In general research shows we project more happiness on others than really exists, so the FB thing just feeds it further. The power of projecting such happiness on others, in other words, can influence our own emotional state.
Showing posts with label slate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slate. Show all posts
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Facebook Makes Us Sad
In general research shows we project more happiness on others than really exists, so the FB thing just feeds it further. The power of projecting such happiness on others, in other words, can influence our own emotional state.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Slate's News Experiment
Michael Kinsley of Slate poses this experiment: two journalists will spend one hour a day reading print newspapers, two will spend one hour a day getting their news online, but not shovelware or aggregators, so that leaves out Google News or Huffingtonpost but does include sites like Politico.
This goes for three days, then he gathers them back to discuss their experience. They're really doing this.
The headline for this piece reads Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers? so I assume political learning is one of the examined outcomes, along with the overall experience, the frustrations, the good and bad, and of course the ugly, of getting news in more or less one fashion.
Let's set the record straight. This "highly unscientific experiment," as Kinsley calls it, is highly unscientific to the point of being silly. It's more of a vaguely interesting gimmick than anything else.
There's one published study that looked at the differences between people who read the New York Times online versus those who read the paper version. This controlled experiment randomly assigned people to one of two groups (print vs. online of the Times) and examined differences in learning and other factors. Print came out ahead (I can't lay my hands on the link, but I'm fairly certain it ran in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly).
Any differences have to do with the way we read, the way we approach online versus ink on paper. It's more than mere differences of medium, it's differences of motivation. We simply approach a screen differently, almost at an unconscious level, and subtle differences emerge.
This is a bit more PhDweeby than Kinsley wants, of course. The gimmick study will be fun for the discussion that emerges, but beyond that the results are meaningless. After all, they're looking at very different sources AND very different media. That, budding methodologists, is a confound of confounding proportions.
This goes for three days, then he gathers them back to discuss their experience. They're really doing this.
The headline for this piece reads Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers? so I assume political learning is one of the examined outcomes, along with the overall experience, the frustrations, the good and bad, and of course the ugly, of getting news in more or less one fashion.
Let's set the record straight. This "highly unscientific experiment," as Kinsley calls it, is highly unscientific to the point of being silly. It's more of a vaguely interesting gimmick than anything else.
There's one published study that looked at the differences between people who read the New York Times online versus those who read the paper version. This controlled experiment randomly assigned people to one of two groups (print vs. online of the Times) and examined differences in learning and other factors. Print came out ahead (I can't lay my hands on the link, but I'm fairly certain it ran in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly).
Any differences have to do with the way we read, the way we approach online versus ink on paper. It's more than mere differences of medium, it's differences of motivation. We simply approach a screen differently, almost at an unconscious level, and subtle differences emerge.
This is a bit more PhDweeby than Kinsley wants, of course. The gimmick study will be fun for the discussion that emerges, but beyond that the results are meaningless. After all, they're looking at very different sources AND very different media. That, budding methodologists, is a confound of confounding proportions.
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