The Circle of Academic Blog Life

So I'm waiting for a student to show for a meeting and I'm skimming the new issue of the Journal of Media and Religion. There's an article about religious responses to The Big Bang Theory, so I start reading the first graph and this appears in the third sentence:

Based on statistical analysis, Hollander (2013) suggests a more moderate perspective. He indicates that many people with differing perspectives about belief in the Bible still watch the highly popular television show, now in its eight season on the CBS network. He compares perspectives about this show with those who claim religious affinity and those who do not see religion as important. Biblical literalists, in Hollander's study, report that 28% of them watch the show; for those who see religion (and the Bible) as unimportant, the percentage of viewership was 31%. There is a slight difference in this report, but it is not significantly definitive (Hollander, 2013).

"Whoa," I think. "Another Hollander? Because I've never done research specifically about the TV show. Then I check out the references:

Hollander, B. (2013, October). What people know: B ig Bang Theory. Retrieved from http://whatpeopleknow.blogspot.com/2013/10/big-bang-theory.html.

In other words, they cite my blog. This very blog. Cool. And a first. Here's the link to that post and here's a related post even more to point, if you've nothing better to do. What it boils down to is I have tons of data and came across some questions that ask how often respondents watch various television programs. I saw Big Bang and then quickly analyzed it in terms of other questions available in the data. I even mulled over a bigger piece, but got busy elsewhere.

And thus we have the circle of life, the circle of academic/blogging life. I blogged about it, my blog post gets cited, and thus I must blog about the citation.

Oh, an abstract of the Media and Religion article is here, but I can neither point to nor see myself online the full article -- and I'm on the journal's friggin editorial board.

What Bloggers Know ... er, Kinda

Bloggers and journalists?  The same?  Different?  In terms of what they focus on, you bet there are differences.  Below are some results from a Pew Research report on what each group "covered" in the first week of February.  First, the bloggers, next the journalists.

Bloggers (left, right, moderate, whatever) seemed fascinated by the Tim Tebow Super Bowl advertisement, something that got exactly the amount of journalism coverage it deserved (a little, but c'mon, no more than that).  As far as bloggers go, the Haiti earthquake apparently never happened, and Toyota cars have never been recalled.

And bloggers are going to replace journalism?

Blogging as "Intellectual Contribution"

Just for the hell of it, I mentioned my writing of this blog on my annual report to my department head and dean of stuff I accomplished in 2009.  I listed What People Know under intellectual contributions.  False advertising?  Oh yeah, you bet.  Then again, last year under my plans for the year I listed my resolve to exercise more, which tells you how seriously I take these kinds of bureaucratic tasks.  On a more positive note, I did get to list a manuscript I just had accepted at the Journal of Media & Religion (with only minor revision).  More on this later.

Blogging and the Knowledge Gap

Not all bloggers are created equal, according to a new study in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.  As the author concludes:

Consistent with knowledge gap hypothesis, bloggers with higher SES tend to produce more political knowledge and have more social power than lower-SES segments. Moreover, even among filter bloggers who produce more political knowledge, SES, gender, and print media use are associated with their social influences. This structural inequity within the virtual political space mirrors existing material and legitimized reality in U.S. politics.

The author breaks bloggers into two groups -- filter bloggers and personal journals -- and examine a knowledge production gap.  So, in reality, this is a knowledge gap study. 

Most "political" or "news" bloggers are reactive; that is, they offer mediated content, the stuff they've taken from news sites and added "value" or opinion or spin or whatever you choose to call it, depending I suppose on whether you agree or disagree with their partisan point of view.  But sometimes they offer unique or original knowledge, the most famous being Rathergate.

This study notes that personal journals far outnumber "filter blogs," and the author notes lots of other blogs exist.  What's interesting for me are the tables where the author shows what factors predict engaging in one kind of blog versus the other.  Read 'em yourself for details, but the results show knowledge being produced on the Internet by pretty much demographically speaking the same folks who generate knowledge in the MSM: older, better educated folks.  TV watching is positively associated with "personal" blogging but not "filter" blogging, which is kinda interesting.  Gotta watch TV to fill in that personal blog, I guess.

And for those of you with a partisan bent, I end with the following, which I find fascinating:

Overall, liberal bloggers have more incoming links while Republican bloggers have more daily hits. This finding looks odd at a first glance. However, it indicates a subtle difference between incoming links and hits. Whereas incoming links from other bloggers represent the popularity of a blog in the blogosphere, daily hits demonstrate the actual number of visits a blog has and its reach in the general cyberspace. The hits a blog receives come not only from other bloggers or other content producers, but from other Internet users who may or may not engage in online authoring. This suggests that liberal bloggers are more powerful in the blogosphere while Republican bloggers have more power throughout the Internet.

-
Full cite: Lu Wei, Filter blogs versus personal journals:
Understanding the Knowledge Production Gap on the
Internet.  Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
14 (2009) 532–558.

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.

What People Search For

Playing with Google Analytics you can find all kinds of useless info about your site. The most read blog topics from whatpeopleknow are:

1. Knowledge vs. Emotion
2. Recall vs. Recognition
3. Son of Recall vs. Recognition
4. What Happened in 1066
5. Objective vs. Subjective Knowledge

Other top finishers were blogs on chronic know-nothings, negative advertising, communicating science, and my personal favorite -- titular colonicity.

I should put links on each of these to their respective blogs on whatpeopleknow, but it's Sunday and I don't have that much motivation (except that I'm supposed to be finishing my grading, so this beats that). The individual blogs above were the best read of all my posts in 2008. Obviously the first three and maybe the last popped up on Google searches by people doing research in, or writing papers about, kinds of knowledge. That's cool. Hoped I helped.

Google was my top traffic source, with 43 percent coming via a search from that site. Twenty-seven percent came from my own web page. About 13 percent of traffic came directly here. Odds and ends make up the rest.

Nearly all my visits are from the U.S. Second is the U.K., followed by Canada, Vietnam, China, Singapore, and a bunch of others at just a few hits each. Georgia obviously dominates among the states, followed by California, New York, Texas, Florida, etc., no doubt a function of population since those are the biggest states. Not a single visit from my home state of Tennessee, despite me being fairly sure they have Internet there.

October 19 was my single biggest audience day, and the pre-election time saw my highest consistent traffic.

I've had interesting visits and comments, one by an author unhappy with my trashing of his book, another by a conservative documentarian unhappy about others commenting on his Obama film, and at least one by an hold friend of mine from elementary school.

And that wraps up 2008 in blogging about what people know.

Internet & Politics

In 1992, talk shows (TV and radio) became the buzz medium. Bill Clinton, on late-night talk TV, blew on his sax. Rush Limbaugh flexed his talk radio muscle. By 1994, talk shows from TV and radio wielded significant influence. Today they're merely part of the media whole.

In the mid 1990s, many Americans discovered the Internet (never mind it had been around since 1969). The Web made it easy for everyday people to get online, the click-and-duh moment (yeah, I'm a net elitist who fondly remembers the early days). By 2000 the Net became truly influential in presidential politics. Today, like talk shows, it's been mainstreamed.

Thus a new report by the fine folks at Pew comes as no surprise, but is welcome nonetheless.

The lede:

A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama's backers have an edge in the online political environment.

As with all Pew reports, this one is finely researched, full of rich detail. I'm not going to repeat it here, but what people know about the campaign is more and more influenced by what they see, what they read, and what they post themselves online. From YouTube to blogs to cnn.com, how people learn about candidates and campaigns is changing. All for the good? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Great piece this month in The Atlantic (the print issue, so go spend a few bucks!)about how Google is making us all dumber. I read it. Felt even dumber, because I suspect it's true; but that's the stuff of another post, another time.

Women, Knowledge, and Blogging

Women generally perform less well than men on tests of current events or political knowledge.

Methodology Alert

(Why? In part men are more likely to guess compared to women who say they "don't know." Both are coded the same way, with a "0" if wrong or don't know, a "1" if correct. If guys guess, there's a 50-50 shot they'll get lucky, thus increasing their scores. Some of it is the way girls and boys are raised, a socio-cultural explanation. Some of it has to do with a political culture skewed heavily toward men in gray suits, which improves male scores. Find a state with a woman senator and women tend to do better. Ask political questions that involve women in roles of authority, women do better. And so on.)

End Methodology Alert

So I was reading this excellent piece on female bloggers by Sheila Gibbons published in The Villager. It strikes me that as girls and women blog more, with shifting media diets toward online, we should see improvements in the political knowledge scores of females. Women will write about topics that matter to them, other women will read them, and hopefully the gender knowledge gap will disappear.

That of course presumes we ask the right sorts of questions that do not increase the gender gap, sometimes artifically. I'm not a PC guy. If the president and chief justice are men and knowledge tests include those legitimate questions about policy or office holding, women have no excuse in getting them wrong as compared to men. But I do believe the online world will flatten some of the traditional differences we've often found in the data. At least I hope so.