Metamemory

Stick meta in front of a word and we move a step back. It becomes thinking about that word, whatever it is. Too PhDweebish for ya? Here's an easy example. Put meta in front of cognition and metacognition is thinking about thinking. Metamemory, according to a study I read this morning, is belief in one's own memory efficiency -- kinda thinking about your memory.

Yeah, I'm getting older, so I wonder how long the old brainpan is gonna work.

This also gets into feeling of knowing. We've all suffered this one. Some call it the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Or maybe their different. Feeling of knowing is just what it sounds like: you know something, but you can't quite remember. It's like an annoying itch you can't quite reach. Tip-of-the-tongue is similar, a word or phrase or name that's right there, on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't quite grab it. There are probably conceptual and theoretical differences between the two, but it's too early, and I'm not caffeinated enough, to tease them out here.

Why am I going on about this? In part to demonstrate that there's a wide world of research out there on memory and the different ways it goes wrong, which can definitely play a role in how those of us who study political knowledge deal with survey respondents or experimental subjects. We know that TV news, for example, does a bit better with recognition of political information but not so well with recall of facts. There's a nagging feeling of knowing, a tip-of-the-tongue example for you right there. TV news alone probably leads to greater feelings that you know something, because of haphazard exposure to TV news while doing something else, thus leads to better recognition of information as opposed to easy recall. What might be interesting to study is any frustration that emerges from that nagging feeling that you know something but can't quite yank it out of trace memory because you watched it on the boob tube rather than read it online or on paper (thus, deeper processing).

Exercise and Weight

We've been told over and over -- if you exercise (and eat right), you'll lose weight. Not so much, or so says a Time Magazine article (image from the site at the right). The online version is a bit different than the print version, which I read this weekend. But the result is the same ... yeah, exercising is good for you, but it's what you eat that counts. And a burst of exercise, that twenty minutes you do a day on some torture machine, that is not the way to go if you want to lose weight. And even more important, after exercising many people decide they need a treat -- a muffin, or some caloric catastrophe from Starbucks.

Why are we always told to exercise? It's good for ya, sure, but there's a whole industry built around going to the gym or buying crap for your house that ends up more of a place to hang clothes than actually use. But we don't want to upset the food industry all that much, so what people know about losing weight is more about spending time at the gym rather than not eating at McDonald's.

Journalism Jobs

In a shout out, colleagues Lee Becker and Tudor Vlad released the annual job and salary survey this week at AEJMC. Becker's been doing this survey forever, or at least since about 1986 (same thing, right?). There are various stories about the survey -- Editor & Publisher has one, for example, as does U.S. News and World Report and one of my favorite publications, The Red & Black. The lede is the same: bad news for journalism/mass comm grads when it comes to jobs and money. PR grads have the best chance of finding a job. Journalism, not so much. According to the report:

"Only six in 10 of the graduates had full-time employment six to eight months after graduation," noted the UGA researchers in the report. That is the lowest level of full-time employment reported in the 23-year modern history of the annual survey.

The complete report is available here. Read it and weep.

Credit Scores

One of those people want to know is their credit score, and if they don't want to know it then by god someone on TV will try to convince them they want to know it. Along those lines, The NYTimes has apparently canned Ben Stein for shilling for one of those operations that charge you for something you can get, at least once a year, for free. Stein, a funny guy and economist and actor ("Bueller ... Bueller ... Bueller") will no longer write a column for the Times, given the ethical problems with associating himself with these credit guys.

I was also disappointed to learn that the three-guy band for "free credit report dot com" don't actually sing, don't actually play instruments, don't do much of anything at all except wear pirate outfits or ride roller coasters or -- in the latest one below, dress like cowboys -- and try to sell us this crap. Sigh.

Do People Learn from Faux News?

It's been a question raised by scholars and by those somewhat, um, less scholarly -- do people learn from entertainment faux news programs such as the funny stuff by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? The answer so far has been mixed. Programs increase feelings of efficacy but decrease trust, seem to aid learning or perhaps not. They influence how people process the news, what factors they consider, or sometimes not.

So I'm re-reading a study in Journal of Communication by Kim and Vishak (story about it here). I blogged about it earlier, but I wanted to re-read the thing and see if any fresh ideas emerge other than what I blogged on earlier. The basics remain the same: mainstream news media exposure led to greater and more accurate knowledge in a controlled experiment than did The Daily Show.

What seems to explain the difference is the goal of the user. This gets a bit into uses and gratifications research. If my goal in watching Stewart is to be entertained, my brain engages with the program in a very different way than it does with CNN or reading news online. Let's face it, watching CNN is a lot of things, but entertaining ain't one of 'em. If my goal is to laugh at current events and politicians, then the brain is not in "learning" mode, thus actual learning decreases and the accuracy of what I remember suffers as well.

So it's in part what we bring to the TV. Yes, TV news suffers from delusions of adequacy, but when we catch up with the news we're in a different frame of mind, one willing to absorb and retain information -- if only a little since it's merely TV after all. When we sit to watch Colbert or Stewart be funny, it's a completely different take, even if people do say in surveys they watch such programs to keep up with the news.

Cool Stuff: MemeTracker

Check out MemeTracker, a neat visualization of news coverage. Scroll down the first page to see some of the other applications with these data.

This is all part of the growing field of statistically analyzing the boatloads of data out there to help make sense of what we do, what we think, and how we respond on the Net. And it's just fun to play with. I like the "top phrases" graph. Run your mouse over the graphs and the phrase pops out. Cool.

What's this all mean? Lots of stuff, but it'll be an interesting portrait of what the media are talking about, what bloggers are talking about, what news people are talking about, another piece of the puzzle along with opinion polls and all the rest. What this fails to do, of course, is get at the meat of the matter. It's a picture, a snapshot, but that's about it. We don't so much learn from this as we see what we've been talking about. Still, a lot of fun to play with, and the first of many steps that hopefully will take us from what we're talking about to what we know.

Odds and Ends

Favorite odds and ends from today's news:

Passalong PR

A NYT story on passalong pr (my term). It goes like this. Coal producers and power companies have a trade group that hires a lobbying firm that hires a different lobbying firm that has a brainiac staffer who sends fake letters to lawmakers pretending that they're from nonprofit groups opposed to climate change laws. The brainiac gets fired, we're told, thus absolving anyone else of responsibility. So you pr guys out there, remember to hire someone to hire someone who then gets some low-level schmuck to fake stuff and then fall on his or her sword. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing, especially when you make stuff up in order to persuade people.

More PR -- Kinda

PR, or lobbying, or trying to influence opinion, whatever it's called there's also a good story about pharmaceutical company hiring ghostwriters to gin up fake research reviews to say good things about their hormone replacement therapy. This is about as bad as it gets in academe, faking research or at least faking a review of the research. It came out as part of a lawsuit.

Third Person Effect and Driving While Yakking

Summit coming soon on driving while distracted, the new phrase to describe talking or texting on that annoying cell phone while trying not to kill someone while driving.

So how the heck do I work the third-person effect in all this? First, a brief definition: The third-person effect means we think media content doesn't affect us, but it does affect others. In a way this is reported in a story today about the potential of new laws aimed to stopping people from driving while, yup, distracted. Deep in the story, a survey by AAA that found "58 percent of drivers consider other motorists talking on a cellphone to be a very serious threat" and 87 percent think texting is dangerous. But ... and here's the third-person ... 67 percent said they had yakked on a phone while driving, and 21 percent had texted. Sheesh. To summarize, do as I say, not as I do.

A Story NOT from the NYTimes

Okay, the stuff above was drawn from today's NYTimes so I feel obligated to draw something from another source just so I can pretend I'm a balanced, reasoned, Renaissance kind of guy. In this one, it kinda sums up the military's relationship with social networking. This piece here says that while the Marines have banned Twitter and Facebook and other sites for one year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will continue to Tweet, thank you very much. Wall Street Journal version here. Below, a video version of the story: