Yet Another Blog

The world is full of blogs. Welcome to yet another one.

The title What People Know is not all that informative, rather ironic given my focus on how and what people learn from the media. What kind of media? News and entertainment. Mass and personal. Jon Stewart and The New York Times and rap and rock. High school social studies and social networks like MySpace or Second Life.

Okay, that's the independent variable -- all those media we use to learn about the world, the issues that matter, our perceptions of politicians and people. So what's the dependent variable? What do I mean by know? This can be a simple as political knowledge (which isn't all that simple and we'll visit this in another post). It can mean perceptions of groups, like immigrants. I'll try to focus on how we learn about important stuff.

I will look at how we measure knowledge, how we fail to measure it well, and how the results depend on the questions you ask and the media people use. Why does this matter? An informed public is vital for a democracy to thrive. It says so right here in my civics textbook, so it must be true.

I will use links and stuff on later posts, doing all the bloggy things one must do to satisfy the Bloggods. That's for another day.