Better Informed?

The Internet has made Americans feel better informed, according to a new Pew study. The key point -- 76 percent of respondents say the Internet has made "average Americans" better informed, and 77 percent say the net has made "America's students" better informed. You can see the raw questionnaire here.

A couple of points.

• First, this is perception of being informed, not actual knowledge. Perceived knowledge and actual knowledge are positively correlated, but not perfectly so, and there are segments of the population who believe they are better informed than they actually are, and the consumption of certain media can exacerbate this effect (i.e., talk radio). Here respondents were asked not whether they are better informed thanks to the Internet, but rather whether others are better informed. That's a subtle difference.

• There's an interesting table on the types of information available on the net that makes you feel better informed. Look at it (Q34 on the raw questionnaire, but page 2 of the pdf). In most cases people feel better informed, but the fascinating failure, if you will, is for "civic life and government activities in your community," a 49-49 split. Also the net seems to better serve national and international news as opposed to local news (see top of table). That makes sense, as the Internet destroys geography and cobbles us back together based on interests, partisanship, and the rest.

Those are my two takeaways. There's no a lot here otherwise, in part because it appears this is part of a bigger survey in which the results are not yet out.

Our Brains on the Internet

There's been an argument of sorts going on about whether the Internet in general (and Google in particular) is changing our brains and the way we think.  Today's column in the New York Times continues this debate, taking the side -- and one I sympathetic with -- that nah, not really, our brain is always changing in small ways as we learn but not in big, huge ways some suggest.  If anything, the Net may be teaching us to pay less attention or less deep attention since multitasking is a myth, but beyond that it's not really molding the way we think.

The Internet and Social Connectedness

That remarkable place, the Pew Center, has a new report out that challenges the conventional wisdom -- and previous research -- that the Internet leads to fewer real-world social connections.  Absolutely worth the read if you do work in Internet, social capital, or connectivity among people.

Fifty Things the Internet Is Killing

A great list here of the 50 things the Internet is killing -- several of them knowledge related and thus providing blog fodder for a Monday morning.  Among those items to be snuffed by the Net, some of interest here are:

• The art of polite disagreement (negative affect influences learning)
  
• Memory (kinda obvious, it's importance here)
  
• Authoritative reference works (who needs serious references?)
  
• Respect for doctors and other professionals (journalists too?)
  
• Geographical knowledge (again, obvious here)
  
• Mainstream media (ditto)
  

You can read the story to get an explanation for all of these.  Some are obvious, like mainstream media, some less so -- like memory.  In the article they make the case for something I've blogged about before, the shift from what people know to what people can find. It's an important distinction.

Fun list, and the great thing about lists is they're even more fun to argue about.  See this story, which quotes me about why we love lists (I blame God and Moses, mostly, followed by David Letterman).

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.

Internet & Politics

In 1992, talk shows (TV and radio) became the buzz medium. Bill Clinton, on late-night talk TV, blew on his sax. Rush Limbaugh flexed his talk radio muscle. By 1994, talk shows from TV and radio wielded significant influence. Today they're merely part of the media whole.

In the mid 1990s, many Americans discovered the Internet (never mind it had been around since 1969). The Web made it easy for everyday people to get online, the click-and-duh moment (yeah, I'm a net elitist who fondly remembers the early days). By 2000 the Net became truly influential in presidential politics. Today, like talk shows, it's been mainstreamed.

Thus a new report by the fine folks at Pew comes as no surprise, but is welcome nonetheless.

The lede:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama's backers have an edge in the online political environment.

As with all Pew reports, this one is finely researched, full of rich detail. I'm not going to repeat it here, but what people know about the campaign is more and more influenced by what they see, what they read, and what they post themselves online. From YouTube to blogs to cnn.com, how people learn about candidates and campaigns is changing. All for the good? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Great piece this month in The Atlantic (the print issue, so go spend a few bucks!)about how Google is making us all dumber. I read it. Felt even dumber, because I suspect it's true; but that's the stuff of another post, another time.

No Virtuous Circle?

The idea of a virtuous circle is that people who regularly watch, read, or seek out news typically have higher levels of trust and participation, even when you control for all those annoying demographic factors. It's a great idea.

In Finland, at least, it doesn't work that way. Or so says one study.

People who use traditional information channels and the Internet form an information-rich group of citizens. Fairly young, more often voting, and in some ways living the so-called virtuous circle. The authors find the Net limited in its capacity to enhance knowledge, but they do raise what I've always thought an interesting point, the idea of Internet Participation.

This is not the purpose of their study, but there is growing thought that young people see "participation" in a different way than their elders. In the traditional sense, participation is voting, it's attending a meeting or rally, it's wearing a campaign button or sticking one of those stupid bumperstickers on your car. Participation by doing. For younger people, chatting online or uploading stuff count as participation, even if virtual. They are not physically doing something (other than clicking and typing), but in their minds, they have participated.

Thus a disconnect between some of the questions we ask in research and the way young people understand participation. This is not unlike the tension between how we measure political knowledge and the way people think about political knowledge.

The authors finish with an interesting line:

According to the results in this article, virtula citizenry per se
is by no means less sophisticated politically than offline citizenry.

Interesting stuff, but I suppose no longer surprising given the diffusion of Internet accessibility.