A Return to Critical Thinking

The well-known journalist and political commentator, Walter Lippman, believed that the general population does not have the capacity nor the sustained interest and focus to extract truth from the propagandized media that they consume. He thought it was necessary for a centralized, independent panel of elite, political science experts to synthesize news and sanitize it for public consumption in order to protect democratic societies from distorted journalism, overly simplistic stereotypes, and misguided moral judgments. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman also see propaganda in media as a major threat to democracy. However, they focus more on the structural or systematic flaws within the mainstream media. They present a “propaganda model” that demonstrates how authoritative institutions process information through filters that ultimately leave it heavily distorted and skewed towards the interests of a small subset of elites. Looking through this structural lens, Chomsky has an inherent distrust of institutionalized experts, such as the ones Lippman advocates, believing that they, too, can be easily co-opted. Therefore, he looks to individual people and asks them to learn to think independently and critically in order to combat propaganda from the bottom up rather than the top down.

So how should one go about gathering valid, reliable evidence, relevant content, and diverse perspectives? What qualifies information as authentic, valid and truthful? How does one know if facts are distorted? What sort of inherent or explicit factors might lead to a source providing biased information? How can people detect when a media piece is intentionally (or unintentionally) deceitful and manipulative? Critical thinking is perhaps the best tool we have to answer some of these questions and get closer to the truth so that we can make informed decisions and be confident that these decisions are based in reality.

Intuition, Linguistics, and Lies

In studying the practice of critical thinking, my thoughts about the use of intuition have evolved and matured. I started off staunchly defending the general use of intuition, believing that we have certain primal instincts that we too often ignore. Just like with other animals, these instincts are often instrumental in warning us we are in danger or perhaps that something simply doesn’t feel right. However, intuition is often used inappropriately and treated as a mystical substitute for well-reasoned, evidence-supported arguments. Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, discusses the research surrounding intuition, summarizing when it actually works and when it doesn’t. In short, intuition can be very valuable in select environments and applications such as poker or firefighting but in other contexts, such as the stock market, it is extremely unreliable. Additionally, many people tend to use intuition inconsistently. It often takes many years to build a good intuition in a particular domain and learn how to use it correctly. Finally, how information is presented can negatively affect the way fast judgments are made and often people may not be aware where the basis for their judgments came from. In other words, they may unknowingly be relying on faulty or biased preconceptions.

Chomsky (1988) admits that defending one’s self against propaganda takes “a major effort”, however he insists that one can

“Get to the point where it’s like a reflex to read the first page of the L.A. Times and to count the lies and distortions and to put it into some sort of rational framework.”

As a linguist, perhaps he believes that one can learn and develop an intuition for detecting subtle language cues that help to identify where propaganda and manipulation exist in media, which then can provide a launching point for further critical investigations.

Police detectives and other law enforcement officials are well-trained at detecting lies. According to Vrij (2000), they pay close attention to specific non-verbal behaviors, verbal characteristics, and physiological responses. This could be valuable when watching a political candidate or other official representative speak on videotape. What about when you are reading text, however, and you don’t have any visual or audio cues? Well, Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards (2003) discovered that are particular linguistic styles or patterns that can help one distinguish between true and false written stories. For example liars use negative emotion words more often and “exclusive” words less often than truth-tellers. The authors state that

“Liars can be reliably identified by their words---not by what they say, but by how they say it.”

These linguist researchers also insist that “deception takes work.” Chomsky (1987) agrees and extends this assertion, claiming, “Any system that’s based on lying and deceit is inherently unstable.”


Controlling the Agenda
Clay Shirky, among others, has elegantly illustrated how Web 2.0 (“the read/write web”), is a major media revolution that uniquely provide many-to-many communications and tremendous opportunities for sophisticated and effective group action. Everyone now is a publisher and can easily disseminate information to billions of others around the globe, instantly! On the surface, this seems like a perfect vehicle to combat institutionalized propaganda that comes from mainstream media sources and a huge opportunity for independent or marginalized media outlets. However, there are still many challenges.

First of all, the mainstream media still has much greater access to “official” sources, which, for many media consumers, are the most influential because of their authoritative status. According to American Reporter correspondent, Andy Oram,

“Elites control the critical sources of information and hand it out very selectively. This will not change if you’re on the Internet.” 

He goes on to say that the public has been “disciplined to accept certain forces as expert and to reject others.” Many elites in government and private enterprise have exploited this public conditioning even further by interviewing supposedly independent “experts” who happen to have corporate or lobbyist ties. Sebastian Jones wrote an article in The Nation about “The Media-Lobbying Complex.” He claims that mainstream media outlets have not done enough to adequately disclose these conflict-of-interest connections and questions why they are even being given such substantial airtime in the first place, considering their lack of objectivity. Often, these guests are introduced and identified by their last official government position rather than pointing out that they now presently work for a particular military contractor or lobbyist firm. Jones quotes Jeff Cohen from FAIR: "Gephardt will always be the former majority leader of the House. Period.... These guys know they won't be identified by what they do now but instead by what their position was years or decades ago.” By the very nature of who is paying them, it is reasonable to assume that these compromised, biased expert officials are much more likely to offer up political opinions on various issues such as health care or banking bailouts in a manner that favorably represents their corporate affiliations.

This introduces another major challenge. The mainstream media and its army of “official sources” still set the agenda as well as establish the talking points and boundaries of the debate. This manufactured debate usually translates directly over to the web. According to Ray Greenslade, a journalism professor at City University London,

“This kind of net activity goes on all the time. It is not transformative. The agenda is being set, as before, by mainstream media with the Net in the background… The net is still a political echo chamber, and not yet an influential democratic forum.” 

Thus, the debate is still defined by the corporate media and as Oram points out (referencing Chomsky), this power is often used to focus the public attention onto trivial and divisive personal issues and distract them from the more central, institutional problems at hand. As Chomsky says, “Public attention is diverted to overzealous patriots or to the personality defects of leaders who have strayed from our noble commitments, but not to the institutional factors that determine the persistent and substantive content of these commitments.” Sebastian Jones reinforces this agenda-setting idea in his Nation article. He interviews Janine Wedel, who states,

"When there's a whole host of pundits on the airwaves touting the same agenda at the same time, you get a cumulative effect that shapes public opinion toward their agenda."

There are a few exceptions where independent media sources on the internet have managed to break through the corporate media firewall and temporarily disrupt this top-down agenda by presenting something so damning, sensational, and compelling that the mainstream outlets are forced to respond and cover it. WikiLeaks is one such example. As Glenn Greenwald discusses in Salon, WikiLeaks.org has managed to obtain and leak official documents, video footage, and other materials that expose shocking and controversial behavior by the CIA, the military, and other government organizations. These leaks have included propaganda campaigns targeted at allied European countries and footage of American soldiers killing unarmed Reuters employees in Iraq. Such material is provided to WikiLeaks by anonymous whistleblowers, which Greenwald calls, “One of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite secrets.” Not surprisingly, WikiLeaks has recently been heavily targeted and harassed by a number of government and corporate entities around the world.

The New Media Challenge
Spending the past couple of months learning and applying critical thinking techniques has given me the opportunity to look at media, both on and off the web, in a whole new light. This experience has taught me invaluable lessons about how to read and consume media in a much more skeptical and empowered manner. It has shown me how media and advertising can be used to manipulate our emotions and dramatically influence our decisions. The Frontline episodes we watched illustrated how PR and marketing are becoming more sophisticated and targeted (i.e. “narrowcasting”) as data harvesting technologies become more advanced and psychoanalysis, linguistics, and behavioral research are applied more aggressively. I also have discovered how to detect faulty arguments and recognize propaganda more quickly and effectively.

As Will Richardson strongly advocates, we need to become active readers rather than just passive consumers. He believes that as educators and parents, we must model these behaviors for young students both inside and outside the walls of the physical classroom. Chomsky agrees. He states that

"Citizens of the democratic capitalist societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and mind control."

As media psychologists at Fielding, we must utilize critical thinking to responsibly conduct research and evolve our expertise in an overall effort to help people inform themselves more accurately, communicate more empathetically, and organize more effectively. Only then will people be able to reach the top rung of Shirky's social ladder where they can use collective action to set their own national and global agenda that preserves human rights, advocates social justice, and celebrates diversity.

Social Media: Harnessing the Power of "Social Objects" and Constructivism

Climbing the Social Ladder
Clay Shirky spoke at Harvard Law School two years ago and proudly proclaimed, “Group action just got easier.” He discusses a “ladder” of group interactions that begin with sharing. On the first rung of the ladder, someone begins sharing media online, sometimes for a specific purpose and other times just for fun. This shared artifact implicitly attracts people from diversely remote locations, often times strangers, and brings them together around a particular media piece (text, picture, music, video, etc.). At this point, the media content suddenly transforms into what cartoonist and entrepreneur, Hugh Macleod, calls a “social object”. According to Macleod, “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” He goes on to state that, “Social Networks form around Social Objects, not the other way around.”




Once the shared social object has a motivated social network surrounding it, people may then use their common interest in the object to discover related common interests, objectives, and goals. Ultimately this can encourage temporary collaborations that remain active until the mutual objective or goal is reached. At the top of the ladder is collective action. According to Shirky, collective action requires the highest level of individual commitments. Shirky believes that simply publishing media in the first place often reveals a desire or motivation for action. The interesting part, however, is how publishing initiates a social process in which the media attracts, inspires, catalyzes, and engages other like-minded individuals so that they may become sufficiently motivated to join the call for action. The most difficult factor will likely be maintaining enough sustained motivation and commitment to complete the collective task at hand and fully achieve the common goals of the ad-hoc group before the group naturally dissolves.

Moo-ving into a Virtual Collaborative Space

With all the hype and press surrounding the new opportunities that Web 2.0 provides for two-way-interaction and online collaboration, it’s easy to assume that virtual social objects and social networking are new concepts. However, researchers have been experimenting in this space since the dawn of the internet. For example, the MIT Media Lab introduced MediaMOO, 17 years ago, back in 1993. According to Amy Bruckman & Mitchel Resnick, MediaMOO is “a text-based, networked, virtual reality environment designed to enhance professional community among media researchers.”  It was designed to allow researchers to extend relationships and collaborations that are initiated at physical conferences into their daily lives. It was based on the concept of MUDs or Multi-User Domains, in which users navigate a physical world via text commands. These environments initially became popular among Dungeons and Dragons players and other fantasy crowds, where the virtual worlds were designed for role-playing and interactive fiction. The first widely-used MUDs, Adventure - Colossal Caves and Zork, emerged in the 1970s. If you are curious, you can still explore these MUDs today:

1. Play Adventure
2. Play Zork

It didn’t take long for others outside of the gaming world to realize the benefits of MUDs. Bruckman & Resnick used MediaMOO to test out the theory of constructivism within a virtual social space. The theory of constructivism is popular among teachers and often used when teaching children. It asserts that “people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences.” Basically this means that people learn better when they are active participants, partnering with the teacher to think critically, problem solve, and build artifacts. This is why shared activities in MediaMOO often included construction of even the virtual world itself. Bruckman & Resnick discovered that interactions among media researchers using the MUD were much more beneficial when users participated in a shared activity and everyone had the ability (and responsibility) to build the virtual world in the manner that they saw fit. Today, MUDs are big business as they have morphed into more visually sophisticated graphical MUDs such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. Many groups and businesses, including IBM recognize the potential value of such environments and have put significant resources toward setting up virtual space inside these worlds. Using Wikipedia as an example, Shirky illustrates just how powerful and successful the theory of constructivism can be when applied on a massive scale

Let's Build Something Together!
Will Richardson recognizes the same benefits that Bruckman & Resnick did with today’s “Read/Write Web”, his nickname for Web 2.0. He is encouraging educators to play the role of co-learners with their students as they actively work together to break through the traditional walls of the physical classroom. Richardson believes it is important that teachers help students expand their collaborations and learning activities into a more global virtual world through the medium of Read/Write Web tools such as blogs, forums, wikis, podcasts, etc.  He sees classrooms as “media centers to the world”.



What I personally find interesting are all the potential media applications of constructivism and virtual social objects in politics and civic affairs. For example, Hervé Glevarec looked at youth radio in France as a “social object” in one of his studies. In this article, he shows “how radio is a medium particularly able to exploit its dual nature as both conversation and device, text and frame, conversational exchange and social interaction.” Glevarec inquires about what various radio programs represent for youth listeners within a social, interactive context. Clay Shirky, in his Harvard Law speech, discussed how one passenger who was stuck on an NWA airplane out on the tarmac for 7+ hours co-opted online media to canvass and assemble other frustrated passengers. These passengers collaborated to generate a non-partisan, populist petition that ultimately led to an airline “Passenger Bill of Rights” being signed by congress in 2007.

Time for Something a Little More Flashy
In truth, virtually any political issue may be turned into a social object that can then be used to recruit and network activists. Frank Luntz learned that by simply renaming something, such as the “Estate Tax”, using words that are more emotionally provocative, a person can generate mass interest in an issue and leverage that interest to get people to collaborate and/or take collective political action. Some feel that Luntz’s application was a rather deceitful and an unprincipled use of this strategy, but nevertheless, the results were quite revealing. These various case studies inspire me to explore how social networks might be generated by citizens to rapidly respond to government and corporate actions that are deemed unfavorable and undesirable by particular groups of constituents who are adversely affected.

Shirky, in his Harvard speech, also describes how kids in Eastern Europe used Bill Wasik’s satirical flash mob idea for real political purposes to help them expose and document their government’s oppressive actions. In the same vein, if random flash mobs can so easily be organized, why couldn’t symbolic “flash boycotts” and “flash protests” be organized in the wake of company policy announcements that consumers find to be unfair or inappropriate?

A More Perfect Union
Workers have often relied on collective organization and action through the use of unions. Historically, this was easier because they usually shared the same physical space (i.e. a factory or store). It was a straightforward task to recruit these workers since they all were employed within the same organization. However, until now, it has been much more difficult for widely dispersed and unrelated consumers to come together and “unionize” in order to challenge companies who have overstepped their boundaries. The citizens of Wells, Maine proved the effectiveness of such online collective action by using web media to stop Nestle from unfairly extracting water from their municipal ground sources.

This is the real power of the Read/Write Web. When social objects are used to harness the power of social networking, it can bring passionate and motivated individuals together to collaboratively learn and forge real relationships. Just like the researchers in MediaMOO, the gamers in Zork, or the students in Richardson's future classrooms, frustrated citizens and consumers can now work together to actively construct virtual worlds that will ultimately lead to the construction of new, and hopefully better, physical worlds.

Consumer Psychology: When Will the Villagers Grab Their Pitchforks?

The word “advertising” has a rather benign and practical definition. According to Merriam-Webster, advertising is “the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements.” It is a practice that has been around since the beginnings of civilization to help individuals or groups sell themselves or their goods. However, 20th century modern advertising is an entirely new beast and it has increasingly become more invasive, ubiquitous, and psychologically potent. The shift of focus in advertising from tangible products and services to abstracted, emotionally-centered branding concepts has led to a widening gap between the reality of what is being sold and the broad-brush, euphemistic ideations that are used to represent them. This week’s materials took a deep look at the cultural and societal impact of modern advertising and whether Madison Avenue has gone too far. They left me questioning whether the misleading messages and manipulative techniques implemented by marketing consultants have crossed moral boundaries, significantly damaging the integrity of both business markets and our democratic, political system. Moreover, I began to wonder if the most heavily targeted audiences will eventually revolt against consumerism, and if so, what form such a revolt might take.

Attack of the Clones
In the Frontline Episode, “The Persuaders”, we learned about two individuals who exploit behavioral and social psychology research to help their clients manipulate mass audiences and ultimately control their buying or voting behavior. Clotaire Rapailles used his work with autistic children to come up with a formulaic and questionably effective strategy for “cracking the code” of various consumer cultures, product categories, and brands. Rapailles claims to hunt for peoples’ primal urges, attempting to discover their “reptilian hot buttons” that compel them to action. Frank Luntz is a political consultant who generally works for various conservative candidates and special interest groups. He does research on test groups in order to learn the language, information, and isolated facts required to frame an issue or ideology so that people will go along with it. He teaches politicians and advocacy groups how to talk about an issue and the most effective emotional buzz words to use (e.g. "Death Tax", "War on Terror"). Both of these individuals have used their craft to become rich and powerful within the highest circles of business and government. However, they actually owe much of their success and ideas to a man who was around long before them.

Edward Bernays has often been referred to as the “father of public relations” Author Larry Tye went a half-step further, coining him as “the father of spin”. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the legendary founder of psychoanalysis. Combining his uncle’s work on the unconscious, primal mind with Wilfred Trotter’s theories of crowd psychology, he came up with PR techniques that manipulated public opinion through subconscious channels (Wikipedia). According to the New York Times, he “helped shape public relations by favoring the use of endorsements from opinion leaders, celebrities, doctors and other ‘experts’.” Adam Curtis illustrates this strategy in his documentary Century of the Self: Leveraging feminist spirit and rhetoric, Bernays hired a group of young debutantes and staged a seemingly grassroots-driven “torches of freedom” event, ultimately helping the American Tobacco Company reset societal taboos surrounding female public smoking virtually overnight. Over 70 years later, similar techniques were templated by Madison Ave and used to help Sprite turn its brand into a hip-hop music icon.




We're Not Crazy, We're Local!

Just like “the merchants of cool” (i.e. Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom, etc.) are constantly looking to co-opt what teens presently consider “cool”, top advertisers are now attempting to deceitfully leverage the most current social-political sentiments surrounding such populist trends as anti-globalization and eco-friendliness. One great example of this, is what many are now calling “localwashing”. This is a strategy by large corporations to exploit the sudden rise of the local food and sustainability movements (i.e. “localvores”) who strive to support and build self-reliant food economies that “integrate the environmental, economic, and social health of their food systems in particular places.” Companies such as Whole Foods, Pepsi, and Walmart have all been recently pushing ad campaigns in which they dubiously claim their products are local (see here for a slideshow of examples). Starbucks was so brazen that it decided to open a location in its birth town of Seattle, thinly disguising the coffee shop as a small, independent business called “15th Ave Coffee and Tea.” Perhaps the most ridiculous perpetrator of “localwashing”, however, is the Venezuelan-owned oil company, Citgo. As a part of one of their current ad campaigns, they are putting up billboards across the country with the absurd slogan, “Local. Loyal. Like it should be.” They also have an entire page on their website sappily devoted to a massive, neon sign that resides next to Fenway Park in my beloved city of Boston. On this webpage, they praise the Citgo sign as a “majestic” landmark that citizens fought tirelessly to save. They even include an anonymous, supposedly “well-know Boston quote” that equates the sign to Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.

Don't Take it Personally
The “localwashing” efforts described above illustrate another phenomena discussed extensively in the documentary, The Corporation.  Many multinational companies, in recent years, have essentially managed to personify themselves (both symbolically and legally). Noam Chomsky once stated in an interview with CorpWatch:

“Corporations, in other words, were granted early in this century the rights of persons, in fact, immortal persons, and persons of immense power. And they were freed from the need to restrict themselves to the grants of state charters.”

It seems predictable that these corporations would now use localwashing to try and create a personal bond with consumers, acting as if they are truly members of our local community and family. As discussed in “The Persuaders”, top advertisers have also extended this personification into the world of entertainment media as well. Thanks to a growing alliance commonly referred to as “Madison & Vine”, advertisers have managed to insert their brands, front and center, into popular TV shows and movies, even portraying them as sympathetic heros. Such was the treatment of FedEx in “Castaway”.

Escaping The Matrix
It is now quite clear that advertisers plan to continue inserting themselves into our lives, crowding and imposing on our cultural identity and personal space. For them, they believe it is vitally necessary to “break through the clutter” that they created in order to simply survive. This is at least how NYU professor, Mark Miller sees it. Miller fears that our American culture is in great peril under the threat of such aggressive marketing:

“Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it ceases to be a culture at all. It ceases to be a culture worth the name.”

As Acxium harvests more and more personal data about us and “narrowcasting” becomes more pervasive, we will be segmented, categorized and stereotyped at ever more granular levels. This will likely provide advertisers with endless opportunities to target each and every one of us and feed us the messages they hope and pray our “reptilian” brains will instinctually react to.

The big question is when will consumers finally revolt? Is there a breaking point where consumers will simply become so over-saturated and over-stimulated that they simply grow deaf to all of the noise? Cable bills and movie ticket prices continue to skyrocket, yet the product is arguably getting worse. How many ads can be stuffed into a sitcom or a movie before it becomes so manufactured and contrived, so sugary and fake, that people finally just turn the television off all together and stop going to movie theaters? Independent and amateur content is becoming more and more sophisticated every day, as the tools for producers become cheaper and easier to use. Web-based podcasts are gaining steam and quickly becoming more innovative and intriguing than the reality TV flood that has washed over all of the old media airwaves. Ad-based traditional media is failing because advertisers recognize their investments are reaching a level of diminishing returns, but as they attempt to co-opt the creative content itself, they might just inadvertently kill the “cool” completely. If that happens, perhaps we will all learn to rediscover the rebellious teen identities still hiding deep down inside and tear away to build our own, democratic media world, leaving the middlemen and former authoritative sources behind. Clay Shirky’s vision of “Mass amateurization” might just be the undercurrent that finally breaks our consumer culture free, as we enter a new age of read/write interaction and cooperative, collective endeavors.

Web Bias: Biased By What We Don't See

In my past couple of blog posts, I discussed, in considerable depth, the nature of user behavior on the internet that may contribute to inaccurate information and a general lack of authenticity. I also discussed how most official sources, even ones that are considered authoritative experts in a particular domain, can still have inherent biases and ulterior motives when presenting information. There is, however, another type of bias that exists that people don’t often think about when doing research on the web. This bias comes not from the web content itself nor is it even about what is in the content. Rather, it is about content access and awareness of what content is available.

A Clear and Present Danger
About 9 years ago, John Hopkins University conducted an asthma study. During this study, a healthy, young volunteer named Ellen Roche died as a result of inhaling a chemical called hexamethonium. According to the Baltimore Sun, this story became more controversial when researchers discovered that there were several articles readily available online that described extremely serious side effects associated with this chemical, including death. Dr. Alkis Togias, the supervising physician, believed he did his due diligence by searching through medical textbooks as well as a commonly used and well-respected medical research database called PubMed. Tragically, however, these resources did not reveal results for the most critical and relevant studies about hexamethonium.

This deadly informational blind spot that was exposed by Roche’s death can ironically be associated with one of the criteria that John Hopkin’s own library website provides for evaluating online information. This relevant criterion is called “currency” or “the timeliness of information” and actually in this case, we are essentially talking about the opposite of currency. PubMed, at least at that time, only tracked articles back to 1960. Unfortunately, the research articles that could have provided Dr. Togias the crucial warnings about hexamethonium were all published during the 1950s.

To Google or Not to Google. That is the Question!
The sad story of Ellen Roche is an important case study that reveals a growing problem with the internet in general. As exciting, useful, and broad-reaching as Google’s search technologies appear to be, there is also a considerable risk and downside to their success. Google has generated a pervasive and problematic expectation or illusion among users that they truly do “provide access to the world’s information in one click.” Casual internet users, including many students and professionals, have gradually been seduced into believing that Google offers simple and immediate access to ALL the world’s information. “Mommy” blogger, “Christy” exclaims:

“Oh, dear. The day has come where people honestly believe that if you can’t find it on Wikipedia or Google, it doesn’t exist.”

It is quite possible that "Christie" may be right!

Searching With My Good Eye Closed
As amateur users increasingly adopt such attitudes about Google and overestimate their own searching abilities, they may fail to recognize the importance of using multiple database sources. Such users might also lose appreciation for information science professionals, such as librarians. In an Information Today article discussing the Roche case at John Hopkins, Eva Perkins states:

“Professional searchers — in this case, medical librarians — apparently have not made the potential and actual value of their contribution to the quality of searches visible enough to their clients for the clients to recognize the risks of working without them. Physician researchers overestimated their effectiveness as literature searchers and didn't compensate for any defects in their searching abilities by using professional networking to double- and triple-check their research. Database producers failed to build files and interfaces that would have found the needed information.”

Perkins proceeds by putting pressure on both specialized and common search engine companies to do their best to actually meet the expectations of amateur users by building more usable graphical interfaces and better databases that communicate with other search engines in order to link (patch) the critical information gaps that currently exist between them.

I recently helped conduct a usability field study for a company called Stat!Ref that provides healthcare-related electronic resources as well as a robust search engine which indexes all of their materials. In this study, we interviewed 15 users who worked and/or studied at various hospitals and universities in Boston, MA and Portland, OR. Our user group represented a broad range of searching skills and included medical students, researchers, and librarians. In this study, we discovered that even the most advanced, highly-trained searchers were frustrated by information being too siloed as well as the lack of quality tools for sharing and collaborating during cooperative digital search activities. They also reiterated the challenge illustrated in the Roche case of gathering the most relevant and accurate information on topics that have been around for many decades.

Dig Deeper
The lack of access and awareness bias will continue to be a major challenge for information professionals and computer scientists. As more and more of our information is exclusively accessed via digital mediums and the technological expectations of users continues to rise, new tools will need to be developed in order to combat this hidden bias. According to Read Write Web,

“Less than 0.2% of the web is indexed and some of the most valuable information lies beyond search results returned from traditional search engines.”

Fortunately, progress is being made as we speak. For example, an exciting new service called DeepDyve (formerly Infovell) was recently launched, promising search technology that “enables an untrained searcher to express complex concepts in a simple and intuitive way and provides easy-to-use tools for filtering and sorting through relevant and related documents.”

A Compact Digital World
User perceptions of traditional media are rapidly changing and evolving. For instance, in our Stat!Ref study, we learned that many students today have a hard time even describing the difference between a book and a scientific journal. Young students now rely heavily on digital versions of publications, and thus they have trouble conceptually understanding delineations that made perfect sense to those of us who are accustomed to physical, print versions of these publications. In the physical world, books have a considerably different look and feel than journal articles, but online, such tangible properties sort of fade into the background and readers are simply left with words on a screen.

As scientific communications continue to migrate to the internet and become intricately mixed together with other forms of communications (blogs, forums, e-books, video, etc.), researchers must also adopt new media strategies for effectively and credibly disseminating their important findings and analysis. Kenneth Goldsmith, a well-respected American poet and conceptual artist, is a big advocate of “academic blogging”. He believes that blogging generates “peer-based consensus” which in turn “garners credibility”. Goldsmith recognizes that blogging not only exposes research to the general public much earlier, but it also allows one to lay claim to research ideas before formally publishing them. Furthermore, it gives the academic researcher the opportunity to immediately engage in debate with others in their field, in real-time, about the validity of their methodology, results and interpretations.

These types of emerging social media interactions could definitely be interesting topics for us as media psychologists. Overall, I have learned that the most dangerous online biases may not necessarily be those that are found inside relevant online information but rather those that emerge from never finding the most relevant information at all.

Web Bias: Hacks, Hammers, and Hate

Discovering Bias Through Reverse Engineering and Hacking
I find it interesting that determining bias in the materials we read on the web really requires a combination of basic technical computer science skills along with the more universal, content-based critical thinking skills. Alan November discusses in considerable detail some of the more technical, computer-centric techniques people should learn in order to help them detect bias and deceptive information. These include analyzing URLs and looking up domains on “WhoIs" services. The main point seems to be in order to track where information is truly being sourced, we need to understand enough about web technologies in order to reverse engineer the internet’s underlying structure.

The technical discussion above logically leads me to assume that web programmers (and others who are more knowledgeable about how computers work) are naturally better at detecting bias in web materials than users who aren’t regularly involved in computer engineering activities. Is this really true though? It might be an interesting hypothesis to test. In the same vein, Catherine Seo often talks about "digital immigrants", or those who belong to age groups that did not grow up using the internet. Is there a wide gap between age groups in terms of technical knowledge about how the World Wide Web works and does this correlate with each age group’s ability to detect bias?

Back to Critical Thinking Basics
As I mentioned at the beginning, determining authenticity and objectivity on the web requires traditional critical thinking skills as well. John Hopkins University’s Library website contains a tutorial, called “Evaluating Information Found on the Internet”. This tutorial lists a number of factors that users should consider such as the authority of the author (credibility in eyes of others within the field), the publishing body of the web material, and demonstrated knowledge of the literature within the domain in which the author is writing. I personally find “point of view” to be a particularly poignant factor, however.

Hammering Away at the Government
For instance, the following article about the Pentagon's “$600 hammer” appears, at first glance, to be an objective piece written to disprove the urban legend that the military actually spent $600 on a hammer. However, after reading the article and researching the source, I had a very different take on what the motivations behind this piece actually were. This article comes from the National Journal. This is a publication that claims to be non-partisan, yet a good argument could be made that they are a considerably conservative magazine; one that generally advocates privatization and less government. In each of the last two presidential cycles they ranked Obama and John Kerry, respectively, as the #1 most liberal senators. Also, the National Journal owns the domain, govexec.com, which, according to their website, is “a business magazine serving executives and managers in the federal government.” Many of their articles seem to push for more privatization of government agencies and the military. The “$600 hammer” article, on closer examination, implicitly appears to be doing just that. See this passage as a case-in-point:

“Such accounting arcana are bread-and-butter issues for Douglass now that he heads the Aerospace Industries Association of America Inc., whose members want more military service contracts - which they can win only by showing they can perform a given service at lower cost than the military could do it in-house. But when the public and private sectors compete, said Bert M. Concklin, president of the Professional Services Council, differing accounting standards mean that "the government's costs are elusive, at best."

So, deceptively, the article starts off, appearing to defend the government, saying that the $600 hammer story is not a legitimate example of the Pentagon’s financial incompetence. However, as the article goes on, the author does an about-face and starts emphasizing that the government’s accounting practices are indeed highly flawed, ineffective, and wasteful, and that this “elusive” accounting system makes it harder for the private sector (i.e. private military contractors) to compete with the public sector.

Don't Be a Hater
I found a similar case of “point of view” bias in a NY Times article that, the John Hopkins Library site linked to. This article, on the surface, simply warns against racist websites that deceptively pose as being objective and educational. If more closely examined, however, this story is rather one-sided and appears to be advocating an ulterior agenda.

The article primarily features the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper. This center holds a very broad definition of  “hate” content and it strongly advocates censorship of any content it deems hateful. Many disparate groups fall within this wide-cast net that the Wiesenthal Center casts, including “hate music, religious extremism, Holocaust denial, militia groups, and conspiracy and new world order ideology.” It is dubious at best to put all of these groups into one pot and label it “hate”. For example, under their broad definition, the Center could easily put gangster rap under the category of hate music. So does this mean that they advocate censoring popular rap songs? In the same vein, there are many people out there who are truly worried about globalism and the potential of elites to gain too much power over all of the world’s populations through the institution of a single, centralized government. Is it fair or responsible to classify such concerned citizens under the category of “hate”? These are dangerous precedents to set and it is a manipulative way to play on people’s fears in order to push an agenda that severely limits freedom of speech on the internet.

In short, when vetting information we read on the web and attempting to determine bias, there is no doubt that we should always be wearing our critical thinking hats. However, there are also some helpful technological strategies and techniques available to internet users that can potentially provide some important clues about whether bias exists in media and where exactly that bias is coming from.

Urban Legends: The Biases Inherent in "Authoritative" Sources

One of the first things that Michael Shermer says in his "Baloney Detection Kit" video is not to blindly trust any information or source, even when it comes from a widely accepted, authoritative expert. Ironically, this caused me to immediately clue into the potential biases that Dr. Shermer himself possesses as I carefully evaluated the agenda he was pushing and the organizations he represents. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and a columnist for Scientific American. In other words, he is a spokesperson for the scientific community at large and his agenda is to push forward the philosophies of science and critical skepticism. 


Now, scientific methodologies have certainly proven themselves to be quite useful and invaluable throughout the course of mankind. The evolution in technology, medicine, etc. that has occurred over time as a result of science is virtually impossible to deny. At the same time, scientific practices are often idealized in the mainstream media as generally being infallible and impervious to biases of any kind. Those who have studied the sociology and politics of science, however, do not find this to be true in the real world at all. Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher, historian, and physicist once said:

"Typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate."

Donald Campbell, a social scientist engaged in the study of false knowledge, also was critical of academic disciplines and often pointed out biases or prejudices that could lead to faulty research results and/or theories. His model of "ethnocentricism" suggests that the scientist’s nature is greatly influenced by extensive social factors. For example, political and business pressures may lead researchers to gravitate toward specialties that are already central to a department. The members of these central specialties receive the most support, financially and politically, for their concerns, theories, framework, goals, and methods. Therefore, these members naturally define the current paradigm as they suck in new students from peripheral areas that have lessor support and indoctrinate these students into their already narrowed models of thinking and research. Campbell believed that this organizational phenomenon has created large interdisciplinary gaps and also greatly debilitated cross-departmental communications in many institutions.

My point is that although Shermer's "Baloney Detection Kit" was an interesting and valuable lesson in critical thinking and I certainly agreed with much of what he said, I still must call him out for failing the critical thinking tests of humility and empathy. His attitude seemed to be rather dismissive and condescending towards those who choose to be skeptical about certain scientific results as well as those who tend to rely more on their intuition and gut in order to make sense of the world. Michael clearly showed his cards early on about where he stood on issues such as global warming, and yet he made little effort to fully engage or debunk these skeptics. I am not attempting to defend deniers of science but I must say that by the end of this video, Dr. Shermer left me feeling a bit unconvinced of his assertions, especially after he cavalierly exclaimed:

"Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works, and everybody knows that..."

I started watching with quite a cooperative and agreeable attitude but after hearing this overly bold and absolute language in his closing remarks, I actually walked away questioning his objectivity and feeling like somewhat of a skeptic myself. 

Snopes.com is considered to be another "authoritative" source for determining truth. It helps visitors rapidly determine whether various urban legends and internet rumors are true or false. Once again, though, Snopes objective and infallible reputation has been called into question several times. For example, a blogger named John Andrews, who appears to be a webmaster and SEO consultant, discovered a deceptively disguised promotional article for Jingle Networks "free411" service buried in between their authentic articles. The promotional article was designed to look just like an actual Snopes article, complete with meta keywords and everything. There were not even any obvious labels that identified it as sponsored content. Additionally, Snopes recently angered some of its visitors by eliminating article author bylines and implementing a strange Javascript hack to prevent casual users from cutting and pasting content from their articles. Snopes never explained why they took these measures, and it ultimately caused some to wonder if their mission was more profit-driven than truth-driven.


The real takeaway here, in terms of uncovering truth via the internet, is that there simply is no convenient "truth tool" that can fully replace the rigorous act of critical thinking when one is seeking authentic information. There are no shortcuts. Even when reading scholarly articles from generally respected scientific or academic institutions, one must continue to exude the values, techniques, and virtues of critical thinking.

Urban Legends: The Nature of Authenticity on the Web

By now, it is cliche to say that the internet has fundamentally changed how we consume, process, and publish content, yet, at the same time, it cannot be overstated enough. There are countless business and technology leaders, such as Apple founder, Steve Jobs, and Twitter founder, Biz Stone, who constantly preach and muse about all of the information that is now ubiquitously at our fingertips. They love to gloat about how their own products and services will give go even more opportunities to access an even greater amount of this vast universe of information. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, most succinctly summed up this prevalent, virtuous attitude with their now famous quote:

“Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.”

With all of this mutual, congratulatory grandstanding, people rarely stop to consider how such easy access to information channels (both from a consumption and production standpoint) would affect basic uses of information such as the understanding or interpretation of truth and authenticity on the web.

Warning: Information Overload! Identity Shield Engaging

Clay Shirky, in his book, Here Comes Everybody, discusses the limitations of the human brain, using email as one example, where he explains that people have already hit practical ceilings in their ability to effectively filter, process and respond to incoming information. At this critical point of “information overload,” a person is faced with a dilemma. How do I prioritize this information and choose what to read first, what to save for later, and what to discard without reading at all? Unarmed and unprepared, many people do not know how to respond to such an avalanche of information, so it is possible that they fall back on primal thinking patterns that do not necessarily include techniques such as critical thinking. I hypothesize that this in turn leads to an exaggerated attraction toward identity-based processing where people tend to only internalize information that fits harmoniously with their values, beliefs, and social memberships. All information that doesn't fit into this privileged bucket bounces off their "identity shield" and never gets analyzed.

George Lakoff speaks extensively about this phenomenon in terms of American voters and political strategy in his articles and books such as The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 20th Century Politics With an 18th Century Brain. In fact, sophisticated political and marketing strategies are frequently based on a psychological understanding that powerful symbolism is much more important in influencing the masses than actual facts. As Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine, puts it:

"People believe weird things because our brains are wired up to find meaningful patterns."

Therefore, the goal is to simply evoke an emotional response and generate trust through identity associations. Once that bond is created, cognitive dissonance sets in and people tend to rationalize or simply ignore the pieces of the puzzle that no longer fit, for example when "their candidate" takes a stance that contradicts their belief system.

Skim Baby Skim
Another artifact of the internet’s emergence is that it very well may be changing the way we read and think. Nicholas Carr discusses this idea in depth in an article he wrote for Atlantic Magazine, called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". He proposes that our use of the internet is making sustained and focused reading of books or even long articles increasingly difficult. Our reading behavior has completely changed in that we now all act as amateur speed readers, skimming and bouncing from one title, headline, or abstract to the next. To emphasize his point, he cites a study of online research behavior from the University College London which found that readers often "power browse," primarily looking for "quick wins." In fact, in light of how prevalent this consumer behavior has become, entire websites and business models have emerged, such as Newser, Digg, and Twitter, that encourage and leverage these new habits by keeping users primarily focused on professionally crafted or user-based summaries of longer articles. In addition, their interfaces entice users to jump from one article or topic to the next as quickly as possible. For example, Newser, with its slogan, "Read less, know more" has an image-based grid of all the latest and/or most popular news stories. It is sort of a more extreme, interactive web caricature of CNN's Situation Room, in which multiple monitors simultaneously display entirely different stories.

Amateur Night at the Internet Cafe
So what is the big deal about all of this information overload and superficial reading behavior in terms of “truth”? To find the answer to this, we need to go back to Clay Shirky and a phenomenon he popularized called “mass amateurization”. The internet has catalyzed, or more accurately enabled, a dramatic communication shift around the globe in which the traditional one-to-many model (e.g. newspapers, television and radio networks) is rapidly being replaced by a many-to-many model. Shirky is one of the first technologists to consider the implications of this shift. He reminds us that having a greater quantity and diversity of information available to us is not inherently better or worse. Rather, he quotes the physicist Philip Anderson, and proclaims that often "more is different." It is fundamentally different!

When we couple mass amateurization of content with cursory, superficial reading (breadth rather than depth) and identity-based filtering, what we ultimately end up with is a lot of published content on the web that is either full of half-truths or misinterpreted facts that have been propagated and sloppily reproduced through many iterations. Consider this to be the modern version of the "telephone game." One Snopes article illustrated how this works in a response to an email going around listing supposed comments by sports announcers that involved double entendres. Suspiciously, these statements were all attributed to anonymous sources. In the analysis, they pointed out one of the double entendres in a commentator quote about Andy Roddick, a pro tennis player, being superstitious and having his wife "kiss his balls" before a match. They showed how this double entendre may have been creatively borrowed by the email author from a joke that Johnny Carson had once told when speaking to Arnold Palmer, a pro golfer. This same pattern shows up again and again. Another article on Snopes discusses an alleged nude photo of Sarah Palin that was being spread around which was actually the same picture that someone claimed years before was a nude snapshot of Julia Louise Dryfus. Both stories have since been deemed false as the photo ultimately was proved to be a photoshopped fake.

Very Funny But Seriously!
Comedy and satire surprisingly even becomes a confounding issue within this new ecosystem. As SNL, Daily Show, Colbert Report, and Onion News sketches are quoted around the web, they often are intentionally or, more likely, unintentionally mixed in with quotes from the real-life counterparts who are being parodied. During a rapid skimming exercise across multiple websites, someone may quickly cut and paste a satirized quote and use it to support their claims in a serious argument. Once again, this happened with Sarah Palin, when some people mistakenly attributed several of Tina Fey's SNL quotes to the actual Sarah Palin. It may be increasingly common that the sarcasm and satire get lost in the translation (via web syndication) and Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" ends up being presented as actual "truth".

A New Word Order
It is quite possible that the new age of web-inspired “power browsing” makes people more susceptible to blatant, thinly-disguised propaganda. The attention span of many web readers may be too short and divided to pick up even the most obvious red flags, let alone the more nuanced details that hide behind the headlines (e.g. "The $600 Hammer").

Legends have been around since the dawn of mankind and have served a number of constructive social purposes. Tall tales of heroics by various public figures are also nothing new in our society, such as when George Bush was falsely credited with paying for the funeral of a boy who drowned near his Crawford Ranch home. The difference now is that these legends are mixed into the same digital pot (in the form of mass emails, forum posts, and blogs) with real news stories. This makes it ever more tedious for the casual information consumer to sort out fiction from fact, especially when such legends are deliberately incorporated for the purpose of political persuasion. The problem compounds each time these stories are edited, embellished, and re-syndicated by another "creative" user. It all gets mixed, stirred, and bundled up together before being shipped off again to the next naive and mentally overwhelmed recipient. The "telephone game" continues. When trying to phish out the truth with incredibly complex issues such as the banking crisis or health care reform, it is no wonder that all the factors discussed above leave citizens in such a state of helplessness and confusion.

This may explain why people start to gravitate toward overly-simplistic “theories of everything” (as coined in the "Baloney Detection Kit" video). If a provocative personality such as Glenn Beck or Alex Jones, can neatly package up all of our problems in this country and attribute them to absurd constructs such as "Obama's Socialist Fascist Regime" or a small global network of perfectly unified elites called the "New World Order", it makes it much easier for their listeners to symbolically accept. While some of these conspiratorial, black-and-white world visions are quite terrifying, they are oddly easier pills to swallow than the uncertain and complex, grey truths that likely exist below the surface. I believe that Michael Sherner said it best. When attempting to determine the authenticity of information:

“The point here is, you want to have a mind open enough to accept radical new ideas but not so open that your brains fall out.”

Sound Effects on Affect

United by Music
Early this morning - 2 am to be exact - most Americans "sprang forward" as daylight savings took effect. Unfortunately, I was caught off guard and tripped. Not realizing the time change had occurred, I almost missed my flight home to Boston. Ironically, after an intense week in Media Psychology bootcamp, otherwise known as New Student Orientation, I spent much of this weekend detached from all media. My phone sat in my bag, the TV remained off, and I hardly touched my laptop. Instead, I was enjoying some concentrated time with an old friend who lives in Los Angeles. We were so busy interacting with each other and roaming around the city that I wasn’t paying attention to any sort of live news sources. Thus, I missed the fact that the clocks were changing.

In a surprising stroke of luck, however, my flight ended up being delayed. I happily discovered this as I raced from the security gates over to Gate 77 at LAX and heard over the loudspeaker that my plane was still being “pre-boarded”. Hearing this word always makes me chuckle a little as I nostalgically remember George Carlin's old stand-up acts in which he hilariously disparages this and similar nonsensical, euphemistic terms. It makes me wonder: when the CIA decides to waterboard a suspected terrorist, do they pre-waterboard him first? 


Sorry for the terrible and tasteless joke. (For the record, I strongly condone any and all torture.) Just consider it a tribute to Carlin as I am quite certain he would have happily incorporated such a joke into his routine! Come to think of it, George once had something to say about critical thinking and the media: 

"They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests."

~ George Carlin

Anyway, as I sat down at the gate to gather myself for a few minutes, I heard some invigorating yet pleasant piano music playing in the background. It was soothing and calming, considering that I had just been running through the concourse and panicking that I was going to miss my flight. The music allowed me to finally relax amidst all the chaos of the airport environment. My bliss was short-lived however. As I begin to pay closer attention to the song playing, it sounded oddly familiar; and suddenly, I knew why. I quickly became disturbed as I realized my relaxing music was nothing but a looping jingle from a series of frequently aired United Airline television commercials. I felt annoyed and manipulated. I realized immediately that the music was sophisticatedly being used by United to embed their brand into my brain. This subtle advertising technique was leading me to unconsciously associate their jingle and branding with my pleasant, “meditative” experience.





This sort of marketing phenomenon is not unique but rather quite prevalent in modern society. I bet most of you can think back to when you were children and vividly remember certain television commercials simply because of their catchy jingles. You may possibly even remember all the words. This is the incredible, persistent effect that music appears to have on our brains, in terms of association, affect, and long-term memory!





Getting In Tune with Background Music
Music is a powerful media tool. I found Dr. Isbouts' lecture on the subject, during NSO, to be quite interesting. He demonstrated to us how one could show the exact same video but simply replace the soundtrack and elicit an entirely different emotional response from the viewers. We all watched a video clip in which a first-person camera is panning over ocean waves. The first time we watched it, a Beach Boys song was playing in the background. The second time we watched it, the "Jaws" theme was playing. As one might expect, our interpretation of the clip was dramatically different in each version. When Dr. Isbouts performed this experiment, I was immediately reminded of the re-cut movie trailers that various people have posted to YouTube in which the authors show movie excerpts and provide a soundtrack that make a horror flick appear to be a romantic comedy or vice versa. It's pretty incredible to see first-hand how music can so easily pull our emotional strings and guide our interpretation of the visual images on screen.








Feel the Music
I was surprised to learn from Dr. Isbouts that very few media psychology students, if any, have focused their dissertation work or other research on the use of music in media and its powerful abilities to manipulate emotions.

• Jennifer Copley (2008) wrote a short article called “The Psychology of Music” in which she surveys a number of studies that illustrate the significant effect, both positive and negative, on humans, animals, and plants. She suggests that inadequate sample sizes and a failure to control for confounding variables put some of these results into question but believes that these studies certainly justify further research. 

• LeDoux (2000) suggests that emotions may often be “unconscious processes that can, but do not necessarily, lead to conscious experiences.” 

• Panksepp & Bernatzky (2002) discuss how emotional circuits are “widely distributed in the brain.” They also describe how auditory processing of music is widely distributed across many of the same areas of the brain and thus may be able to biologically influence emotions in a very direct manner. 

Just putting this small sampling of research findings together, we can construct an intriguing theoretical framework of how music unconsciously and directly affects our emotions and behavior. Such a framework could be a fruitful source of future media psychology research.


References

1. Copley, J. (2008, Februrary 25). The Psychology of Music. Retrieved from http://psychology.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_psychology_of_music
2. LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual review of neuroscience, 23(1), 155–184.
3. Panksepp, J., & Bernatzky, G. (2002). Emotional sounds and the brain: the neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation. Behavioural Processes, 60(2), 133–155.