I am disturbed by the non-sequitur inherent in the Subject and Body of this article: It suggests that the Web inherently *should* make Americans more well informed.
3 points: 1) I agree that these are not particularly important questions in their own right, but they *are* hugely significant indicators of how uninformed the folks who were "studied" are on this type of details, and I agree with Owen that is scary that "anyone ALIVE in the US ... cannot answer these". 2) The internet, in my opinion, is still mainly a reference source... Somewhere between a dictionary or encyclopedia and a newspaper or magazine subscription. If people aren't interested in these kinds of facts, they won't look them up and they won't "subscribe" (e-mail lists, blogs, podcasts, news/information web sites) to sources that provide them. Like the folks I grew up around whose only reading material was their subscription to GRIT or Nat'l Enquirer. 3) If there is a correlation, perhaps it is a negative one... the ratio of "important" (by some measure) factoids to the "unimportant" (by any measure) has plummeted, no? Even TV (with 182 channels) in it's "ubiquity" has aggravated this. At 5 or 6 PM and 10 PM each night in my youth, *any* television running would be showing news... mediated by a local station such that anyone within earhshot would hear their Gov's name as well as the VP's and some of the other facts in question fairly frequently. Today specialized channels like ESPN, MTV, TBS, HBO, Science, Discovery, even CNN (and all of their competitors/wannabes) mean that you can run your TV night and day and never hear most of these things (even with CNN you won't hear your Gov's name often unless he's a bombast like our own). At the newsstand there are hundreds of magazines where there were once tens. Geeks like us maybe all read Byte and now Wired (haven't had a subscription in a decade myself) and maybe Nature/Science/SciAm and maybe Fashionistas all read Cosmo (or whatever is equivalent) but the competition for eyeballs (and ears) is fierce... and a lot that is being offered up is overly refined (like white sugar, flour, corn-syrup, textured-vegetable-protein, etc.) to do more than satisfy (seduce) the most immediate of appetites. Owen said: I sorta have to agree: Just how IMPORTANT are any of these questions? > >> The five questions: >> Who is the vice president? >> Who is your state's governor? >> Does the US have a trade deficit or surplus? >> Which party controls the House of Representatives? >> Is the chief justice of the Supreme Court a liberal, moderate, or >> conservative? > > If you were to be able to ask 5 questions that you would LIKE folks > to know the answer to, would any of these be on it? I think only > one .. the trade deficit. > > But, man, its scary to know that there's anyone ALIVE in the US who > cannot answer these. > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
