Civic Engagement Online:Song Remains the Same

A new Pew Center report finds that online civic engagement is largely the product of the same people engaged in offline ways -- those who with higher incomes and greater education.  In other words, online or offline, the song remains the same.  The graph to the right, hotlinked from the Pew site, says it all.

The largely parallel lines suggest it may be time to stop separating offline and online participation and just fold them into a single measure of political or civic participation.

It's both a theoretical and methodological question, one worth pursuing.

Supreme Court and Political Speech

There's a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that no matter how it is decided, will influence what people know about candidates and campaigns -- in particular the craziness every four years that is presidential politics.

The court meets today for arguments.  Here's one place for a quick backgrounder about Hillary: The Movie and the case.

Do campaign finance laws cover a movie like this one?  I suspect the lines are so blurred that a movie is an advertisement is ... whatever.  I think the Court will dodge this one. Typically the courts give commercial speech less protection than political speech, but what about when a non-profit or commercial enterprise engages in political speech?  I have a feeling the Court will strike down most, if not all, of campaign finance laws and the result will strongly influence future presidential campaigns.    What people know about presidential candidates is already a function of political advertising, but once the spigot is opened, who knows what the end result may be. 

Some fear corporations dominating the airwaves with their money.  Others argue corporations deserve the same First Amendment rights as individuals.  This is where it gets interesting, because an original intent conservative judge might argue that the First Amendment was only intended to protect people, not companies, therefore campaign finance laws must stand.  But as if often the case, original intent folks will quickly forget their focus on original intent when ideology gets in the way.  That'll happen again this time in what will probably be a 5-4 vote to stomp campaign finance reform into mush.

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.

Teens and Knowledge of Parental Spending

If you're a parent, this survey (actually, a press release about the survey) will come as no surprise -- teenagers underestimate how much parents spend on back-to-school stuff. Bill Me Later is involved in the survey, for obvious commercial reasons, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Favorite part of the press release:

...a quarter of all teens, and more than one in five preteens, indicated that there is nothing their parents won’t buy them for back to school.

Maybe so, but not in my house.

I suspect this idea could be dramatically extended into other forms of spending to explore the disconnect between what teenagers think their parents spend on them and what parents actually spend.  This is similar to studies that ask people how much the government spends on things like foreign aid (people always overestimate it).  But the teen-parent angle gives it so much more fun -- and, I suspect, the differences are always there.

Labor Day Slide

When there is a relatively new president, Labor Day becomes something of a touchstone in how the job is going.  As the graph to the right shows, Obama is doing lousy compared to some,  but better than others.  Graph from this NYTimes story.

Ford?  Easily explained by Watergate and the pardoning of Nixon, so let's set that one aside.  Clinton's slide?  Well, it's before a stained blue dress, so I'm guessing it was the gays in the military thing -- but that's just a guess without taking the time to look it up.

Does this slide mean much?  Not really.  Clinton was easily re-elected.  Carter had no real change and he was defeated.  But in terms of what people think, the Obama folks have to worry about momentum and the perception in the public that he's failed to follow through with his promises.  The health care debate is weighing down his presidential approval ratings, but that's not going to go away.  The talk radio guys slam him every day but relatively few people (20 or so million, already Obama haters) pay attention.

Public perception is fickle.  Right now, if I had to guess on what people know about the presidency of Barack Obama, it's that he's not doing as well as they'd hoped.  Maybe their expectations were too high after Bush.

News in English and Spanish

I am fiddling with data to study Latino use of news and whether it predicts turnout in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. 

The dependent variable is simple: did you register to vote, and did you actually vote?  These are self reports, fairly straightforward.

I have lots of predictor variables because there are competing theories about which model best explains participation, but these theories fail to include news media consumption.  That got me curious, then I became more so when I turned to the question of whether individuals prefer their news in English or in Spanish.

On one hand, I suspect a preference for news in English will signal integration (aculturation) into U.S. society, so you'd have greater likelihood to vote.  On the other hand, perhaps news in Spanish would be associated with greater voting as it eases the cost of getting such motivating information.

Which one?  Dunno yet.  Still wrestling with theory, but an early peak of the data suggests the former, not the latter.

Possible confounds?  Here's a few -- how long they've lived in the U.S. (if not born in U.S.), how comfortable they are with English, how much attention they pay to news from another country (Mexico, etc.),   Gotta not only control for these, have to examine how they interact with my key independent variable (language preference for news) in explaining my key dependent variable (voting).

There's a lot more to this, of course.  The literature is broad and deep, some of it specifically at Latino/Hispanic voting, a lot of it aimed at other groups, all of it rich in theoretical debate.  Is the SES model enough?  Or is a better model one that focuses on ties to the local U.S. community?  And so on and so on. 

While I work in political participation research and the role of news consumption, this one swerves a bit outside my comfort zone.  That makes it fun.