Talking Together

Just picked up a copy of Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation. Yes, note the titular colonicity -- gotta have a colon to qualify as serious academic work, otherwise it's just hackery.1

Anyway, this book focuses on deliberative democracy. Basically, you sit a bunch of people in a room, educated them in an unbiased fashion about the issues, then poll them to get results theoretically better than the kind of uninformed opinion you'd often get from a random survey of U.S. adults.2

I'm burying the lede. I've only skimmed the book so I can't give an overall judgment, but there are concepts that matter to me: political engagement, participation, attention, and of course my old favorite, knowledge (which plays a bit part, not a starring role). In this case, there is a set of multiple regression tables in Chapter 5 with participation as the dependent variable and a host of independent variables tossed into the recipe. These ingredients are grouped as demographic factors (race, gender, etc.), social capital (belong to organization, religious attendance, etc.), political capital (efficacy, trust, knowledge, attention), and the last in the model -- deliberation.

Now the lede: deliberation still explains unique variance even after controlling for every possible other variable in the social science universe.3 Now the secondary lede: knowledge sometimes retains its explanatory power, even after all these controls. In some tables yes, some tables no.4

So knowledge leads to participation? Couldn't it be the other way around?

There are some obvious causality issues here, and the authors rightly mention them, so I'm not going to get into that methodological mess. Just skimming, the book is sound, thoughtful, and a worthy addition to the participation/social capital/deliberation literature.

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1 Like this blog
2 That these people differ from regular people is hardly surprising
3 Okay, not every variable. Beer consumption is oddly missing
4 Attention, however, offers zilch to the model

Multi-Taskers are Mediocre

Interesting research on multi-tasking that came out last week. There's a NYTimes version and a slightly better by Wired that includes info on how the study was conducted. Basically, multi-taskers may do a lot of stuff at the same time, but they do none of it particularly well.

From one of the authors:

"Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”

You can read the abstract here. It reports multitaskers were "more susceptible to interference" and they performed less well on memory tasks (this last part not from the abstract but rather the Wired version of the story).

So what?

We all multi-task. Especially when we're consuming the news.

So I'm thinking, if we multitask, do we remember less of the news? Seems an obvious yeah, but how do we test this? Controlled experiment is the easy answer. But what about a survey? We could ask people how often they watch or read the news while doing something else, and what that "something else" might be. Assuming they're honest, we'd find some interesting results in political knowledge.

Okay, what about people who multitask the news. That is, people who say they use lots of difference sources, like TV and newspapers and online and magazines. This is not traditional multitasking (doing many things at once), but kinda interesting nonetheless. We want people to rely on multiple news sources, but is that also a bad thing? This is easily tested in a survey scenario: just ask them about all the different ways they get news and then create an index that measures the variety of sources. Will more variety be associated with more, or less, political knowledge?

Dunno. If time allows, I'll do a quick-and-dirty analysis this week and report back.

How Much Attention is Attention?

There are good reasons to pay attention to news and public affairs (civic responsibility, your job requires knowing what's happening, conversational material, etc.). There are good reasons to not pay attention (busy schedule, hate the partisanship, worried about missing the next Dancing with American Idol episode, etc.).

How much attention is enough?

If you read the scholarship on political knowledge, you might come away thinking there is a magic amount that everyone should know, a certain degree of attention everyone should have. Carefully read the literature, though, and you find the nuances: people learn what they need to know based on their jobs, their social situations, their time and resources.

Scholars tend to ask the same kinds of questions to tap political knowledge. We do this in part because they seem to work from study to study and it allows us to compare -- more or less -- our finding with other studies. It all gets into the reliability and validity of our measures that, if established by other research, frees us to get at the more substantive analyses. In other words -- get past the method stuff and get to the fun results. Sometimes a study will come along that challenges the status quo of how to measure knowledge. These are acknowledged quickly by most scholars and then they move on to, yes, studying it the same way other people have done over the years.

It may be time to reconsider our measures.

So back to my question above: How much attention is attention? We know that media exposure is a lousy measure, that how much someone attends to a medium is a more fair, more valid, and at times more reliable measure. Perhaps we need individual-specific attention measures. Is a "high" attention for one person the same as a "high" for another? And do they have the same consequences? We have to tie together exposure, attention, and some other factor -- not sure what -- to get at the changes in the media landscape. One answer may be elite versus middle-brow versus low-brow sources of news.

Is high attention to Bill O'Reilly the same as high attention to NewsHour? Probably not, but they'd go down at the same in a research situation (depending on how you scale it).

But trying to scale the kinds of content people consume, that's rife with problems. Should I score Fox News lower than CNN? No, I don't think so. People versus New Yorker magazines? Yep, that's easy. It's TV where we get into trouble, and we're probably going to have to drill down to the individual program level to get at some of this, and that's a whole different problem when it comes to survey (versus experimental) research.

The Politics of "Civic Knowledge"

Everyone agrees "civic knowledge" is important. People need to understand how government works and the historical nature of our system and other systems, how they compare, the basics of structure and how just a bill on capitol hill can become law. But I can't help think there's a lot of politics involved in these calls for "civic knowledge."

Here's one from a day or so ago. According to the pullout quote:

Coalition Calls for a Renewed Focus on Western Civilization and Ethics Coursework in Texas Colleges and Universities Asks lawmakers to study the value of fostering greater civic knowledge

The Coalition for American Traditions and Ethics? Obviously I'm big on political and civic knowledge. Hell, I blog about it constantly, plus I do research in this area, but I gotta think there's just a hint of politics and "culture war" stuff going on here.

Reasons for Paying Attention

I wrote yesterday about what the reasons might be for people to pay attention to public affairs.

Attention to the news is necessary, according to the traditional argument, in order for people to know what's going on. An informed public, so goes the theory, is vital in a democracy. Let's assume all that (though it makes an interesting argument for a later date as to whether it matters if a public is informed or not).

What are the reasons for paying attention?

There are a lot of reasons to not pay attention.

• There are a zillion TV channels now. You don't have to watch TV news unless you absolutely want to. Many have chosen to do just that.
  
• The news itself -- especially on cable TV -- is often petty, partisan, and particularly focused on the inane.
• I get my news off Facebook ... whatever friends happen to link to.
  
• The source of real news -- newspapers -- is often presented in a dull, dry manner.
• It's so easy to just be entertained. Or if you want to feel informed while being entertained, there's always The Daily Show or Colbert Report.

I'm sure there are other reasons to not pay attention. But what are the reasons to pay attention?

• It's your responsibility in a democracy
• Take your medicine; it's good for you
• Being informed is fun!

Yeah, the reasons to pay attention, they kinda suck. Responsibility? Pfffft. I'm sure there are other reasons people should pay attention, and they do when a major story breaks, when things get serious (and when that happens, funny how CNN's audience shoots up compared to Fox News. Just saying).

So Jon Stewart has taught us an important lesson. For many, the news has to be entertaining. And Bill O'Reilly has taught us that, for many, the news has to be highly partisan. And Rush Limbaugh has taught us that, for many, the news can even be on radio. And the Internet has taught us that, for many, the net is for porn.

I'm being a bit of a pessimist here. The NYTimes and Wall Street Journal prove that, for many, quality serious news will sell. At the hyper-local level, people will pay attention if you cover your community in a way that rings true to them, stories that seem real and not artificially distanced from the communities they strive to describe. People will also pay attention if you somehow manage to work sex into the story, but that doesn't always work, so it's a challenge for many types of news stories.

Ultimately, getting people to pay attention to what's happening the world, that's not so hard. Getting them to pay attention to News, that's a bit harder. Getting them to pay for News, that's even more difficult. And thus we come to the core of the problem -- that journalism is expensive, at least the way we've been doing it for decades, and the revenue models are unraveling in some ways.

We've got to come up with ways to convince people to not only pay attention, but to pay for paying attention.

Reasons for Paying Attention

Citizens do need to be more engaged in politics, but the reasons for paying attention need to be clearer to them, the benefits of stronger citizenship must be more evident, and the opportunities to learn about politics more frequent, timely, and equitable.

- Michael X. Delli Carpini & Scott Keeter
What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters

The quote above, from an excellent book I've had shamelessly checked out of the university library now for a million years, gets right to the point I'll be addressing for the next few days -- the reasons for paying attention. For the average American, what are they? Do they still work? What does this mean for news, and for journalism? For democracy? Are we -- to steal a great book title -- Amusing Ourselves to Death?

This is serious stuff. I'll summarize much of what I've blogged about before, look at some of the more recent research, and ask why someone should even want to pay attention to the business of public affairs.

Stay tuned, or clicked, or whatever the hell it is you do for a blog.

Titular Colonicity

I've blogged about titular colonicity so many times (latest one here but also see here), it feels like an old friend. There's a theory that as an academic field "matures" you see more and more journal titles (hence, titular) with a colon (hence, colonicity). Plus the name is damn funny.

I'd love to do a serious study of mass comm journal titles, but I'm not sure where the heck I'd publish the thing. But as a quick-and-dirty study, I looked at 1960 titles from Journalism Quarterly and then what's been published so far in 2009 (now it's called Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly).

This was not a careful, systematic study, but if we can argue mass comm has "matured" as a field -- and I think we can -- the academic journal titles certainly seem to reflect that -- at least as far my small sample from one journal are concerned.

• In 1960, I count an almost 3-to-1 ratio in favor of NO colons in titles.
• In 2009, I count an almost 2-to-1 ratio in favor USING colons in titles.

That's a stunning shift. A more careful study, of course, would include more mass comm journals and more years, looking at the trend data. It'd also be interesting to see if certain kinds of studies were more likely to adopt the colon first (quantitative effects studies versus history, for example). As an aside, I note my own research is slightly more likely to include a colon in the title as not. For what it's worth.

This is clearly a good AEJMC conference paper and possibly, but less likely, journal article. I'm tempted, oh so tempted, to carry through with it. But if someone out there wants to take a stab at it, I claim no ownership. Go for it. Just let me know how it comes out.