Cam Newton, and What People Know

I live and work in the football-crazed SEC, so it's fascinating to watch a case study as it develops -- in this case, the wacky coverage of Auburn QB Cameron Newton.

As you may or may not know, Newton is a Heisman favorite, is a helluva QB, and scares the crap out of me because this Saturday he'll make life miserable for my Dawgs.  That aside, he's also caught up in a scandal of sorts, in part because of stories about his time at the University of Florida (yeah, another SEC school) and in part because of a rumored payoff offered to him to attend Mississippi State (which he didn't, but you guessed it, yet another SEC school).

Today, a fake tweet got the Internet into a wad as it suggested Newton may be suspended by the NCAA before Saturday's game.  You can read one version of the story here.  Either someone misunderstood a radio report, or a fan can't hear very well, or someone just decided to make things interesting.  You pick.

Why blog about sports in a spot devoted to how people learn from the media?  Good question.  My answer is twofold.  First, I can do whatever the heck I wanna do on my own blog, but more important, it's fun to watch what people know about something other than politics.  Not only is Twitter ablaze about this, but so is Facebook and, no doubt, other social media I don't even use or know about.  Auburn fans are angry about these stories flying about -- and let's face it, only because it's their guy and their team, which may end up in the national title game (please, yes).  If it was a Bama QB, they'd think it was all damn funny and no doubt Pulitzer Prize winning journalism.  But here, because it's their guy, selective exposure and memory and attention and all the rest are kicking in as they, surprise surprise, attack the messenger.

We see the same thing in politics, just without so many goofy fans yelling at a reporter as he tries to do his job.  If I hadn't known better, I would've thought it was a bunch of Tea Party folks.

When emotions run high, people lose all ability to calmly consider a story, whether it be politics ... or sports. What they feel, then, outweighs what they know.  Emotion always seems to trump cognition.

Meaning Making

We all engage in meaning making. Scholars from widely different fields have widely different approaches to the question of how people make sense of their social and political world. Most of us use some form of heuristics, rules-of-thumb, shortcuts, schemata, chronically accessible constructs, and a host of other theoretical fictions to help us tame the information tide (to borrow a book title). I'm sure there are others I've missed, but they all share in common the idea that we can't possibly cope with the world in all its complexity, so we find shortcuts to help us make sense of what we see and hear (and taste, and smell, and feel, if I want to be fair to all the senses).

These are more than mere shortcuts -- they come rich with meaning. We impress meaning on what we see and hear and then fit it to our own expectations and predispositions. Doesn't fit? Oh, we'll make it fit, we'll get that round peg into a square hole even if we have to change what we actually heard or saw. Selective attention, meet selective memory.

Why am I going on about this? In part because I've been reading student papers from my Public Opinion graduate seminar, in part because I've been reading the "who hates the most, liberals or conservatives?" nonsense on the web and papers, and in part because I needed blog material for today.

But it comes down to this: What people know, unfortunately, is often a function of what they want to know, or what they want it to mean.

Selective Attention

New study in the latest issue of Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media supports the idea of selective attention to online news.

In other words, we pay attention to stuff that agrees with our own viewpoints.

What people know often is a product of what we watch and read, but even more so it is the product of our own predisposions, our own filters, our own take on the info we consume. And then, even when exposed to info we don't like, we mess with it in our heads and twist it into something we should have heard or read. That way, it fits.

Back to the study. Graf and Aday run a series of experiments to show people spend more time reading stories consistent with their own points of view than those counter to them. Selective attention. We already know people selectively expose themselves to stuff they agree with, now we know that the echo chamber is even louder -- they attend to that with which they agree.

The result? Not in this study, but in general we know that leads to more extreme viewpoints.

This all fits the idea of a fragmenting news environment. It's easier now to spend more time with news sources that agree with our particular partisan or ideological viewpoints. While it is hard to argue with having more sources of information, the consequences are less positive.