Jeanne Breaty Professor Alex Smith Honors English 1C 21 March 2024 Information, Technology, And Me Walking down any American street will surround you with information. From the prices of street food to the newsman on the TV talking about changes in the U.S. Tax Code. Despite how prevalent information is in our society, many people still lack access to information. When I was small, my access to information was limited to my immediate family, especially my parents. My parents were the average German conservatives, hating new legislation and living by the bible. As a result, my information would come only from a conservative source, making me illiterate on issues such as immigration and xenophobia. As I grew up however, my access to information as well as the variety of my sources exponentially expanded. Part 1: My Childhood and Background I was born in the German city of Munich to a Spanish-Filipino mom and a German dad. When I was little, we would always watch the local news anchor every morning. Despite the abundance of sources of information, my parents limited me to the sources that leaned conservative. If they caught me looking at sources that weren’t conservative, they would often berate me and make me feel bad for listening to the liberals. Like many news anchors, the ones that we watched leaned towards one side of the political spectrum and would publish media to make that side look good. They would often negatively talk about the other side, make hasty generalizations, and appeal to emotion. Munich is a very liberal city, as they’ve constantly voted for socialist parties in the German federal elections. However, when walking down the streets I would at times, see some billboards or posters that portrayed the Greek as bad people who are freeloading on the German economy. In summer of 2011, when I just turned 4, the Greek debt crisis became a hot button in European politics. This time around, the argument was on the austerity measures that the EU would force onto the Hellenic government. My parents were enraged with the fact that their EU taxes were going to Greece. “Warum geben wir Aüslander Geld?“ I remember hearing these words from my parents all the time. In English, it means “why are we giving money to foreigners?”. I couldn’t even comprehend the words coming out of their mouths, I was only 4 years old. I didn’t know what austerity or debt was, or even where Greece was on the map. Yet, I was being fed this narrative that Greece and the people there are all horrible. I didn’t know why I was being told these things about the Greek, but of course, I didn’t care. All this negativity that was being fed into my brain would put me into the path of being a right-wing AfD supporter. Could I have possibly understood what any of these things meant? Maybe, but my parents were proud of me for embracing their political ideology. Good enough for me. AfD stands for “Die Alternative für Deutschland”, which means “the Alternative for Germany.” It’s a right-wing political party established in 2013, when I was 6. To some, they are the modern-day version of the Nazi party. My parents were very eager to jump onto the bandwagon for the AfD and spread word of the new party. The AfD was very Islamophobic, anti-EU, and nationalist about Germany. I was learning about my country’s history in school by this point, and I couldn’t help but to connect the AfD to the Nazis. I was really confused as to why my parents would support a party that resembled the Nazis. I thought to myself that my parents knew better than me, so I ignored my gut. According to a press release by the Federal Returning Officer of Germany, the AfD won 4.7% of the popular vote in 2013. This was unprecedented for a brand-new political party to pull off. Despite their successes in the election, the AfD fell short of the threshold to get a seat in the German parliament. It made my parents heartbroken and upset, and it hurt me to see my parents like that. Feeling bad for my parents, I made sure to spread word about the new political party. I would often talk about the AfD to my peers at school, to my cousins, and sometimes even strangers on the train. In 2015, the EU migrant crisis was at its peak. Some 1.3 million people from North Africa and the Middle East made their way into Europe and most notably, Germany. The AfD wanted to use this crisis to push their narrative and appeal to people’s emotions. They depicted the immigrants as people who are leeching off the German taxpayers, or the people that would wipe German culture off the world. Billboards like the one on the left was a common sight for many Germans, including me. The text on the billboard translates to “Stop Islamization, Choose AfD!”. Billboards like these were everywhere for me. Walking to school, the café, or the train station, I would come across these kinds of billboards that depicted the immigrants negatively one way or another. Like many people, these appealed to my emotions as the culprit for the hardship that some Germans faced. As a result, the AfD grew even more in popularity, and eventually won enough votes in the elections to win seats in the German parliament. These kinds of billboards and in general, conservative outlets and anchors, were my only sources of information growing up. With the control my parents had over the sources of information that I could access; I was being indoctrinated with a far-right rhetoric. Part 2: Evolution of My Sources Up until I was 8-years old, far-right media outlets were my only source of information. That would no longer be the case when I moved to the United States. My parents couldn’t control my information as easily as they didn’t have any idea what went on in the American media. They were also not as fluent as I was in English, so they couldn’t understand what people were saying most of the time. People here in America are much more vocal, leading to a lot more conversations than I typically would have daily back in Germany. These conversations along with growing up, slowly made me second guess if I really wanted to affiliate myself with my then-political affiliations. When I was in 5th grade, my parents got me a phone from a government program. The program dubbed “Obama Phones”, wanted to connect low-income families to the internet by handing out free phones with a cellular plan. As the phone was intended to be how I contacted my parents, they verbally put some rules on it. I couldn’t use it for anything but to text my parents. I didn’t really care what my parents told me about what I can and can’t do with the phone. I was like a little kid on Christmas who just got a bunch of presents, except the present that I got was this new phone. I played games on it, texted friends after school, but most importantly, I had a newly found freedom of obtaining information. At the time, I couldn’t really grasp the idea of being able to look up anything I wanted to. At first, I used my new freedom of information to help me do my math homework. 9-year-old Jeanne was amused that she could get help with her homework just by typing an inquiry or topic into the search box. Being able to find tutorials for topics or concepts that I struggled to comprehend really helped me expand my understanding of controversial topics like immigration and intellectual knowledge back then. Google ended up becoming a major source of information for me. Google is a search engine, and it houses anything ranging from independent journals to a partisan news outlet. When I want to learn more about a specific ongoing issue, find places to visit, I always go on Google to find whatever it is that I want to read on. Having the information of information that Google gave me felt liberalizing. I was effectively seeing the world through a new set of lenses. As a result, I broke away from my right-wing AfD supporter phase and over time, started to learn towards the left. Could my sources now have pushed left-wing rhetoric on me like what my parents did? Maybe, but the major takeaway is that I was able to find information on my own. Being able to find and access on my own made me question every bit of information that my parents had previously fed me with. Up until this point, I was always told this and that by my parents. Now, I could form my own opinions with my own sources. I could’ve finally answered all my questions on my own whenever they came up. It was no longer just assuming my parents knew what the best was. I started taking what my parents send and tell me with a grain of salt, and fact-checked everything that they told me. I was never at ease when I aligned my own affiliations to my parents, so breaking myself off from the rhetoric that they had fed me for all my life made me feel like I was finally my own person. Part 3: The Present, And How I Compare to My Generation Fast forwarding to 2024 when I am 16, my information environment has countless differences from my childhood. Compared to my childhood, there are no external forces imposing limits on my information environment. My sources are no longer limited to what my parents wanted me to see. For the most part, my way of getting information today lines up with my generation. In the article “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023,” Monica Anderson reported that in 2023, YouTube is the most popular platform, with 93% of teenagers having used it at least once. My most common sources of information are YouTube, Instagram, Google, and word of mouth. As an aviation nerd, I was intrigued to find out about the door-plug incident of Alaska Flight 1282. I immediately went onto YouTube to find videos about the issue. Multiple videos from different sources with differing political affiliations came up. I had an overwhelming amount of information in front of me, much more than what I could have asked more back in my days in Munich. I have grown to appreciate how accessible information is for me. When I was little, my environment was contained to conservatist outlets, limiting my comprehension of issues like immigration and xenophobia. These limits would heavily influence my opinions on issues such as the Greek debt crisis and EU migrant crisis. As I grew up, my access to information broadened up, which gave me a new perspective of the world and the many issues that we face. As information became more accessible for me and as I grew older, I have swayed away from my parents’ political ideology. My access to information helped me foster a better understanding of the world around me. Works Cited Page Anderson, Monica, et al. “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 11 December 2023, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/. “Official Provisional Result of the 2013 Bundestag Election - the Federal Returning Officer.” Office of the Federal Returning Officer, 23 September 2013, www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/info/presse/mitteilungen/bundestagswahl-2013/2013-09-23-vorlaeufiges-amtliches-ergebnis-der-bundestagswahl-2013.html.