[lbo-talk] (no subject)

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of public opinion in the US - at
least to an outsider - is contrast between general access to information and
education on the one hand and the total lack of understanding how
institutions work on the other.  This, however, appears to be an illusion
created by the ubiquity of the information, or perhaps misinformation,
created by the gargantuan media industry.  That is, people tend to view the
US society through the filter of media disseminated information rather than
through direct face to face interaction with people.  Their perceptions are
skewed by distortions created by the media, and especially th epolls that
are particularly treacherous because their create distortions while
maintaining the myth of their objectivity.


>From a cognitive point of view, polls created thier own answers by imposing
a particular interpretative framework on the comunicative interaction.  It
goes well beyond mere wording of questions, and involves social status and
personalities of the interviewers and respondents, social context where the
interview takes place, e.g. whether it is a telephone or face to face
interview, who else is present in the room with the responded, what was the
respondent doing prior to the interview, and so on.  The idea that one can
measure the contetns of the human mind with a paper and pencil test is
probably one of the biggest science-defying fallacies in out times.
However, this fallacy passes for knowledge in everyday discourse.

Point of clarification - not all polls are useless.  Those aiming to collect
data on objective and clearly defined events are generally valid.  For
example, labor force surveys asking whether respondents were employed last
week will generally yield valid responses.  The problem starts when polls
try to measure moods and attitudes that are not only highly malleable i.e.
change depending on the person's interaction with the outside world, but
their recollection also changes based on the current interaction.  Trying to
measure it with a paper and pencil questionnaire is sheer lunacy.  It is
tantamount to someone trying to forecast the weather by calling people and
asking them to recall the shape of clouds they saw on their way home.

So I think that the necessary step to undersatanding how people feel about
various issues is to dump altogether all opinion polls and start talking to
people directly.  The French sociologists Alain Touraine called it
"sociological intervention" and used to capture popular attitudes toward
current events.  This is akin to focus groups, except that focus groups tend
to take place in an organizational setting that imposes certain
interpretative frames, which may skew the results.  A better way would be a
sociologist getting on a Greyhound bus or going to a pub and engagin in
conversations with people.  But that takes time and money, so it is a no-go
in the market driven media, which instead prefer quick and cheap, but
totally faulty, opinion polls.

Based on my face to face interactions with people in this country I believe
that whatever image of the "public opinion" presented in any media outlet
(left or right) its most likely a grossly distorted caricature of reality.
Unfortunately, it is thos emedia generated images rather than face-to-face
interactions that dominate not just the public discourse but also what
people, including myself, think.  I know darn well that the portrayal of the
"American public" in the media is completely FUBAR and I understand the
mechanisms that are at work in that process, but at the same time I am too
lazy to go out an find myself what is really going on.  I am reasonably sure
that many smart people fall into the same trap.

The problem that many observers, especially from outside, with the American
society is that their perception of it is shaped too much by the media and
too little by personal face to face interactions.  This may not be the case
in other countries, where people ar enot as physically isolated from one
another by automobiles and suburbia, so they have more opportunities to
casually meet and chat, and where the media, polling and message
dissemination industries have not yet grown to the gargantuan proportions
they reached in this country.  But the thing is that comparing US to other
countries involves "apples and oranges" - mostly media produced images on
one side, and mostly personal experiences and observations on the other.

Wojtek

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:34 AM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com
> >wrote:
>
> For example, in some European countries, the majority, for better or for
> > worse, was able to defy the private media and governmental mouthpieces on
> > the EU constitution. This would never, ever happen in the United States.
> >
>
> It has happened in the United States, but not in a way that the organized
> left might prefer. Immigration springs to mind as a prominent example.
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
> lytlað."
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>