Abramovitz and De Leo (or is it Matthew Robinson? The text attributes this article to different people depending on where you look. Anyway....) provide a multitude of examples to illustrate how Americans know more about entertainment than politics, more about advertising than history, more about Bill Cosby than Bill Clinton.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Polling illustrates just how much we don't know, and how much this lack of knowledge can have a detrimental effect on public debate. But I would have preferred that the authors delved a little deeper into finding out how and why we ended up this way. It's no secret that most of us prefer watching television over reading The Bill of Rights, but what caused us to get to the point where we know so little about important current events? I discussed this issue with my dad, age 62, to get his perspective. He told me that when he was a kid, his family would sit down together and watch the news every night after dinner. Why the news? And why every night? Because that's all that was on during that half hour with the limited channel selection they had. That got me thinking: do the increasing media choices we have only make us more ignorant? And will it get even worse as more niches, going far beyond Food Network, develop? When there was less choice in the past, perhaps Americans were less entertained and more informed because they couldn't find that channel or website that served their unique tastes. Abramovitz and De Leo/Robinson's humorous use of comparisons shows just show stark and troubling this ignorance is. 99 percent of college seniors polled were familiar with Beavis and Butthead but only 22 percent knew that the phrase "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" came from the Gettysburg address (362). Yikes.
Wade Roush might think that we will continue to have better access to information than ever before, but even he or she (this person is referred to by both pronouns in the text. I guess they were still trying to nail down gender by the time of publication.) might not think that better Internet services will have a causal relationship with a more informed public. His/her article is very far from an emphatic "Yes" to the question of Are People Better Informed in the Information Society. Just because information is delivered faster and more securely does not mean that people will improve the kinds of information they decide to consume.
Does anyone else think these editors had a few too many wine coolers before throwing together Issue 18?
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2 comments:
Way, way, too many wine coolers! ;)
Truthfully, I think the "yes/no" format for the book didn't work for a lot of the chapters.
As to why we seem to have tons more information but even less real knowledge, I think it's because people would rather be entertained than informed. I think people watch the news less when it's depressing.
I think back on Maria's post about how people in Romania were so hungry for knowledge of the outside world... we are a bit spoiled in the here in America, don't you think?
Im not questioning people's intelligence, however, polling should not either. Just because Students know who Beavis and Butthead and are unaware of the Gettysburg address does not mean they are clueless.
Asking citizens who Paris Hilton is, and then asking about Aaron Burr might not be fair. The media over saturates characters constantly. We should not be surprised by the results.
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