Abstraction: News Stories & How They Affect the Way We Learn About What is Happening Around Us.

As an Egyptian, January and February of this year has been remarkable! It marked the start and the end of the Egyptian revolution, something that came to exist almost 30 years late... However, this is not the topic I am going to discus today, I want to talk about a specific incident that happened during this time.

The Egyptian revolution was planned and executed successfully by the Egyptian youth, who planned it all using the new popular media like facebook and twitter to gather and start it. Later on, the Al Jazeera channel worked full force along with other numerous news channels to cover this rare event(at that time) meanwhile, the Egyptian local news channels also covered the ongoing revolution, in their own way that is. With a desperate attempt from the ex-government to stall the news until they can get everything under control.

I hope this previous pictures gives you a clear idea of how the naive the media was thinking that people would buy what they are selling, now the reason I mentioned this example is to show that news stories, especially the ones that shows on local news channels, or even corporate ones, do not really give a realistic view of what happens in reality, this is because governments and the owners of such channels have their own agenda, everyone has an agenda and naturally this agenda would affect what to show and what not to show on their news. Governments normally like to stay on the top and make sure everyone knows that everything is under control and super Okay! Corporate news channels want to have the most views in order for their adds to sell and influence the world... we can take a very good example of Rupert Murdoch, the man who "owns the news" (click here to know more)

But here is when things get interesting, with the emergence of youtube, twitter, facebook etc. there are many ways in which people can easily share and interact media pieces with each another. This makes things more exposed and opened for verification just like what happened during the Egyptian revolution, had the internet not existed during this time, the Egyptian revolution wouldn't have happened and the rest of the world would not have the slightest idea of an attempted revolution all together. With these social networks, one can easily and quickly verify anything that comes up in the news, I personally developed the habit of going on these websites to verify any piece of information floating around be it from the news or people gossiping around.

Here is a video from Youtube that is made by Onion News

mocking the modern news channels that use catchy news

to fill air time and get the most views.