content. However, large city papers are a more controlled environment in the sense that they rely on the knowledge and experience of professional reporters and fact checkers to create articles that appeal using primarily truthful information.

Though newspaper publishers can and have published their papers online, there is still the barrier of how the papers will be found, as there is little public knowledge on how popular websites’ algorithms work. Newspaper companies also need to have a way to spread knowledge of their own websites, likely creating the need for these companies to build a social media presence or use other ways to spread that knowledge and making it even harder for a newspaper to transfer into an online format.

On the other hand, there can be an appeal to the nostalgia of having a tangible paper which allows you to cut things out and have a reasonable, satisfying end to your reading, rather than the digital rabbit holes that you can fall down with the control of algorithms.

Due to the convenience of the internet and its largely personalized information, newspapers have become relatively less useful and less effective at spreading ideas. While newspaper companies can create digital articles and while algorithms inhibit the success of many internet sources, this is negated by the appeal of personalized content and ease of use.