Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET This, That and the Other Thing by MARGARET DICKSON In other words, "consider the source" is now an everyday task. The lessons of the Boston Marathon bombings continue to be pondered and ••• absorbed and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Some will remain mysteries Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old naturalized American who crawled out of forever, but one truth is clear now. a boat in someone's back yard into law enforcement's waiting handcuffs, faces Media coverage of breaking news will never be the same. charges and possibly the death penalty in connection with the Boston Marathon No longer will Americans simply click on our television sets and wait passively to be bombings that killed three and wounded hundreds. Say what we will about his role spoon-fed the latest detail. in the most significant terrorist attack on our nation since 9/11, it remains true No, indeed. that he is very young. From now on, increasing numbers of us will forgo the TV altogether to follow the Beloit College in Wisconsin creates a list every year to introduce its faculty to the story on our other, more personal, appliances. Our smart phones and tablets have frame of reference of the young people who will take their seats as freshmen in its become channels of the absolute "latest," and we gobble up emails, Tweets, texts, classrooms this fall. Most of them drew their first breaths in 1984. Tsarnaev will not be instant messages and comments of our friends, celebrities familiar to us and people among them at Beloit, but he is the same age. we will never know. For many, this is an indiscriminate process, with each info tidbit Beloit reports that this year's incoming freshmen are too carrying the same weight as any other no matter from whom young to remember the space shuttle blowing up. or where it originates. They do not know that bottle tops have not always been What is more, we the audience are now part of both the plastic and childproof. news-making and news-gathering processes. Once law They do not remember a time before we had CDs — they enforcement authorities released photographs of the two were introduced four years before they were born. bombing suspects, the public immediately weighed in with They have always had cable TV and cannot imagine not who they were, how we knew them and where they had having a remote control. been and where they might be at any given moment. Law As far as they know, Jay Leno has always been on the enforcement — literally — could not have done it without Tonight Show, popcorn has always been cooked in the "us," or at least not as quickly or dramatically. microwave, and contact lenses have always been soft. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described They are totally unaware that McDonald's once served its the new news reality this way. "Everybody is continuously burgers in Styrofoam boxes … connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, Feeling ancient yet? on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and ••• faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. The rich do get richer and the poor do get poorer Everybody's talking all at once, in a hypnotic, hyper din: the Smart phones and tablets have become channels of the according to figures released by the Pew Research Center cocktail party from hell." absolute "latest" information/news. and based on U.S. Census data. A real problem with the dizzying cacophony of chatter As our nation recovers from the Great Recession, 7 disguised as information is that much of it is simply not true. percent of American households saw their share of America's wealth rise from 56 to It is the technology version of the much-loved adolescent game of Rumor, in which 63 percent between 2009 and 2011. The other 93 percent of Americans saw their someone whispers a secret into another person's ear, and the secret is then passed household wealth fall correspondingly. The mean wealth of the 8 million households along, whispered to another person and then another, until the last receiver reports in the top group has risen to $3.2 million, while that of 111 million other households what she heard. It is never what the first person said and often is not even close. has fallen to $134,000. Analysts say this is largely because the upper 7 percent of Please do not misunderstand. households tend to own stocks and other financial instruments while the lower 93 I am not condemning the new news reality. That would be pointless as technology percent has more of their assets in their homes, whose values have not is doing nothing but getting faster and more sophisticated. What I am suggesting, recovered as quickly. though, is that more is now required of us as news consumers. Gone is the day when Whatever the reasons, these numbers Walter Cronkite, America's beloved Uncle Walter, could tell us the news and we all are more troubling evidence of the growing MARGARET DICKSON, Conunderstood it had been thoroughly vetted and was accurate. tributing Writer, COMMENTS? financial divide in our nation. The burden is now on us to do our own vetting and editing. Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. Daily Specials Breakfast Lunch Dinner Fresh Seafood Hand Cut Steaks Homemade Desserts Italian & Greek Children's Menu Banquet rooms available up to 100 guests APRIL 7-13, 2010 ys y' n ing Weekl Up & Com VOLUME 15 ISSUE 14 Now e! n Onli WLIXOFRP OHEHDX \HWWHYLO ZZZID Cumberland County Library ary Presents The Big Read d 201 2010 m com y.com comingweekl www.upand Fa ayet Fa teville Bea You re You're A G Good an C Charlie B Brown at FSU PROUDLY SPON SORED BY HEY! THIS PAPER ide d Poc et Gu FUN FAMILY EDUC ATIONAL RESOURCE *HSSF REE l Focus o D d UP Up VOL. 10 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM OF CUMBERLAND & HOKE CO BELONGS TO: AY 2010 HAPPY MOTHER 'S DAY! CAMP GUIDE INS IDE! 3 484-0261 1304 Morganton Rd. Mon-Sat: 6am-10pm Sun: 7am-2:30 pm Serving Fayetteville Over 50 Years! 9LHZVUZ [V THYRL[ HUK HK]LY[PZL `V\Y I\ZPULZZ ^P[O \Z Pocket Guide 5V^ VUSPUL! ^^^\WHUKJVTPUN^LLRS`JVT MAY 1-7, 2013 UCW 5