A conversation with someone who had a bit of a different upbringing than I did led me to the following realization:
I am politically aware primarily because I read newspapers. It's more complicated than that - I take in far more political information than just what's in the Star and the G&M mostly because of the internet, a good part of my ability to dissect and analyze spin comes from my job, but at the root of it all is newspapers.
I read newspapers because my parents read newspapers. We always had them around the house, I'd pick them up to read the comics and, as I grew older, gradually expanded to other sections of the newspaper, until I was reading the whole thing in middle school.
My parents read newspapers because their parents read newspapers.
I've always been assuming a certain amount of basic knowledge about political and current event just by virtue of being an adult. But I was talking to someone - a perfectly competent adult - to whom it never occurred to seek out newspapers regularly because they'd never had them around when they were growing up so they were never normalized.
I don't know what to do with this.
2 comments:
I have always had co-workers who don't read a newspaper, but learn about the world from 24-hour news TV channels, all news radio stations and headlines in elevators. There's a huge divide between their knowledge and the knowledge of newspaper readers.
That's something you never get in translation. You have to be able to quickly become conversant in anything, and the fastest way to get there is just to read newspapers every day. You store up all kinds of knowledge and phraseology that you can then use when it comes up in a text. I spent a good chunk of last fall translating economics (which I went in knowing nothing about), and trained myself up just by reading the business sections instead of throwing them straight into recycling.
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