Millennials are a sociological paradox to those who study them. On one hand, common vernacular denounces millennials as the “all about me” generation, focusing only on their own, presumably selfish, concerns while remaining woefully ignorant about the world news at large. On the flipside, however, a second narrative often finds that the people born between the year 1980 and the year 2000, are intensely concerned with the world around them, and are dedicated not only to keeping up with local, domestic and international events, but to improving it as well.

Which is true? In a world of curated Twitter feeds, it can often seem that young people today are woefully ignorant of “the news” and the world around them. But it mustn’t be forgotten that the world around today’s young people is radically different than the one that study authors may have grown up in.

Simply said, “the news” in 2014 is radically different than traditional notions of what “the news” have been up until now.

It’s no secret that news is changing. All around us we are consistently being told that newspapers and television are on their way out. Facts corroborate this. In 1990, the Los Angeles Times circulated on average more than 1.2 million copies of each day’s paper. By 2009, circulation numbers halved, leaving the paper just barely printing 600,000 copies each day.

READ MORE: The Millenial Generation: A Discussion With Morley Winograd

Falling newspaper readership, however, is no indication of how informed young people actually are. A 2011 research study by Project Information Literacy at the University of Washington, across 25 college campuses revealed that, actually, young people are far more savvy than common banter suggests.

Alison Head, the executive director of Project Information Literacy, research scientist at the University of Washington, and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet Society spoke with me about this topic.

Head said, “We found that eight out of 10 students in our sample have a ‘need for news,’ whether local, international, or national, within the last 6 months.”

This ‘need for news’ as the study titled it is exactly what it sounds like; a need to be fluent in current events around the planet.

Head’s work also finds that the way contemporary students gather news is dramatically different from how a person in, for example, 1987 would have found it.

“Students don’t go to traditional outlets,” Head told me.  “And they really don’t have allegiance to a specific publication.  Nobody says ‘I’m a New York Times reader’ or ‘I watch only CNN’, anymore."

This is different.

Notwithstanding the problems this lack of allegiance for traditional media’s business models, the fact that young people gather news so differently means that outside observers might simply be unaware that information can be gathered in such a way.

“They get their info not in a silo sort, but rather as an aggregate,” Head continued. “Twitter is this. People say it’s shallow, but it goes a lot deeper.”

News aggregation, rather than single source consumption, is the means by which millennials get their news.  Technology allows young people to view, not only just multiple sources at once—for example, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR can all be open at once in different tabs—but also to view all of these same sources on one, cohesive aggregate interface.

Websites like Twitter and Google News let users to find information from a tremendous diversity of sources that traditional media outlets simply cannot duplicate.

People that are going to Twitter want the most current mix of information. Whether that’s someone on the street, CNN, or someone else posting a thought it doesn’t really matter.

“You get this real montage of information that no reporter could really deliver at a single story. But you get that instantly on Twitter, and its not tied to a news-cycle,” said Head.

Jonathan Stoller-Schoff is a USC Sophomore, double majoring in International Relations and Theatre, with a minor in Cinematic Arts. Stoller-Schoff and I talked outside of Cinematic Arts about how he gathers news, and what he’s best informed on.

“I listen to NPR’s Morning Edition each morning during breakfast. But other than that I rely mostly on Tumblr. I follow The Atlantic, NPR, and some others on Tumblr,” said Stoller-Schoff.

Tumblr is a website that allows its users to curate personal blogs. But, like Twitter, Tumblr also allows users to follow each other. Media companies, like The Atlantic often have Tumblr pages, where they post stories and images to their blog that, ostensibly, appear in people’s feeds.

Stoller-Schoff also told me how he uses Google News to keep updated on topics particularly important to him.

“I also get emails about the Congo,” Stoller-Schoff said. “Google News has this feature that lets you set news alerts on certain topics. When something new happens, it sends me an email and I’ll look at it as soon as I can.”

Stoller-Schoff is passionate about fighting human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is highly aware of the various factors contributing to a genocide currently occurring in central Africa.        

When asked about his knowledge of the conflict going on in Ukraine, Stoller-Schoff reflected that although he was aware of a major conflict in the country, he was not tremendously aware of the particular details behind the conflict.

This was echoed by Jordyn Holman, a Sophomore Journalism student at USC, who gets most of her news from CNN news updates on her phone, Twitter, and Facebook (where she has liked a mishmash of different sources).

Holman explained “I get so many updates, I usually kind of tune out, it’s a ton of white noise to know where to start, and I feel behind.”

Like Stoller-Schoff, Holman acknowledged a conflict in Kiev that is killing lots of people, but she admitted that she knew less than she should about the specifics behind the crisis than she liked to admit.

This isn’t to say Holman is uninformed, though. Ask her any question about Chicago, or racial stratification in the United States and you’re going to get a tremendously well-informed breakdown of what is going on.

The volume with which information saturates Holman’s Twitter feeds is simply too much for any one person to keep up with.

This is perhaps the moral of the story; young people and college students are by no means uninformed about the world, but rather that the wealth of information available means that they can pursue particular topics to a much greater depth than if they were simply handed a copy of the Los Angeles Times and asked to digest it all.

This same wealth, though, can be overwhelming when there is so much to keep track of.

Holman and Stoller-Schoff both do their best to keep updated with what’s going on. They both were aware of a crisis in Ukraine that involved a government that authorized violent force against protestors.

However, learning more than that demands dedicated time set aside to become fluent on the complex factors causing that conflict. Considering there is also a civil war in Syria, virtual civil war in Venezuela, genocide in the Congo, and chronic instability in Egypt, it can get quite hard to keep up with absolutely everything at once.

Reach Staff Reporter Matthew Tinoco here.