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.

Moody Songs and Blogs

A terrific story today in The New York Times science section about gauging the nation's mood not through traditional surveys asking people how they feel but rather through the kinds of songs they craft or the blogs they write. Or as a pullout says: "Looking for clues to well-being in what we sing and say." The image to the right is hotlinked from the Times story and nicely sums up what it has to say.

A couple of statisticians at the University of Vermont have created an analysis strategy that taps into our sense of well-being in a field called mass psychology. As they note, every methodology has its drawbacks. Asking people about their well-being may actually influence it, so this is an indirect approach that skips asking people and instead looks at what they do or say.

The Gallup Well-Being Index a traditional, survey-based approach, and a damned good one too. Play with the tabs. Much fun.

I don't want to go deeper into the NYT story. Read it for yourself if you're interested in what people know or what they reveal about their own well-being through a less-than-traditional-but-awfully-cool approach. Yes, I'm suffering from methodological envy. Why didn't I think of this?

Science, Framing, and the Media

An interesting blog post examines how important the "framing" of science is for public understanding. Social scientists are "critical friends" of other scientists, according to the post, and the "picture we present" to the public can influence perceptions. All in all, interesting stuff.

The idea of "framing" is an old one in the literature. What is framing? Whatever the hell you want it to be, since there are about a million definitions. Like porn, we know it when we see it, but in general framing sets the way we understand a story. Is a story framed as little guy versus big guy, or is it framed as a morality piece? An election framed as a vote on the economy can turn out very different than an election framed on the safety of a nation (see 1992 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections as examples).

And people don't need a lot of information, or any information, to form an opinion, especially about science. A good 2005 study, for example, found that people use heuristics, or shortcuts, to make sense of science stories about nanotechnology depending in part on how they are framed by the media or political elite.

Polls

Public opinion polls are obviously one key way to learn what people know or think about some subject. The Washington Post has tightened its rules on reporting about polls. The Post's new regs are now out yet, but they will be "especially wary of unproven new polling techniques," according to the story. We're saturated by polls. Many are excellent. Some are complete crap. News organizations need to tell us when a poll is crap, and why. It'd be nice if bloggers did the same, even when they like the results of a poll to prove some partisan nutjob point.

The Word of 2009

My vote for the top word of 2009 is sustainable.

It's everywhere. For example, here's a recent USAToday story about college students flocking to sustainability degrees. Green -- not greed -- is good, or so says the story. And we talk a lot about finding a sustainable model for journalism as its traditional economic model of advertising and circulation unravels. There's even a Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University. I look forward to seeing what they come up with, once it truly gets rolling.

A Google News search for "sustainable" 40,979 hits, though to be fair, a lot of them have nothing to do with the recent use of the word. But a lot are tied to "green" in some way. By the way, search Google and you get 61.2 million hits, the first two from -- yes -- wikipedia. So "sustainable" is, I would think, growing in the public mind. It'd be interesting to know how people in a survey respond to the word. Do they think "green" when they hear it? Do they think anything at all? Is the word loaded with positive or negative connotations?

My hunch? People will associate it with "green" and that association will result in the usual, tired, ideological breakdowns. Conservatives will shudder at the word (I do too sometimes, it's not a pretty word). Liberals and greenies in particular will smile, get a warm fuzzy, then go buy something organic. At some point "sustainable" will get ideolized -- a bad word as well, one that I made up on the fly to suggest it's become too politicized to have meaning.

Judge Souter and Civics Knowledge

Retired U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter warned that a lack of civics knowledge poses a threat. Versions of the story all over the Net. An AP version here.

Polls show two-thirds of Americans can't name all three branches of government. "This is something to worry about," Souter said "There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme."

He's absolutely right, of course. The stability of a democratic government relies in part on a reservoir of good will by the public. When government screws up (which is often), it draws down the reservoir. When things go well, it gets replenished. But it's important people understand why the courts can make certain decisions, even if they don't agree with them politically or ideologically. Understanding the role of the courts is vital.

What People Know ... about organic foods

There was some noise earlier this week about a study that found organic foods to not be any more nutritious than other foods. There's a version of the story here though a bit of searching and you can find the same thing, more or less, all over the net.

The lede? A review of 150 studies found no real health benefits from eating organic-grown food.

In other news, organic food will significantly damage your wallet.

To be fair, they're mostly talking nutrient content here, and that's hardly the reason people buy organic foods. We buy them on occasion in part to support an industry and local farmers, in part to avoid the chemicals that are used in non-organic foods, and in part I guess to make ourselves feel better. I never expected there to be a nutrient difference, though some individual studies do find better antioxidants and other factors in organic foods.

But will this study and its coverage influence what people know about food, and especially organic food? Not really, not so much. We're talking a very specific audience here (part yuppies and yippies, part informed consumers, and in all cases people willing to spend a little -- or a lot -- more for a carrot or hunk of meat). However, it may influence general public opinion about organic foods, which in turn could influence how willing government is to support organic growers through space for local farmer's markets or even in rules and regulations about that organic label. The study gives ammunition to people who are suspicious of anything without a corporate label, or smacks in any way of "liberal" thinking. I haven't checked, but I'd think Rush Limbaugh loves this study. He hates most other science, but he'll like this one.