Global Breaking News - Monday, December 23, 2024

Reading More but Learning Less?

When one of the “big two” newsweeklies is going out of print, it’s clear that Americans are not consuming news the way they used to. Maybe that’s a good thing, if the technology revolution has made it easier to get more of the kind of information and analysis that readers once sought from Newsweek. But if Americans are finding a more polarized reality online, they may have just grown more partisan with less knowledge, making it more important for forums like presidential debates to deal with the details of policy. In the Web 2.0 age, when many Americans see hundreds of articles every day, are we more informed than previous generations were?
* go out of print = 절판되다/ polarized = 양극화되다/ partisan = 편파(당파)적인/ zealot = 열성적인 사람; 광신자/ abysmal = 최악의; 최저의 

 매일 수백의 기사를 미국인들이 볼는 왭 2.0 시대에, 그들은 이전 세대보다 더 많이 아나요?

1. It’s Easy to Learn, or Be Misled
Countless people are finding it easier to make informed decisions about health, finance, politics and much more. It is also easier to become a zealot.
 
2. Having Information vs. Being Informed
We have all the resources of the Internet at our fingertips, yet all we need to feel engaged is to scan some headlines shared via social media.
 
3. A Larger Pool of Data, but Few Dive In
To be informed, a person has to want to be informed. The percentage of Americans who seem motivated remains abysmal.
 
4. Beyond the Front Page of the Newspaper
By 2016 a majority of high-quality, public issue-focused content online will come from nonprofit and mission-driven organizations.
 
5. We’re Stuck at the Same Level of Ignorance
The rise of digital news sources is having little impact on the millions of Americans who are not that interested in the news.

Sample Essay

We’re Stuck at the Same Level of Ignorance

In 2007, the Pew Research Center set out to test whether the wide array of news sources available at that time made people any better informed. The answer: Not so much. Roughly as many people could name the vice president, or their state’s governor, as were able to do so in 1989. On some questions, people did better; on others, they did worse. But the bottom line was that people were about as likely to name key leaders, and were about as aware of major news events, as they had been nearly two decades earlier.

Information technology today – constant news on Twitter and Facebook, streaming video on iPhones – makes 2007 seem like the Dark Ages. But Pew Research’s “news IQ” quizzes have found that the public continues to struggle with many basic facts about politics and current events. In our most recent quiz, in July, just 34 percent of Americans were able to identify John Roberts as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, from a list that included Harry Reid and the late William Rehnquist.

As was the case in the predigital era, college graduates are better informed than those with less education. Yet the swelling ranks of college graduates have not led to a better informed public. Moreover, while education is correlated with increased knowledge about prominent people and news events, it may not confer as much of an advantage as it did in the 1980s.

For people who actively seek out information on politics and current events, the current media landscape provides previously unimagined opportunities for obtaining news and information. Want to watch the presidential debate on your cellphone? Easy. Tweet about it as it is happening? No problem. But the rise of digital news sources is having less of an impact on the millions of Americans who are not that interested in the news, who lack the background to make sense of it, or who simply can’t afford the technology.