Newspapers, letters, books and even word of mouth: these are just some of the ways that information used to be spread to other parts of the world. This process seemed convenient at the time, but it took some time to receive information about anything significant taking place in the world back then. Today, we have the news right at our fingertips.

Articles, magazines, blogs, newspapers online, news-sites, news apps and even social media are just some of the ways that people receive information today. Regardless if that information is true or not, people receive information in a variety of ways today. Recently, I've had the pleasure of discussing how much media usage has changed and how the printing of magazines, newspapers, and books has completely evolved over time, but have we taken the time to really think about how essential this change has really been? We have been impacted by this change without even knowing the advantage that we have over so many other generations. We have been given the gift of technology to be able to access any source of news at any time of the day at whatever time we wish. As part of the growth that has taken place in the media industry, it should be our jobs to stay up to date with the important events that are taking place in our world today by utilizing what we already have.

According to the Statistical Portal, "This statistic shows the percentage of U.S. smartphone users that use an iPhone from 2014 to 2016. In 2015, 43.3 percent of smartphone users in the United States used an iPhone." Just by looking at the graph posted on their website, one can notice about how many people used an iPhone in 2016 (the graph reveals the stat was near 43.5% of the population in the U.S. alone). If such a large number of the population in the U.S. is filled with smartphone users, should it not be our responsibility to utilize our smartphones to learn something worthwhile?

1. The News App

This feature is commonly found on our iPhones and is very similarly ignored. Overshadowed and completely overlooked by all other forms of social media and apps on our phones, we tend to forget how useful this app actually is. This app not only lets you select what news sites you would want to be subscribed to, but it also allows you to receive notifications the second something is published online. If you are already spending time being notified the second someone "likes/favorites" what you posted, is it that hard to be notified when something important in the world and in politics might be taking place?

2. The Internet

As simple as this may seem, utilize this source. We spend a majority of our time on the internet looking at a variety of things, asking multiple questions, looking for answers for homework, looking at insanely absurd videos and looking up results for games that we might have missed. We spend a majority of time using the internet to cater to our personal needs and interests. If we just spent a little bit of our time searching up reliable news sites or simply even googling the news, it's amazing how many things we can find online.

Since we have the vast advantage with the use of information at our literal fingertips today, it is important that we utilize it and make it our job to stay up to date with what is going on in the world around us. If we spend most of our days checking our phones for stuff related to our own personal needs, would it really be that hard to look up the current events for just five minutes?