Facebook and False Consensus

To save time, energy, and to keep cool in this blistering heat, instead of doing something original I'll just point to a column I wrote and that was published yesterday in my local daily newspaper.  The title above says it all.  Enjoy.

News Quiz

The fine folks at the Pew Center have a new News IQ test available, if you feel lucky.  I got all 11 questions correct, scoring me higher than 95 percent of those who took the test.  Fear me.

Knowledge Structures II

A few days ago I wrote about a new study that examines the differences between actual knowledge and knowledge structures. I discussed those two concepts in the previous blog, but I do want to comment on an odd way of measuring news use.   Most of us would probably fall back on mere exposure as a way to measure "use" of the media, but the author instead uses two questions that deserve special attention.  To tap the concept news use, she does the following, quoted directly from the study:

Use of political news. Attention was measured on two items that assessed whether participants had ‘‘paid a lot of attention to news coverage’’ and whether people ‘‘felt informed’’ about political news in this election. The items were related (r=.66).

So on the one hand we have attention, which is fine.  There is a good body of work that examines the differences, conceptually and methodologically, between exposure and attention.  But then she adds an item that asks whether people "'felt informed' about political news in this election."

Can I have a huh from the audience?

I assume she miswrote -- feeling informed about political news rather than by political news, otherwise this doesn't make a lot of sense.  And we're mixing theoretical apples and oranges, combining attention to the media with what might essentially be political self-efficacy or, in political science terms, internal efficacy.  It's hard to say, but despite the high correlation between the two questions, I'm not particularly happy with lumping them together and would not have allowed it had I been a reviewer of this manuscript for Communication Research Reports, or I would at least have required a more vigorous defense.

Okay, enough with the nerdy methodological nonsense, what did she find?  Glad you asked.

Treating knowledge structure depth as the dependent variable (basically, how many different things respondents can name), we find attention to the news and reflective integration (a scale that measures how much you think about the news) to be positive predictors.  Factual knowledge was not a predictor of this structure variable, which is kinda odd and makes me wonder about the quality of the depth listings.  Mere venting?  Or is what people know versus what people say quite different?  Or is this simply a function of using college students as respondents because, as we all know, teenagers and college students -- while related to humans -- have not evolved to humanity yet.  In other words, they're not real people.  Yet.

Also a positive predictor is conservatism.  This also is odd, because ideology, once you control for education and the like, typically does not predict political knowledge.  Given these were college students, a fairly homogeneous sample, I'm not sure what to make of this one, or of the whole study.  There's a lot to like here, but also a lot to question in terms of guidance for other scholars.

Full study cite:  Rebecca M. L. Curnalia (2010), "Predictors of the development of applied knowledge structures for presidential candidates."  Communication Research Reports, 27, 80-89.

Knowledge Structures vs. Actual Knowledge

There is a fascinating study that argues, in part, that important theoretical differences and consequences exist between knowledge structures and actual knowledge.  Best of all, the authors cite my work on recall versus recognition.

What's a knowledge structure?  The authors argue that it is distinct from actual knowledge, yet related (much like I argued for recall and recognition).  Basically, you ask someone to list as many things as they can about a topic (say, Barack Obama).  The number of relevant responses are part of the knowledge structure.  Factual, or actual, knowledge is a more standard item, a set of questions settled on a priori and then asked of respondents.  The differences here are not new.  V.O. Key and Doris Graber long ago explored the important theoretical and methodological differences between what people know versus what social scientists ask them about what they know.  "The voters are not fools," Key famously said. 

The study also probes something called reflective integration as well as news consumption to explore all the relationships.  Tomorrow, I get at the results and their consequences -- methodologically, theoretically, and even for the real world question of what people know and how they use that information.

In terms of what people know, I agree this one hardly ranks up there in importance, but many of us knew of the engagement before famous mom/grandmother/politico Sarah Palin did -- if we believe news accounts today.  Then again, many of us know a lot of stuff Sarah Palin doesn't know...

The 99 Percent New Media Solution

Ninety-nine percent of all news stories linked to in blogs come from the Evil MSM (mainstream media), according to a Pew Center study.  "The BBC (23% of all blog links), CNN (21%), the New York Times (20%) and the Washington Post (16%) combined accounted for fully 80% of all news stories linked to on blogs. Web-only sites, on the other hand, made up less than 1% of the links in the blogosphere."  A more in-depth version of the study is here, with lots of info about blogs, social media topics, and the like.  Worth the read.

The point?  Net-only blogs and news sources have yet to generate the kind of reporting necessary to achieve some significance, some critical mass.  They do well on commentary -- reactive rather than proactive -- just not so much on original coverage (though a few specialized sites such as Politico are getting there).

Fewer Dying Mags

Lots of people still rely on magazines.  You know mags -- those paper things that show up in the mail once a week or once a month, those paper things you see on the racks at bookstores (where they also sell paper things called books).  There's good news on the magazine front, according to this story from AdWeek:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Magazines aren't closing like they used to, but new ones aren't coming along as quickly any more either. 

The math looks good.  Publishers shut down 279 mags in the first half of last year.  This year publishers axed only 87 magazines.  Now a skeptic might say there were fewer mags left, so of course the number is smaller, but there are literally tens of thousands of magazines, most of which we never see.

Even while print closures ebb, a more modest pace for new launches suggests that a thinner competitive set will persist for many magazine categories. Ninety new magazines arrived in the first half of this year, down from 187 launches in the first half of 2009, MediaFinder said.