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In many cases, our views of reality are not based on personal experience. We find politicians personable or despicable, even though we have never met them in person. And we feel intimately familiar with landmarks in foreign countries even though we have never visited them. For many of us, the same is true for scientists working in a lab. We have mental images of how they act or what they look like, even though few of us have never been in a lab watching a scientist at work. The tricky part: Many of those images may have little to do with reality.
"The reemergence of a prominent partisan press has led many scholars to investigate partisan self-selection of news outlets. Political scientists and journalists have concluded that individuals are motivated to select media sources that match their own political views and avoid media sources that challenge their political views. However, an analysis of individuals’ actual media exposure patterns lead to conclusions about selective exposure quite different from previous research based on self-reported media exposure."
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- With the abundance of claims about bias emanating from both the right and left, these claims amplify strong partisan's natural tendency to view even favorable coverage as biased to their political view points.
This last cause is a common finding in the literature across studies and topics. As I have written with my colleague John Besley in a recent study, this psychological tendency even likely accounts for why elite groups like scientists hold a pervasive belief in media bias, despite a mainstream media that typically covers science in strongly favorable terms.
"Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.
"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.
While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening"
"And, given all the new platforms that exist solely for the purpose of satisfying curiosity, the web is also a reminder of our perpetual knowledge. The answers, for the most part, are there for us; we just need to take the step of asking the questions. So while it's easy to make fun of the people who broadcast their ignorance, it's much better to celebrate them. They're a collective reminder that, with the world's knowledge newly at our fingertips, the only thing worse than ignorance is indifference."
"But not all scoops are created equal. I see four main types. The politics of credit-claiming vary, depending on which type of scoop we're talking about. "
"Ashley Judd’s 'puffy' appearance sparked a viral media frenzy. But, the actress writes, the conversation is really a misogynistic assault on all women. P"
"As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today.
Why? That is my question in this post."
"What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. "
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Some of my favorite social thought from the 1970s and 1980s emphasizes a point analogous to Lunenfeld’s: activity, participation, interaction, interconnection—these will be the solutions to the alienation of the modern world. In writing on music, especially, the language turns utopian. Charles Keil (1994) argued persuasively that musical meaning is formed through participation in musical events, and not in the text or score. Christopher Small (1977) waxed poetic about a world where the distinction between musician and non-musician no longer existed, and Jacques Attali imagined a world of “composition”—expanded out from avant-garde jazz—where the means of creativity inhered in each person (1985, 135).
Yet that same rhetoric works differently today.4 Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.
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The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat.
"Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures."
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Historians know that early scientists were—and, indeed, prided themselves on being—amateurs. I am more interested in lay circles, like Lovecraft’s, that persist(ed) well after the professionalization of science and technology. Some scholars have already touched on this theme. The historian of technology, Susan Douglas, has noted the importance of amateurs in shaping the initial stages of technical change in objects such as radios. We can also think of Sophia Roosth’s work on garage science. Yet, much remains to be said about the perseverance of amateurism.
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Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering
"This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010. Utilizing Stimson’s method of constructing aggregate opinion measures, data from 74 separate surveys over a 9-year period are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. We examine five factors that should account for changes in levels of concern: 1) extreme weather events, 2) public access to accurate scientific information, 3) media coverage, 4) elite cues, and 5) movement/countermovement advocacy. A time-series analysis indicates that elite cues and structural economic factors have the largest effect on the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion. Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern. "
"Following stable, tepid concern from 2002 to 2005, apprehension began to climb in 2006, peaked in late 2007, and then fell back to where it was in 2002. But the team of three sociologists, led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, wanted to know why, so they gathered data on five likely influences: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, congressional attention, and advocacy groups on both sides of issue. They also looked at four control variables: unemployment, gross domestic product, war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the price of oil. The team then compared that data to changes in the Climate Change Threat Index.
They found the most important factors that influenced public concern were public statements by Democrats in support of addressing climate change; anti-environmental votes by Republicans; unemployment; GDP; and the number of times The New York Times mentioned the film, An Inconvenient Truth."
"The new science media ecosystem in the US and UK that we have mapped in this article – a mostly online environment that is deeply pluralistic, participatory and social – has presented challenges to the traditional professional role and working practices of the science reporter. In this environment, journalists have moved from their dominant historical role as privileged conveyors of scientific findings to an increasing plurality of roles that involve diverse, pluralistic and interactive ways of telling science news."
"The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides, mapping scientific knowledge for readers, showing them paths through vast amounts of information, evaluating and pointing out the most important stops along the way."
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The contemporary science journalist, we found, is now working at the confluence of three cultural trends. First, their traditional historical role as the privileged disseminators of scientific information has been undercut by the emergence a new science media ecosystem in which scientific journals, institutions and individuals are producing original science content directly for non-specialist audiences. As a result, journalists are no longer the primary source of breaking news about science. Consequently, they need additional ways to attract readers and maintain their professional identity.
Second, the traditional ‘scoop’ culture of journalism is being supplemented by other forms of journalistic authority, what journalism scholar Donald Matheson, in an academic article on online journalism trends in New Media & Society, called “knowing more, knowing better, knowing more comprehensively and knowing in as much depth or extent as readers would wish.” To do this, science journalists need to provide expert interpretation of scientific knowledge, operating similarly to art critics as they evaluate — rather than just describe — scientific findings.
And, thirdly, the economic changes in the news industry has meant that science reporters are increasingly working as freelancers, the working life of many split between a portfolio of journalism, teaching, convening science-related events and writing books. For example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Deborah Blum said the industry-wide move to freelancing has driven changing perceptions of what a science reporter is and does. She said in an interview for our paper: “A science journalist wears a lot of hats, the way I do… I write books, I do magazine articles, I teach - [this] is much more the 21st century version of a journalist.”
"I can see why people worry if and how science media can clearly communicate scientific knowledge, but it should also open up questions about how science is made and what we want to do with it too. Here’s my final question: how can science media more effectively discuss commercial interests of science, rather than just being constrained by them?"
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