While recognizing that Global Updates is an attempt to promote engagement with current events, I  agree that the format of Global Updates is dangerous, as it only gives  quick snippets and summarization of events into a small paragraph. As I keep thinking about how to grab people’s attention for longer in the Global Updates section, I couldn’t imagine a scenario where people, at  least most of the student community, would be excited to read a giant block of text starting with a wide  context and gradually getting to detailed descriptions of events. 

Global Updates attempts to capture the wider school community’s  ephemeral attention. It does not cause our community’s preference for summarized, bite-size pieces of  news, but simply reflects our community’s preference. Global Updates caters to the current students’  attention span while promoting the goal of engaging with current  events. By itself, the promoted engagement appears superficial, but  it hopefully piques the interest of students to research on their own. It’s a starting point and needs to be complemented with other forms of engagement: classes, discussions  during sit down, and conversations during cocurriculars or in the  dorm.

That’s why I believe that most criticisms of Global Updates such as the accusation that we misrepresent events aren’t helpful, as I believe these comments fail to understand the overall goal of Global Updates. There is no one magical way to engage with current events, and Global Updates should not be the  driving force behind campus discourse. To truly change our superficial understanding of world events,  we need to reflect on our community. We need to think about how the  Deerfield Bubble came to be and how we uphold our bubble. Global Updates can serve as the catalyst for those uncomfortable conversations.  Instead of simply blaming the section for failing to inform and educate the campus, you can build from  the foundational knowledge of current events offered by Global Updates. You can dig into the foundation of our school, identify patterns  in our community, and come up with new ideas for improvement. It should be obvious that a section in a barely monthly newspaper is not sufficient for hundreds of students’ global understanding. I invite you to create discourse on top of this broad understanding provided by the section. Introduce more nuance and detail, instead of taking the easy path out—complaining that Global Updates should do a better job informing the community.

Global Updates is not perfect; many criticisms are valid, and this  article may very well be overreacting to the lighthearted criticism.  If I took more time, I could find a better balance between length and attractiveness, as well as breadth and detailed perspectives. But I do believe Global Updates is a starting point to break free from our bubble.  What needs to be done now is further encouragement surrounding  deeper conversation in classrooms and clubs. Both arguments for and against Global Updates wish for the student body to hold themselves to a higher standard, so why get caught up in the details and criticize each other so much that you forget the bigger picture? It’s all too easy  to discredit a project for its shortcomings, but as the only program  in the entire newspaper consistently bringing news from beyond the  bubble, we want to pass you the torch.