Spying on Your Kids

This is a bit off topic for me, but this story discusses the results of a survey of just how many parents spy on their kids' Facebook pages.  Survey says ... 60 percent (U.S.).  Globally, the average is about 44 percent.  Also, a lot more American parents are "connected" to their childrens' social networks than parents in other countries.

And no, I'm not.  I can't even see my daughter's FB wall.  I'm not "friends" with my son, either, but at least I can see his FB wall if I really want to spy on him.

Oh, and for fun, a map below of the percentage of people by state who use Facebook.

That Facebook Guy vs the Speaker of the House

We all use Facebook, and apparently more young people can name the guy who created it than can name the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, so says this new Pew survey. 

In all fairness, Mark Zuckerberg did have a movie made about him.  John Boehner?  Well tanned, he runs the people's house, and he tears up occasionally -- not the same as a major film or 500 million "friends."

The results are interesting, especially the age breakdown (see below).  Among 18-29 year olds, 63 percent correctly identified the founder of Facebook (Zuckerberg).  Only 21 percent in that age bracket correctly identified the Speaker (Boehner).  So let's jump to the 50-64 year olds.  Among that illustrious group (um, mine), 58 percent knew Zuckerberg (not half bad) and 58 percent knew Boehner (respectable).  In other words, older respondents have a more well-rounded knowledge, or at least that's my interpretation and I'm sticking to it.

A Washington Post blog discusses the results, with writer Scott Clement suggesting it has to do with education and interest.  As he writes:

Young people, on average, have lower levels of education, are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party and are generally less interested in politics — all of which are linked to lower levels of political knowledge generally and, at least for education and partisanship, knowledge of Boehner in particular. Wide awareness of Zuckerberg among young people may be due to the fact that 86 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use social networking sites.

Plausible hypotheses, to be sure.  Ability (education) and motivation (interest) play key roles in predicting political knowledge and, in general, young people tend to score lower on tests of political knowledge.  A less likely hypothesis, also raised by Clement, is the role of party affiliation.  Yes, young people may be more likely to be Democrats, but I doubt they'd do any better identifying the Senate majority leader (a Dem) than they were in identifying the Speaker of the House (a Republican).

The full table is reproduced below.

Multitasking the TV

According to some U.K. research discussed in this story, 80 percent of young people use their mobile phones while watching TV and 72 percent comment specifically about the programs to social media, mostly Facebook and Twitter. 

I'd be excited if it were the news generating such interest and involvement, but unfortunately it's not.  "The most popular shows commented on by respondents," says the article, "include ITV’s The X Factor and Coronation Street, Channel 4’s Skins, E4’s Glee and the BBC’s EastEnders."  In other words, the fun stuff, not the news stuff.

So we have a potential upside and downside here, at least in terms of what people know:

• Upside: When they do watch news (not often), perhaps young people also post to social media, thus helping reinforce their exposure to such information and, by extension, their knowledge.  It's a testable notion.
• Downside: Do you actually learn while watching TV and posting about what you see?  Evidence from previous studies on multitasking suggests not, but as far as I know no one has specifically tested this with news and posting about news.  All you budding mass comm scholars out there, here's one to grab and go with.

Facebook Makes Us Sad

An interesting Slate column discusses recent research on Facebook and its impact on our own attitudes, in particular whether seeing all those shiny happy people makes some folks sadder.  It makes sense.  Rarely do we post to our newsfeeds the bad stuff, so for some people, seeing this constant feed of happiness, this may result in them reacting negatively. 

In general research shows we project more happiness on others than really exists, so the FB thing just feeds it further.  The power of projecting such happiness on others, in other words, can influence our own emotional state.

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.

Business Use of Social Media

Nearly eight out of ten Global 100 companies are using some kind of social media, according to a new study (which I'm afraid is in annoying pdf format and not an easy read).  For the companies that actually use Twitter -- and it's the most popular social networking site for businesses -- they're very active.  Facebook is second, followed by YouTube and blogs. 

In terms of what people know, the corporate shift to social networking means they're reaching out directly to people with their message.  Whether this outreach matters is, to me, unclear.  Not much data out there to answer that one.

Social Media Attract the Affluent and Urban

The headline says it all.  Story here.  Facebookers, in particular, tend to be "largely upscale."  So will we have an emerging Social Media Gap to rival the old Knowledge Gap?  Or maybe the Digital Divide?

Facebook and Political Engagement

I stumbled across this post that pointed me to this fascinating paper about Facebook and political engagement, including political knowledge, which was presented at APSA. 

Participation in online groups, according to the authors, "strongly predicts offline political participation by engaging members online." That's the good news.  The bad?  Facebook political discussions are unrelated to actual knowledge.

These results, the authors write, are "bitter-sweet."  While it's good that Facebook fosters engagement, the lack of improved knowledge is troubling.  Their content analysis of Facebook content provides a clue. 

The information content and quality of most wall posts were found to be very poor, generally lacking support for their claims, incoherent, or simply opinionated. In other words, group members are exposed to little new or well-articulated information about the political causes around which these groups form. The information is more likely to be reinforcing and therefore mobilizing, but not enlightening and therefore educational.

This is bad news for those of us hoping to see social media step up and be more than a way to waste one's time.  Engaging an uninformed public?  A next step, of course, would be to see whether the engagement prompted by Facebook use leads to seeking out information elsewhere.  The results here suggest not.

Social Networks -- as Predictors of Popularity

This appeals to my inner geek, the idea of using social networks as a way to predict the next big hit in pop music. 

This article (warning: math) asks whether it's better to rely in the intrinsic qualities of music or on social networking to predict that next song to run up the charts.  I won't get into the math but the methodology looks sound to me. The authors used last.fm as source material for user tags to create a "folksonomy of music."

The result?  Mining the music social networking data does a pretty damn good job of identifying popular songs.  Cool.

Why am I so fascinated? 

Think of the ways we might mine Twitter or Facebook or whatever tomorrow's social networking flavor of the year happens to be to predict the success of a policy, like health care, or even of a candidate's run for office.  If we take social networks to roughly sum up the group mind, then tapping into that should be an interesting snapshot -- not unlike that of a traditional public opinion poll.  I see this as another way of understanding what people think and know about the important, and not-so-important, issues of the day.

Yeah, the math and algorithms are not for the casual user.  Gotta work out the kinks, but I suspect someone will come up with off-the-shelf and on-the-net ways for paid users to do this kind of analysis.

Twitter, Facebook, and "working memory"

I blogged below about this story, that suggests Twitter reduces short-term or working memory while Facebook increases it.  It was a quick link-and-run job -- I had to get to class -- so I didn't take the time to look up the scholar or locate a peer-reviewed journal with an article. 

As an aside, the story mentions a thing called Jungle Memory which you can use to "train your child's brain" and improve memory.  For $49.99, that is.  And it's scientifically proven to increase IQ!  And it slices and dices and is easy to clean! 

But the author Tracy Alloway is a serious scholar who has published in all the major child psychology journals with extensive research in working memory.  I glanced at her stuff.  Impressive.  Though if she's commercially tied to Jungle Memory, that's a tad bit tacky.  I just can't tell that she is, so let's move on.

What about the journal where this research appears?  It doesn't.  According to a post on her site, the Twitter thing is based "on findings from a pilot study, more to follow once the study is complete."

A pilot study?  Oops.


Okay, but does it makes sense? As a user of all the social media mentioned in the story, yeah, it makes sense.

The nature of Twitter is quick bursts (140 characters), coming at ya again and again, and like the MTV videos of old with their quick cuts, we'd expect some influence on patience and short term memory.  I buy the idea, but I'd like to see the methodology and research that supports it, something beyond a pilot study.  But Twitter is not in it for the long haul.  Facebook is more serious, had longer legs, and deserves more scrutiny from a number of scholarly angles.  Myself, I'm fascinated by the public opinion aspects of Facebook, but that's another post for another day.

Twitter Makes You Dumb?

Story here on research that suggests Twitter and YouTube makes ya dumb but Facebook makes ya smart.  On my way to class, so little time to dig into it.  Just had to post in time for any social media conferences that may be happening so they can work it into their curriculum.

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:

News Quiz

There's a Facebook app designed specifically for the New York Times to quiz your knowledge of current events. It's typically five questions. I only got a 60, three out of five. Sad. Only works if you have a Facebook account (and who doesn't?). I'm not sure why it's important to know how many full-blown press conferences President Obama has had, but that's one of those I missed. Seems trivial in the extreme. I put answered it was his fourth and the correct answer was the fifth. Sheesh.

Also ... away from a consistent Internet connection for a few days.

Participation and Political Knowledge

Political participation and political knowledge are closely linked. Taking part in the process makes you more attentive. It lowers the costs (cognitive, not financial) and increases the perceived benefits of participating. The more you know, the more you realize how you're affected by government decisions, so the more likely you are to participate. And the more you participate, the more you learn. A splendid little circle forms, what the social science guys call reciprocal effects.

Okay, but what about new forms of participation?

Younger voters especially see participation in a different way. While a political scientist will often examine how often one attends rallies, votes, gives money, that sort of thing, I know of damn few standard surveys that include as participation such activities as visiting a candidate's Facebook page or "friending" that candidate, of subscribing to tweets, of posting on your own page something good about a candidate, or a bit of embedded viral video, or anything else.

Is that participation? Oh yeah, but we don't really measure it all that well. Not yet at least.

Does that kind of participation result in the splendid little reciprocal circle I mentioned above?

No one knows.

I'm thinking yes. I'm thinking it's gotta make a difference. Any form of participation raises the stakes a little, makes you recognize how a campaign or issue affects you, makes you attend just a little more to the subject -- thus raising your political knowledge. Nudging the needle, I'd call it, perhaps in a statitically significant way.

At least that's my hypothesis. Someone out there needs to test it, so get to it budding PhDweeb types. There's a thesis or dissertation or journal article there just waiting to be exploited.

Social Media

Everyone knows social media are the big thing -- Twitter, Facebook, and a host of others just around the corner and waiting impatiently for their turn to be mentioned by Stephen Colbert.

Adam Ostrow wrote recently about the fastest growing social media on Mashable (cool site). Yeah, Twitter up 2,500 percent in a year. Yeah, Facebook passes MySpace (thank god). Also watch out for Ning and Bebo and -- sigh -- LinkedIn. (I'm not bothering with live links. You can find 'em on your own by using such creative url guesses as twitter.com).

Okay, so the what people know connection? Too easy. As well as being places for social networking and meat markets for checking people out (admit it, job #1), people also pick up snippets of news and other information on these things. My Facebook feed usually includes links and embeds of news stories from around the web that "friends" in my network have posted. Given we tend to be grazers online, skimming a headline here, reading a couple of graphs there, the social network sites become merely another place where we can chomp and chew on a bit of cud news.

Does this lead to quality political knowledge? Nope, not even close, but in a world of talking political potato heads like Sean Hannity we can only hope people glean at little real news along the way.