Twitter May Not Make Us Stupid, But ...

There is of course a silly argument semi-raging online about whether Twitter makes us stupid.  Of course it doesn't.  Making us dumber is the job of reality television, especially Jersey Shore.

But this does raise the question of whether exposure to Twitter is associated with greater political knowledge.

The answer?  No one knows.

Few if any studies directly examine the micro-blogging site Twitter and any potential political learning.  A number of studies have examined the motivations for reading blogs or Internet use among the young and participation or even the troubling consequeces of online rumors, which leads to misperceptions rather than knowledge.  So far I haven't seen any solid, systematic attempts to explore whether Twitter leads to greater knowledge.  They may be out there, but I haven't found them.

And so, like any good blogging academic, I'm gonna make stuff up. 

Or rather, I'll extrapolate what we know about media consumption and political knowledge to answer the question of whether Twitter makes us politically smarter, politically dumber, or (to not bury the lede) probably makes no difference at all.

The Dumber Argument

Twitter as social media automatically gets frowned on, just as television news did as it emerged to overtake print news consumption, and not without good reason.  TV news does suffer from delusions of adequacy, but we know now that watching news on TV actually leads to greater knowledge -- for those who have little prior knowledge, or who are less educated, or who are less interested in public affairs. 

In other words, TV news works best for those who don't know all that much in the first place. But what about Twitter?  The argument for dumber is based on a large part to the billions of stupid posts that litter the Twittersphere.  Never mind the good posts, the 140 characters-or-less comments and pointers to good journalism.  There is a time-wasting aspect to Twitter, certainly, and the dumber argument rests largely on the combination of stupid posts and time spent on a medium that presents itself in fragmented, oddly phrased posts.  It's not a bad argument, but it's wrong.  There is no data that suggests reading tweets makes you dumber or even shortens your attention span.  It does steal time from more meaningful content, but a counter to that is that many tweets actually point toward compelling content a reader may have missed otherwise.

The Smarter Argument

There is little data to support this argument either.  Some correlational data may suggest greater political knowledge is associated with using Twitter, but that's a function of the kind of people who choose to tweet or read tweets -- people who happen to already be news junkies.  Even statistical controls for various demographics may not capture all the factors that better explain what people know than would using Twitter. 

For the chattering class and those who follow the chattering class, no doubt Twitter is a boon.  But does it lead to greater knowledge? No.  For those folks, they're probably learning no more than they already know, which is probably a lot based on traditional tests of political knowledge.  Twitter is another tool, but it's not making anyone like to use it any smarter.  There's a ceiling effect here.  But what about Twitter users who are not news junkies?  Odds are they're not any smarter, politically, from the medium and indeed their social use of tweets would probably drive down the political knowledge scores of overall Twitter users.  Which leads us to the next category ...

Twitter Makes No Difference

This argument rests largely on the lack of data, the discussion above of how the news junkies have a ceiling effect on knowledge and social users might offset any high scores Twitter users get on tests of political knowledge, and an appreciation for a finely crafted null hypothesis. 

There are strong methodological reasons why exposure to mainstream news sources may actually be unrelated to political knowledge, in part due to measurement error associated with the kinds of exposure questions we ask in surveys.  I don't buy that particular argument, though it's loved by political scientists who tend to shy away from, or explain away, media factors in understanding politics.  The media have a modest but significant relationship with knowledge, but Twitter -- once you control for other factors and due to its unique audience -- will not have enough variance left to explain. 

In other words, Twitter will be found to be unrelated to political knowledge.  It doesn't make you smarter, it doesn't make you dumber.  At least not politically.  People who are drawn to Twitter to escape the news, those folks fled the news long ago.

Can We Do Away with Media Exposure Questions

I blogged earlier about the difficulties of getting a proposal approved because I relied on exposure to the news, a concept some find problematic due to perceived (though to me, unconvincing) measurement issues.

This raises at least a couple of questions:

• Can we do away with media exposure questions?
• And, if so, what the hell do we use as an alternative?

Exposure versus attention has received its fair share of attention, but we can't really measure attention without first establishing exposure.  The two are intertwined.  The real problem, to me, is the broad nature of the questions often found in large surveys such as ANES.  These items are historical.  They've been asked more or less the same way for decades, and by continuing to do so, we have some ability to look at changes over time.  For an example, see this table.

But to ask broadly about television news exposure, with no difference drawn between Fox News or PBS, raises all kinds of concerns. 

The issue for me is, do we now combine ideology or partisanship with media exposure ... that is, if we're not going to get specific about where people get their news?  We know from recent research, my own and that of others, that there is a partisan migration going on, especially in cable news, as conservatives shift to Fox and liberals to MSNBC and those somewhere in the middle still watching CNN.  The same is probably true, to a lesser degree, across the news spectrum, particularly on the Internet.

So if we not going to get specific in our news questions, and that's what I tried to do in my modest proposal, then perhaps it's time to combine ideology and news exposure and basically assume likeminded folks seek out likeminded news. 

We are obligated, then, to create interaction terms -- to put it in a regression frame -- for all media and partisanship/ideology measures.  The short answer to this is, ugh, ugly, and a pain when it comes to creating all these dummy terms.  But in the long term, save more specificity in our news media questions, this may be the only logical answer.

Frustration with Media and ANES

The ANES is putting together a study called the 2010-2010 Evaluations of Government and Society Study.  It should be great.

While you can read about it here, "The overarching theme of the surveys," according to the page, "is citizen attitudes about government and society."  Given the tea party atmosphere and distrust of government, it struck me that certain media content -- particularly watching Beck or Hannity or perhaps Fox News in general -- might be good concepts to explore in relation to people's attitudes about government in this Tea Party atmosphere.

Guess not.

My proposal got shot down, in part because I didn't do enough work at getting it through the process, in part because they mistakenly don't buy media exposure as a viable concept.  This is, in part, due to a devastating research paper from 1993 by Larry Bartels that I never found particularly convincing, but really got the attention of a political science community that runs the ANES but, let's face it, while very smart, are far from being media scholars.  Plus, Bartels was looking at the broad exposure items (TV news, newspapers, etc.) on the old 0-to-7 days scale, while I was focused on particular programs and networks, something that would significantly reduce measurement error and also provide meaningful insight into particular programs and hosts who tend to criticize government and who also tend to have significant influence on those in the public who tend to criticize government.

In other words, they screwed up.  Or at least I'd like to think they did for my own self-esteem, but it would be helpful -- theoretically and normatively -- to know if watching or listening to Beck and Hannity and their friends plays a significant role in how people respond to government or spark their protests against government, or more important, influences the way they perceive government's role in society.  We're left with damn little else in this study, at least when it comes to the role the news media may play, at least at this time.  Or we'll get the same tired media items they always use in ANES because, let's face it, political scientists are convinced the media don't matter (er, except when they get the chance to go on TV, then suddenly it does).

Do I sound bitter?  I'm not, really.  There's enough on my plate, thank you very much.  I just find it unfortunate that the quality of media items never seems to change in the national elections studies, that Pew has moved so far ahead of them.  But we do have a million ways to ask questions that date back to the 1940s, most of which are never used in anyone's analyses. 

Sigh.

Cognitive Mobilization and Party ID

The theory is straightforward. The more cognitively mobilized the electorate (more knowledgeable, better educated, more exposure to news media), the more likely citizens will abandon habitual party voting. In other words, less party identification or voting a straight party ticket.

At least that's the theory.

In a new study, the theory falls apart. The telling graph comes near the end:

The data examined in this paper, however, are not consistent with the theory's predictions. CM clearly increases the probability that a respondent expresses an attachment to a specific party, and this positive relationship does not change across cohorts. In fact, there is some evidence that the positive effect of CM on party attachments is growing even stronger over time. In sum, neither the micro- nor the macro-level components of the theory are corroborated by the data.

Data yet again get in the way of theory.