Print vs Print

There's been a rash of recent studies to help us understand how people learn from television versus print news.  Basically, those with less education tend to learn more from TV news than other media, in part because of the way television tells stories is more easily digested by those with less knowledge or motivation to keep up with public affairs.

But what about print versus print?

Earlier studies looked at reading the news in print paper form versus online and tended to find paper worked better than pixels.  I've even blogged about one aspect of this.  How do we explain the difference?  Isn't print like print, regardless of whether it's ink smushed on paper or pixels painted on a screen?  My own hunch is it has to do with the way we approach the medium. Paper is seen, unconsciously perhaps, as more serious or more deserving of attention, thus we tend to process news in that form better and, hence, do better on tests of political knowledge.

And so comes this new study (abstract only, sorry), published in the latest New Media & Society.  It finds that among higher education subjects, the kind of print (paper vs pixels) makes no difference in comprehension.  But for those of less education, paper works better as a source of information, at least when measuring comprehension.  The medium, then, is part of the message, but only in that we approach different media in different ways, with different expectations and different consequences of that exposure.

Less education can mean a lot of things -- cognitive ability, for example, but never underestimate the power of motivation.  Folks with less education tend to be less motivated to keep up with public affairs, in part because they fail to see how fairly abstract stories are linked to their daily lives.  If I was to try and explain the results above, I'd say less educated respondents somehow view print as more deserving of their attention than a screen, while those of greater education are equally able to glean useful information regardless of the kind of medium they are confronted with.  It fits the earlier television news stuff discussed above and adds another brick in the wall of what we know about how people choose their news source, how expectations color the way they process information, and what the consequences of these trends may be in the long run.

Odds and Ends

Online Vs. Print

I blogged earlier about Slate's little experiment in which a couple of journalists got their news for a few days from print and a couple who got their news only online. There is an audio here of their discussion after the experiment. Listen for a long time (only moderately painful) and you'll struggle to hear a conclusion or answer other than the sense of frustration by both sides as to the limitations of using only one source. I think that sums it up nicely. Today's informed individual relies on a gumbo of print, online, television, and radio, but these are not real people talking, they're journalists, so I doubt the frustrations they felt would be shared by a typical person.

Today's Idiot Box

This columnist, with ties to my college. Read it and weep for cogent thought and the English language.

Good Blog

A doctoral student blogs about research here. Good stuff. The latest piece discusses research on interpersonal networks. I'd like to see more PhD students doing this sort of thing, in part as a mental exercise, in part sharing significant research with the rest of the world.

Tax Cuts and Trust

And speaking of significant research, a Public Opinion Quarterly piece examines the role of political trust in support for tax cuts. Trust plays a significant role among liberals in support of tax cuts, but not so much among conservatives and moderates (who, let's face it, tend to like them anyway). As an aside, if I'm reading the tables correctly, the more knowledgeable you are, the less supportive you are of tax cuts. That's kinda interesting. Unfortunately the authors did not include media variables.