Photo by Cory Wyman ’16 – A photo of the Reddit.com homepage as of Feb. 25. Reddit is one of many sites banned on the school wifi.
By Hunter Cisiewski ’17
THE ROUNDUP
In early January I was in the Info Commons trying to read opinions about the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting, but my attempt to view articles on Reddit was stifled by Brophy’s wifi network restrictions.
Reddit is one of the largest and most accessible places for online news, and in the modern age we live in should not be blocked.
As a website, Reddit is subject to many articles and threads that would not be appropriate to school.
However, any large-scale news site, or any website for that matter, will have parts that the school does not deem appropriate.
You can find equally offensive material on Google or Yahoo, yet these sites are allowed.
It seems that the fact that it is not affiliated with any major news network along the lines of CNN or NBC is what adults worry about.
This type of worry is something that needs to be suppressed as the news industry edges more and more to online and news aggregators such as Reddit.
Students have grown up in an online atmosphere and have accepted sites like Reddit as their primary form of media.
The fact that Reddit, which has over 6,000 Subreddits, is blocked changes the way that students, who have grown up viewing news and online-based format, must look at current affairs.
Yes, students can access news websites individually, but why stop at a dozen stores if the shop down the street offers everything in one place?
Each of these Subreddits has hundreds of thousands of individual users who devote their time and energy to create news articles about a variety of topics, ranging from the juvenile to the serious.
These user can and have produced primetime news level quality articles that provide as much legitimate information as an article in The New York Times.
Some of the most popular articles have ranged from arguments about video game review scores to hate crime attacks.
Why should one of the web’s most popular news sites be blocked when an entire generation has always looked to it first for the newest stories?
A generally accepted piece of media since 2006, it is a platform that almost anyone who spends time online understands.
Reddit has proven itself a substantial form of media that deserves the same respect and availability as any large scale network.
