Misinformation

Today's edition of The Tennessean carried a story about a German broadcaster, RTL, and its posting of a fake video of Michael Jackson emerging from the coroner's van. RTL was interested in how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories spread. RTL posted the video for only one day on YouTube. It went viral and received 880,000 hits. Now it has been picked up by other sites around the world.

Misinformation is nothing new. Both the Axis and Allied powers made extensive use of misinformation during WWII. Some have concluded that the success of the D-Day invasion stemmed in large part from the successful attempt to misinform the Nazis about the location of the invasion so that they moved troops away from Normandy to meet the challenge which never materialized. More recently, Nimmo and Combs have suggested in The New Propaganda that misinformation abounds in political discussion.

What surprises most about the RTL experience is the speed with which one can obtain a large audience. While I was in graduate school, several churches began a "Clean Up TV" campaign. The campaign gained forced by using misinformation that CBS would begin airing adult content movies on network television, albeit after the 10 o'clock news. Of course, CBS had no intention of airing such movies, but the organizers of the campaign succeeded in getting churches to send signed petitions to CBS. The campaign took about two months to complete its work and did not reach even half of those reached in the RTL hoax.

Today, both political parties and special interest groups air commercials and produce sound bites full of misinformation. Fortunately, some groups have taken it upon themselves to check for misinformation in political news, speeches and campaigns. Politifact won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for its work in fact-checking politicians (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/), and the Annenberg Public Policy Center hasw produced Fact Check (http://www.factcheck.org/) to work on the same problem. I would certainly recommend that anyone interested in the health care debate invesitigate these websites before listening to talk radio. :) Perhaps if all us did our fact checks, we would be less likely to believe the thriller about Michael Jackson.

Journalism again

About two weeks ago, I heard an interview with Alex Jones, the director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111985662). Jones lamented the takeover of the news by public relations functions. While he did not go into detail, one could easily argue that he had two different ideas in mind. First, much of what gets into newspapers and on television news has it origins in public relations offices inside organizations. My university has a communications office, and part of their responsibility is to prepare press releases for news outlets so that our school gets the same amount of coverage as other schools in the area. Obviously, when our pr office writes a story, they spin it to put our school in the best light, as does every pr office in every instiution/business/sports team/etc. They then shop the story around hoping to get favorable coverage on the 6 o'clock news or somewhere close to the front page of the newspaper. The reporter covering the story will make some changes as will the editor for the news outlet, but, given the financial situations faced by news outlets, much of the story will mimic the copy provide by my school. A short Google search uncovers the appearance of firms which will help get press releases to journalists and/or gives advice on how to use the Internet and Twitter to get coverage for one's organization.

Second, news outlets themselves often rely on the techniques of public relations to generate the content of their stories. An article in the European Journal of Communication (2005) documents how in Slovenia reporters use all of the PR techniques to construct their stories: "These include using the representatives of an organization as the main source, partiality and a one-sided (favourable) evaluation of the characteristics/activities of the subject discussed; none of which are in the interest of the audience, but in the interest of the powerful elite that the news covers." (http://ejc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/2/155). As anyone familiar with the news in the US, the former Soviet state of Slovenia has a lot of catching up to do to rival the coverage of the democratic press. Several studies, beginning in the mid-90s in an issue of Mother Jones, document the fact that US network news agencies overrely on a very few "experts" in covering stories and tend to repeat the official line of the major players. In part, this follows from slashing the budgets and staffs of news rooms, prohibiting long investigations and long stories. The need to produce an abundance of news, especially problematic for the 24-hour cable news networks, creates a situation where often news outlets must rely the public relations officers or public relations techniques to provide sufficient content.

If most of what we get from the news is the official version from officially sanctioned voices, how are we to decide what really is fact and what is spin?

Afghan news coverage

A few days ago, I heard a story on the news coverage in Afghanistan. Despite the fact that the Afghan war is now our longest-running conflict and that Afghanistan has become a much more dangerous place in the past three months, news coverage remains almost non-existent, accounting for only about 2 percent of the total news. One has a much better chance hearing about Michael Jackson's death than about events in Kabul. The biggest culprit is that news organizations are losing so much money that they can no longer afford to have a bureau on site as they once did. Typically, most news outlets either send someone for a few days to shoot some video and interview key players or they rely entirely on services like the AP or on blogs by local journalists. Given those realities, reporters cannot possibly understand the backstories which result from the 100 or so different factions which exist in Afghanistan and which provide tangled nuances to anything statements made or policies drafted. A Google search reveals a fair amount of cutting and pasting as the same stories get repeated on different news sites. We have come to believe that somehow the new media (internet, blogs, Twitter) will fill in the gaps for those who really want to know, but the brief search did not turn up a significant new media presence on this issue. Are we thus resigned to letting wars become the province of specialists? Does the American public (or any other public) no longer have the right to get information from relatively non-partisan sources as it seeks to undertand, argue, and ultimately vote on representatives who advocate particular policies? The state of newpapers and television news operations raises significant questions about our ability to be an educated electorate.

For some related material see a great, short lecture by Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, on TED. http://blog.ted.com/2008/05/alisa_miller.php Miller demonstrates the unbelievable distortion in Americans' views of world news based on the kind of coverage of the world we get. If democracy's survival depends on an educated electorate, we might have cause for worry.

Lab-Rat-Ness of College

My response is to the first article. I feel like I am often being experimented on. The author says “When faced with a plethora of information, many people try to multitask, but scientific research suggests that this does not help. René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, measured how much efficiency is lost when two tasks are carried out at the same time. The first task involved pressing the correct button in response to one of eight sounds, while the second asked subjects to say the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images. When given the tasks one at a time, the participants’ performance for each task was not significantly different. However, when asked to perform the two tasks simultaneously, the subjects significantly slowed in their performance of the second one.” My instant thought went to—“How does this apply to me?” Well, let me tell ya… Three English response essays on top of a communication blog response on top of a Calculus 2 Exam on top of a Biology Test on top of a communication article response on top of a mid-term paper due on top of a Bible mapping project on top of a meeting with the vice president on top of an SGA meeting with the president on top of thirty thank you letters to write on top of getting the information for those letters on top of a meeting with student accounts on top of sending my sister off to VA on top of arguing with financial aid on top of scheduling a car repair on top of doing my Calculus homework on top of work on top of Lab on top of Math lab on top of on top of on top of you name it. So it is scientifically proven that doing two things at a time makes you less efficient than doing one thing at a time—then I must be scientifically distracted so as to be worthless. Sometimes, like now, I am amazed at just how much each one of us really does in a day—every single moment is indescribably complex. I think that I am just a lab rat in the experiment of college that is trying to prove the hypothesis that I can do more and more and more things and still remain good at each of them. To be honest I think that that idea correlates fairly close to this experiment found in the first article—but I do believe that the variables differ greatly, and that it would be hard to find a set control and system of measuring my performance—thus we may have to leave my experience out of the science journals for now.

The world's a bunch of talentless hacks... Apparently...

Is the world really lacking in talent? Is that what we want to chock it all up to? We're all just getting too lazy or too unimaginative? I believe we're accelerating too fast for our own good. With all the information out there now, it's tough just to stay up to date on current events. Maybe it's not the lack of talent that's plaguing the world, rather the lack of such specialized and highly skilled talent. As our world progresses into the future we consequently have more to learn and more skills to attain. We're just expected to keep up with the exponential increase in information.

So how does this affect our communication? When it takes fifteen minutes to recoup from a text message, it's no wonder teachers hate cell phones in class. We can't multitask very well and that affects our grades when 90% of us text every few minutes in class. Imagine if we could eliminate all distractions in class and effectively take notes and pay attention - tests would be an easy review rather than the most loathed experience of all education. Our lack of talent problem would most likely be solved. If we could do the same for work, we'd save billions, literally.

"One estimate for the financial cost to the American economy of such lost productivity puts the figure at as much as $650 billion per year. "
~Daniel Tammet

So why is it that we let these distractions keep going without check? Maybe it's because we'd lose the human side of life if we bound ourselves to such a strict bureaucratic approach. Maybe it's because we just don't want to believe the facts. Until the problem is solved, assuming it gets solved, we'll just keep on lacking for talent and losing billions of dollars.

4 get it

If I wrote a 2151 word essay on how there is too much information in the world, I would follow that up with a 30,000 word essay on how writers kill trees. 

We live in a world where the word “information” is associated with identity theft. We live in a society where emails offer larger “lifestyles” in order to compensate for our low self-esteem.  We live in insanity when Barnes and Nobles are considered our libraries and our libraries are considered porn shops. And when we ask ourselves “Is there an information overload?” I say to everyone, “No ladies and gentlemen, just an idiot overload.”

No matter how much information is out there, certain people hit a limit on how much they are willing to maintain, but that might not be a bad thing. Meet Jill Price. She at the age of 42 she cannot forget a single day since the age of 14. She has been diagnosed with hyperthymestic syndrome. Simply understood, it means you have an extensive memory of every day of your life. It may seem like this may be a good thing, but in reality she has trouble coping with the syndrome. Imagine reliving your husband’s death over and over again in your mind.

Humans are designed to forget. If we did not forget, we could never forgive entirely, or move on towards other endeavors. So no matter how much information there are in the universe, Wikipedia stands no chance in overwhelming the forgetful mind, and we as functional humans should be thankful.

             http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4813052&page=1

 

How much is TMI?

Daniel Tammet essentially asks us the question in his article, "Can learning too much, too fast be harmful to human beings?" He uses examples of corporate efficiency, neuroscience and the technologically strange to make his case. And to some extent, I believe his point is valid- that we, as limited human beings, can be overexposed and overwhelmed by the vastness of our own Information Age.

However, I think the answer to the question he raises is most likely obvious to anyone that has spent any deal of time surfing Wikipedia as I sometimes find myself doing. I simply do not retain even a fraction of the information I am exposed to, but I remain a functional person. I am swayed further, though, by the research of a German scientist named Gerd Gigerenzer who has made a name for himself by proving just how simply our minds actually work, even in the presence of an overwhelming amount of information. His research as the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Human Development has shown that most human thought processes follow simple rules, called heuristics, even when challenged to solve complicated tasks.

Consider how baseball players catch a ball. It may seem that they would have to solve complex differential equations in their heads to predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact, players use a simple heuristic. ... The heuristic is to adjust the running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant —that is, the angle between the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the information necessary to compute the trajectory ... and just focus on one piece of information, the angle of gaze."

 

I believe that even though we are now exposed to the largest tsunami and resulting flood of information humanity has ever seen, we human beings will continue to follow very simple, but effective rules as our astrolabe. What simple rules do you navigate by? http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gigerenzer03/gigerenzer_index.html 

I also strongly recommend Gerd's book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious to those further interested.