Searching for "J-school"

Search for "j-school" via Google (while not logged into Google, GMail, etc., and the first entry, of course, is the wikipedia article on "journalism school." After that, you get a list of schools and other stuff, all 588,000 hits. Where the school is listed below, it's the main site.

1. UC Berkeley
2. UNC
3. Missouri
4. CUNY
5. Columbia
6. Kansas
7. CUNY's Twitter account
8. Florida's Twitter account
9. Wisconsin
10. A MOOC I've never heard of

I gave up looking for my own j-school (Grady, at UGA). I'm sure we're there somewhere. Eventually. And it's kinda funny that UF's Twitter account appears via Google before the college site.

By the third page you start to get articles that use the term "j-school" in them, often in a disparaging manner, but not always so. Me, I'm a fan of the word.

All Political Knowledge is in the U.K.

Why do I think all (or nearly all) political knowledge is in the U.K.?  Would Google ever lie.  I did a search of Google Maps for "political knowledge" and most of the spots show up there, not in the U.S. or anywhere else.  See here for my search.

Twitter = Navel Gazing?

The top story among journalists last week was the economy, followed by the Iceland volcano.

The top story among bloggers last week was the Iceland volcano and the Polish plane crash.

The top story on Twitter last week?  Google.  Followed by Twitter.

Huh?

So the Twitterverse basically spends most of its time talking either about Google or about itself.  Twitter was also, strangely, concerned about something called an "immortal soul clause" in a game's terms and conditions.  NASA, real actual news, comes in next on Twitter, followed by "online music."  In other words, Twitter is a Twit.

Details here.

Does Google Make Us Stupid?

Some time back The Atlantic ran a provocative story that asked: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Well, the folks at Pew asked that to experts.  The results are here, but the short answer is -- at least according to the experts -- no, Google is not making us stupid.  Or, rather, they anticipate the expansion of Google and similar services will make us smarter, more efficient, and have a higher IQ.

Where do I fall?  Well, I can't imagine any Internet service actually improving IQ.  That would be odd and, to me, unlikely.  I do think young people are better at finding stuff out, but perhaps they do not know as much.  In other words, why store all those awful factoids with you can, in a click or push of a button, know.  I blogged about this here.  In terms of politics, a certain base of knowledge is vital for the orderly interpretation and integration of new information -- which is a fancy way of saying you gotta know something to learn something.  Just looking it up, even a skilled search, is not enough. 

Fun with Google

How many ways can I translate Political Knowledge?  A jillion of 'em using Google's translate function.

• Dutch: politieke kennis
• Czech: politické znalosti
• French: connaissances politiques
• Spanish: conocimiento político
• Swedish: politisk kunskap
• Portuguese: O conhecimento político
• Irish (I assume Gaelic): eolas polaitíochta
• Korean: 정치 지식
• German: politisches Wissen
• Chinese: 政治知識
• Bulgarian: политически знания
• Russian:политические знания

Gotta love Google.

The Internet Kills Knowledge?

Much like earlier Atlantic articles on whether Google is making us smarter or dumber, a The New York Times piece -- based on this article -- gets into the question as well. Good reading, both.

In part, this has everything to do with facts. Does it matter that we can immediately recall some fact as compared to being able to quickly and efficiently find some fact? Are we raising a generation of people who know less, but who are more capable of finding stuff out? Some say it's no problem. We're creating a generation, through Google, of integrators, of people who know where to find stuff out and how to link it all together to make sense of some issue, question, or problem. Others sorry that without basic knowledge, an underpinning of common understanding, new information means very little and cannot be integrated, no matter how quickly you can Google some fact.

From the piece mentioned above:

A certain lack of general knowledge—what some might call ignorance—is thus built into the system, and will be more so in the future. My Googling undergraduates are doing something they may have been encouraged to do at school.

This may be one of the most important topics in education, and what people know, for quite some time. Is it a scary world? Not so much. Writing, too, was feared to create a forgetfulness in the public, an inability to learn and instead rely on words scratched on parchment. And we all know that turned out to be a pretty good idea. So a world in which basic facts and information are at our fingertips, so goes the reasoning, frees us to consider deeper what we are learning and to better match it with other information. To integrate. To learn wisely.

I'm wanting to buy into this. Really I am.

This article quoted above is excellent, and I strongly recommend it. So good that I'm going to lift, with due credit to Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston in the U.K., the end of the article:

There will always be dimwits, and their feats of stupidity will always make news. Equally, there will always be teachers and parents who shake their heads at the supposed ignorance of the young. We need to be careful before we construct trends from such things. But the internet is different, and it lifts the discussion onto a different plane. We are bound to tap into it for general knowledge, and the young will do it first. Schools are surely right to encourage them. The story of Thoth tells us that the curmudgeonly response—“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it”—is a waste of breath.

But equally, the extraordinary popularity of the quiz in the mass-communication age suggests that general knowledge, the idea of a pool of information shared within a culture and a time, is potent enough to survive.

What Canadian Youth Know

Stumbled across this editorial about Canada's youth and what they know. The graph that caught my eye follows:

Teenagers have received a bad rap for their political knowledge when actually they probably know more than their parents. Bonin and other youth have access to the Internet and in addition with expansion of airlines, are able to travel to other cultures. Nowadays, youth are able to go beyond only dreaming of far away places and can actually access information immediately online (italics added).

Mostly, young people don't so much know stuff as they are now better equipped to find stuff out. In other words, ask them a political question and the response might be: "I don't know, but I know how to find out."

Whether that's a form of knowledge is a matter of some debate and academic inquiry. Is knowing how to find out a piece of information the same as actually knowing it? I don't think so, not at least in that piece of information's utility. In other words, merely knowing how to find a piece of information does me little good in processing the news, of gleaning some useful information from what I read or hear on TV. Whether Google is changing the way we think, that's a topic covered quite nicely in an Atlantic piece some months ago (that it's making us stupid) and again recently (it's making us smarter). But all in all, knowing how to looking something up (online or otherwise) helps us little in making sense of the world as a story flits across the screen.

It's a topic I'd love to examine further, if my hunch is right that young people indeed take this approach. I'm just not quite sure how to attack the research question.

Bing vs Google

I'm not going to do a comprehensive test of Microsoft's new Bing search engine versus everyone's favorite, Google. But I will run a few quick searches that focus on political knowledge and what people know to see if any significant differences emerge.

Below are some key terms and a summary of any differences between the two search engines.

• "Political knowledge" The favorite, in quotes so it'll be examined as a phrase. Both engines arrive at a Pew knowledge test as their first choice. The Google search also pops up some blogs -- including this one. So I gotta go with Google.
• "Civic knowledge" arrives at the same first hit, the Civic Knowledge Project. The Bing search seems to always pop an Amazon book in the top five or so hits. Interesting. I wonder if they have a deal with Amazon to do that? Google says it found 42,100 on this search, while Bing boasts 38.2 million. Not sure what's up with that, but I'm sure as hell not going to leaf through that many hits.
• Media and knowledge. Tried a little Boolean search and got different results. Google came back with some businesses, an Amazon link, some consultants, and near the bottom of the first page Knowledge Media. That was the first hit for Bing. In fact the Bing search in all cases seems to favor businesses.
  
• "Barry hollander" is a vital search -- if you're me. Google rocks, mainly because its first hit is my www.barryhollander.com web site. Which makes sense not because it's me, but because it's a web site with that name. Bing? Another Barry Hollander, his MySpace page. MySpace? People still use MySpace? And as a first hit? Nope, sorry. In fact, for Bing www.barryhollander.com doesn't even show up on the first page of hits. That's just weird.
• Affect vs cognition. Yeah, a bit PhDweebish, but I was curious how each handled a research angle. Both came back with research but I have to say the Google search results makes more sense. Bing seemed obsessed with Migraines and cognition. No idea why.

In all, at least for this quick search and especially for the all-important vanity search of "barryhollander," Google comes out far ahead. But really, for political knowledge and media searches it simply does a better job than Bing. I was hoping for more because, like many people, I'm a bit tired of "googling" stuff. I see no reason to change . . . yet.

What We KnowvsWhat We Can Find Out

Does political knowledge matter in a Google world? In other words, is what people know all that important as compared to what people can find out?

I've been mulling this one over. Here I am, a guy who studies how people acquire political knowledge and the role the news media play in the process, and now to make my life worse I'm wondering how much all this matters. Does it make me more knowledgeable that I can name my U.S. representative and senators, or am I knowledgeable given I can Google those names quickly and efficiently.

Is mere factual recall a good measurement of knowledge? Or is it the ability to quickly find and use that information that matters?

In part I'm splitting conceptual hairs, in part I'm tinkering with knowledge versus sophistication versus expertise versus (insert your favorite variable here). But now I wonder whether the ability to search and find information is not, in itself, a form of political knowledge. My gut says no. My head says ... hrmmm ... mebbe.

Obviously from a measurement standpoint we can't easily gauge someones ability to quickly find and use political information, especially not in a telephone survey, so those tests of political knowledge aren't going away any time soon. Just how to measure political knowledge is controversial. I've blogged on this in the past, I'll blog on it some more in the future. It's a great topic that cuts across research methods and theory and all the rest -- the kinds of questions we ask, the ways we ask them, how tinkering here and there can mess with the results.

But we return now to my original question: has what we mean by knowledge changed somehow in a Google world? I think it has, though I'm not exactly sure what that means or how you study it. I'm gonna wrestle this one down to the ground in the next few weeks, get a little dirty in the process, and decide whether it's (1) a question worth asking and (2) if so, how to go about it, and (3) is age a significant factor here.

Playing with Google

Enter "political knowledge" and you get the following at the top:

• From Google Maps, Sierra Leone in Africa? And then a bunch of others, mostly U.S.
• From Google Web, the Pew Research Center. No surprise there.
• From Google News, it all depends on the day and what's happening.
• From Google Shopping, a book I've never heard of.
• From Google Blogs, this blog shows up in a special spot, but again otherwise it all depends.
• From Google Scholar, a good study by Delli Carpini and Keeter.
• From Google Video (now defunct, but YouTube), this video of a kid.
• From Google Books, this old book. Cool.
• From Google Finance, zero hits. That explains why I'm not making any money off this political knowledge gig.

Google and What People Know

There is some wailing and gnashing of teeth among the right on whether that dominant net player, Google, is somehow biased in what pops up on our screen when we do a search. In this case, I assume it's a bias against conservatives (otherwise, would the bother complaining?).

Okay, so I did the same search on news from Yahoo and Google using two terms: Obama, and Blagojevich. Topical. Open for some bias. After all, while loonies and the left wish this would all go away, wackos on the right see a conspiracy. So if the theory holds, Google's news should be more supportive of Obama than the sites plucked out by Yahoo.

Top hit on Yahoo? A poll that says 45 percent of Americans suspect Obama or one of his top aides was involved in the job-selling scandal. The top hit on Google? A Republican advertisement about "unanswered questions" in the Obama-Blagojevich connection. In other words, a tie.

The Yahoo links come from CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, some newspapers. The Google links? Something called Right Pundits, then newspapers, Fox, CNN. Basically, a tie.

So in my quick-and-dirty, methodologically challenged approach, no real suspicious stuff going on here by Google, at least not when compared to Yahoo. Conspiracy theorists, sorry.

Political Knowledge, in History

Only tyrants, and the friends of arbitrary power, have ever taken umbrage at a turn for political knowledge, and political discourse, among even the lowest of people.

Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education
by Joseph Priestley, 1778.

You gotta love Google, which can hunt old books for key terms, saving guys like me hours of countless time in the stacks hunting for old quotes to use in a blog. It's a great line because it works even today, over 200 years later. On the one hand, scholars and pundits will plead the case of "the lowest of people" while on the other hand criticize them for a lack of adequate political knowledge. It's an interesting problem. People of less education, working to get through the day, have other things to do than keep up with public affairs. They have little motivation, little ability, and quite frankly little reason to bother.

Education is the single most powerful predictor of what people know, though some have argued it's a lousy surrogate for cognitive ability and motivation. The greater your education, the more likely you have a stake in what's happening, the means to keep up with the news, and the ability to do so. Education works, though imperfectly. That's why tyrants often look at the educated classes, or educators, with suspicion.

Fortunately, "tyrant" doesn't really apply to western democracies, despite what the crazy talk radio people might suggest. And while everyone positions themselves as looking out for the little guy, the "lowest of people," the way some information and news today is served up, heavily laden with partisanship, the "little guy" has a hard time actually voting in a way that helps him or her.

SwiftGoogling

With little comment, I offer this interesting article about the use of swiftgoogling much like the good old 2004 swiftboating. Basically, campaigns purchase Goggle key words to point searches at sites or articles they want you to read. Check out the link above. Interesting, and given how people use Google and the net to find stuff out, this perhaps has some small effect.