"Stop searching. Start questioning."
GEERT LOVINK[2]
It was October 2008 and the stock market was crashing. I sat on the New York subway, immersed in my newspaper. Capitol Hill was contemplating a historic bailout, something to the tune of $700 billion. Companies whose Manhattan headquarters I had walked by just a few days before were now out of existence. People were comparing the coming crisis to the Great Depression.
As New Yorkers often do, I looked over my shoulder to catch a peek at what my neighbor was reading. It looked like a script: double-spaced, bound on the left side, a clear front cover. My eyes were drawn in to these words on the page:
To attract money, you must focus on wealth. It is impossible to bring more money into your life when you are noticing you do not have enough, because that means you are thinking thoughts that you do not have enough…
The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts…If you do not have enough, it is because you are stopping the flow of money coming to you, and you are doing that with your thoughts.[3]
I looked at the title in the page footer: The Secret. Having sold almost 4 million copies in the United States alone,[4] The Secret is a self-help phenomenon, but until then I'd never seen it in the flesh (well, a bootlegged version of the flesh). Its basic premise is that what you visualize-including money-shall be yours, a result of what it calls the Law of Attraction. The book is a dressed-up how-to, one that appeals deeply to our desire to "know" the formula for achieving all that we believe the American Dream can offer.
How seductive, on a day such as that one, with a looming economic crisis throwing our collective fiscal futures into chaos, to seek solace in a book that offers some certainty. How comforting to not wonder about what the impending collapse would mean to regular people like the two of us sitting on that train. To not focus on the causes of this crisis or whether a bailout of such epic proportions was the right medicine for the disease. To not wonder about what it means to the American Dream that home ownership had become such a toxic pill, or how our economy, so heavily dependent on Wall Street, could ever recover.
Questions. Questions. Questions. Isn't it easier to find solace in the answer?
Maybe on the train ride that day. But for how long?
There are as many definitions of culture as there are people to define it; as a "sphere," it is both nebulous and ubiquitous. American culture shapes and is shaped by the books we read, the television we watch, the food we eat, the jobs we work, the way we raise our children, the way we think about our country, the way we define success, and a thousand other things. Fundamentally, culture describes the choices we make and the values we hold that influence those choices.
Society offers rewards and incentives, and in today's culture we reward and encourage the sound bite, the high test score, the confidence and volume with which opinion-however ungrounded-is delivered.
Our national obsession with answers is reflected every-where in our culture. We value solutions and being "right" over thoughtful inquiry; we value outcome over process, and the speed by which those outcomes can be produced. We make decisions, therefore, based on the desire to move as quickly and efficiently as possible toward a quick fix or the "absolute" or "the answer"-even if none of these things exist.
This desire is evident in our approach to public schooling, in the shallowness of our political discourse, and in the increasingly narrow role our media play in informing us. It is evident in America's addiction to self-help, an $11 billion industry, up from $9.73 billion just two years ago. In 2007, Americans generated $1.52 billion in retail sales after watching self-improvement infomercials. They spent $2.45 billion on self-help audio-books. They spent over $1 billion on motivational speakers.[5] To put this into perspective, $11 billion is how much Americans spent in one year to drink bottled water.[6]
Although I applaud the instinct to better ourselves, I don't believe that true and lasting change will come about by plugging billions of dollars into an industry that has no real incentive to actually solve its target market's problems (who, then, would buy such books?).
We look for answers in ideology, whether religious, political, or cultural. In fact, Americans have become more fervent and more polarized in our ideologies, and this polarization is determining where we pray, for whom we vote, and even where we live. In ideology, we find refuge. Ideological solutions off.er the comfort of uniform, predictable answers. And now, as our nation faces incredible challenges domestically and abroad, who wouldn't want a little bit of comfort and predictability? From that perspective, it makes perfect sense to read The Secret on the very day that the next Great Depression is forecast.
But our democracy pays a price for this comfort. Despite being citizens of the same nation, we operate increasingly within echo chambers, bubbles of thought and belief that are protected by virtual and geographic gates. In an echo chamber, we hear the same message bouncing back and forth, amplifying its supposed certainty. We spend hours online every day, among people with whom we agree. We listen to the news station that tells the story just as we want it to be told. We retire to homes near neighbors who will not question us, either. By click or by clique, we avoid questioning ourselves, each other, and our democracy.
Traditionally, we have looked to our media to ask questions, especially of the powerful, but today's press increasingly deals us answers and opinions. Media business models are changing, forcing media outlets to work cheaper and faster, an embodiment of the conflict between consumerism and inquiry in our culture. Our appetites are changing as well. We consume opinion; we are addicted to those who give it to us. Investigative journalists are still out there on their beats, trying to uncover what Richard Tofel, general manager of independent newsroom ProPublica, described to me as "stories of moral force," but the role that media plays in our country is changing to resemble the role of entertainment.
Our obsession with answers-and its partner in crime, instant gratification-is perhaps nowhere better evidenced than by the monumental role that Google plays in our daily lives and common culture. The Internet's blessing and curse is the information it puts at our fingertips. The way we interact with that information reveals the priority we place on trivia over investigation, consumption over exploration, speed over reflection.
Yes, the Internet offers abundance. But it also limits our ability to engage with that abundance. In other words, it is not just what we do to the medium; it is what the medium does to us. We must consider the notion that the Internet changes those who read and think within its borders, like children who grow up near power plants and wind up asthmatic. The Internet changes how we read, think, and breathe in other aspects of our lives as well. And the Internet is changing us in ways that profoundly-and, I believe, negatively-affect our ability to ask questions about and participate in our democracy.
Democracy requires us to ask thoughtful questions whose answers must be constructed, not simply retrieved.
We are born curious; we ask questions with our hands before we can speak. But there is no guarantee that our childhood curiosity will turn into a lifelong commitment to asking questions. We have to send the message that this journey-this journey of asking questions, of exploration-is as important as where we end up. The journey is a risk that our children, and our country, must be willing to take.
1: Inquiry Is Risky, Resilience Is the Reward, and Other Lessons from Childhood
"YOU DON'T HAVE TO TEACH BABIES TO ASK QUESTIONS," Dr. Gwenden Dueker told me. "If they could ask why at birth, they probably would-and once they can say why, they say it all the time. They are constantly exploring and picking up information."
Dueker studies infants and how they learn to categorize the things they encounter. From her post in Grand Valley State University's psychology department, she spends much of her time observing babies and the ways that parents interact with them. When I interviewed her on the telephone, I could hear her eleven-month-old baby in the background. I wondered what it was like to have a newborn when your business is studying newborns. Talk about pressure.
We are naturally inquisitive at birth-this everyone knows-but we don't automatically stay that way. In a safe environment, children are instinctively inclined to explore and inquire. "It's not something that you have to teach children to do," she explained, "but it is something you can prohibit children from doing."
Exploration and discovery, the first steps in an inquiry process, are natural behaviors for infants, but the next steps are not guaranteed, because infants intuitively understand what many adults suppress or only recognize subconsciously: that inquiry is risky. Exploration of the unknown is risky. What will happen if I touch this object I'm unfamiliar with, the infant asks when she looks up to her mother, awaiting the sign that it is okay to proceed. The adult asks, What will happen if I challenge this long-held assumption, this way of life that I've always believed to be right and true-although as we grow older there often is no one to signal that it is okay, or even desirable, to proceed. Inquiry can open us up, broaden our understanding of the world. Inquiry can lead to change. But it is and will always be a frightening concept.
If we avoid the risk of inquiry, however, we undermine our ability to build the resilience necessary to face future challenges. It is enjoyment of the process of exploring the unknown, of asking questions, that we want to instill in our infants. I believe it is also what we want to instill in our society.
Wisdom from the Crib
We can encourage inquiry through the environments that we create for our children. First, to feel safe to explore and tackle the unknown, infants need a secure connection to at least one caregiver. The research shows that securely attached children are "more persistent, cooperative, enthusiastic, and effective at solving problems than are insecurely attached kids."[7] This attachment must be physical; it cannot be replaced by technology. This physicality is important to bear in mind as so many of us are working longer and harder, responding to the realities of an increasingly unforgiving economy, and as our young children spend more time alone in front of television shows and video games than they do around family dinner tables.
Second, research shows that inquiry in infants is catalyzed by external contact. "Inquiry is mostly fostered in interaction with other people," Dueker told me. This requirement for interaction has implications for how we raise our children but also for how we think of one another. We cannot be physically isolated from those with whom we disagree, from those who are different from us, because it is these disagreements and differences that could lead us to ask questions. We need to bump up against the unknown in order to question it.
However, even if the unknown is there, ready to be bumped up against, not all children have the motivation to do so as they get older. Just as we can foster inquiry through the environments that we create, so too can we inhibit it. In this country, we care a lot about the self-esteem of young people. We believe that adolescents with higher self-esteem are likely to be more ambitious and more successful, and so we think that if we praise our children for their inherent intelligence and ability we are giving them the confidence to face new challenges. But as Stanford psychology professor Dr. Carol Dweck discovered, there's praise that leads to inquiry and praise that does not, and we have to be careful about which approach we choose to take.
I've heard immigrants to this country remark on the strange parenting behaviors of Americans obsessed with building up the self-esteem of children. It is literally foreign to these immigrants to see children praised so effusively and regularly. Although such praise is intended to give children the confidence to succeed, it can in fact also inhibit the intellectual risk-taking that leads to greater achievement.
Dweck is an expert in the relationship between praise, motivation, and achievement. She has worked for four decades with people of all ages in the United States and abroad, to understand what makes people ambitious. General opinion holds that ambition stems from self-confidence in one's intrinsic talent and intelligence. However, the results of Dweck's studies of young people go against the conventional wisdom and indicate that, rather than inspiring young people by telling them how smart or talented or perfect they are, we would be wise to praise instead their effort.
A 1998 study by Dweck demonstrates the power of praise to affect resilience and achievement.[8] Teaching assistants hired by Dweck offered several hundred fifth graders, divided into two groups, a three-round, nonverbal IQ test. The first round comprised relatively easy questions, and the children did well. In response, they were given two kinds of praise. Group A was told, "Wow, that's a really good score. You must be smart at this." Group B was told, "Wow, that's a really good score. You must have worked very hard."
For the next round of the exam, the children were given a choice: either stay at the same level of difficulty or increase it. Group A, praised for its intelligence, opted for the same level of difficulty. Group B, praised for its effort, opted for a harder exam. The children who were praised for being smart did not want to take a risk that they would fail. When faced with a challenge, they were more worried about losing their standing as "smart" than interested in what they could learn from the exercise to make them even smarter. They wanted to get the answer right. The children praised for their effort, however, looked forward to the challenge. In their view, the process of learning was what counted, and the challenge of learning brought them reward.
Dweck believes that there are two mind-sets when it comes to intelligence. Those with a fixed mind-set (an outgrowth of the messages children are sent about their value) "shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb." Those with a growth mind-set, on the other hand, believe that one can work hard and get smarter. They enjoy challenges. According to Dweck's studies, students with a growth mind-set are those most likely to succeed.
Simply by signaling what we think is most important, therefore, we can change a person's motivation. Our children can be intrinsically motivated to take action that is rewarding in itself-such as thinking critically about a new and harder task. But our answer-obsessed society is organized to cultivate extrinsic motivation-rewards, such as the praise earned from getting the right answer, even on a simpler question.[9]
When we send children the message that they should enjoy the very process of learning, we cultivate in them the kind of motivation that will serve them as they confront the obstacles that are inevitable in life. When we praise their effort, we cultivate in them resilience that leads to achievement.
I believe there is a cautionary note in this for those who lead our nation. Our nation must be resilient if we are to confront the challenges ahead. To create this resilience, our leaders would be wise to worry less about reinforcing our national status-as the smartest, as the best-and more about cultivating in our citizenry the desire to learn, to question, and to confront the unknown.
Inquiry Builds Resilience
Unknowingly, and despite their stated preferences, the students of both group A and group B in Dweck's study were then given the same exam, a harder one. The "smart" group quickly became discouraged, doubting their ability. They "assumed their failure was evidence that they weren't really smart at all," Dweck writes. The hard-working group, on the other hand, remained confident in the face of the harder questions, and their performance improved significantly on subsequent, easier problems. They became more involved, "willing to try every solution to the puzzles…Many of them remarked, unprovoked, 'This is my favorite test.'"[10]
A final round of easy tests showed that "[students] who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score-by about 30 percent. Those who'd been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning-by about 20 percent."[11] Enjoyment of the process led to resilience, and resilience led to achievement.
Practitioners that I spoke with across the country echoed this view, without even knowing of Dweck's experiments. They all linked the cultivation of a love of inquiry in young people to the cultivation of a strong spirit and persistence.
"As individuals, we learn better when we are curious and interested," Lynn Rankin of the Institute for Inquiry at San Francisco's Exploratorium told me. "That self-motivation of wanting to know something and struggling because you're so passionate you want to understand it, it allows you to persevere and cross a lot of barriers." Driven by questions rather than the need to have the right answer, and supported in environments that reward effort rather than status, these young people are better equipped to confront the unknown and the difficult. They are committed not just to the outcome but also to the process.
Our National Motivations Matter
I can't help seeing a parallel between these children who are praised out of their will to question and our own nation. We are a unique nation in our insistence that we are number one. I do believe strongly that we are a special nation. Although our nation has faced monumental challenges from the moment of our founding to today, we have overcome them faster than any other. To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice, and I believe that our nation's arc is shorter than any other.
But we are also a prideful nation, more so than most. (One study places us in a tie with Venezuela for first place, based on two measures of national pride,[12] a comparison that has very interesting implications.) Our national self-esteem is intimately connected to our perception of America's status in the world. The risk of this association is that, like the students praised for being smart, we are less willing to engage in the collective risk of questioning ourselves or the world around us.
As Dweck's and Dueker's work shows, the willingness of young people to question depends on the messages we send them. What about our national ethos? Do we cultivate in our citizenry the belief that it is okay to question our country, and that doing so is the way that it can become a better, stronger, fairer nation? Does this rule apply during presidential campaigns, during wars, during times of economic crisis? Do we believe, as a nation, that the exploration of the unknown is a worthwhile process in and of itself, or do we attach to that kind of questioning a value that makes it too risky a proposition for the average citizen to undertake?
Ultimately, our resilience as a nation will depend on our success in struggling with what we don't know, not on our success in maintaining our image to the world. But to struggle with what we don't know, we must first encounter it-and as more Americans sequester themselves in bubbles of sameness and ideological homogeneity, we're giving ourselves fewer and fewer opportunities to do so.
2: Ideological Segregation by Click and by Clique
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ON something important? I've changed my mind a few times. One thing I can say for sure is that I've never changed it while surrounded by people who agree with me. But we are insulating ourselves from more and more opposing viewpoints-through the places we live, the way we vote, and who we turn to for news and information-and finding fewer and fewer catalysts to question our beliefs.
Bill Bishop has lived and worked for newspapers in Kentucky and Texas, on both the writing and the publishing sides. Today, he and his wife publish The Daily Yonder, an online publication covering rural America, including places that much of the mainstream media has abandoned. Bishop argues that our country has become increasingly segregated by ideology. Americans are moving to towns and cities to live with people like themselves, who believe similar things. We are clustering "in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics."[13] One way to see this trend in action is to look at our elections.
The increasing incidence of "landslide counties" (counties in which a candidate wins by 20 percentage points or more) exemplifies how Americans are becoming more homogeneous on a community level. Between 1976 and 2004, the number of counties in which the presidential election was a landslide doubled, from a quarter of the population to half. It is conventional wisdom, for example, that the 2004 presidential election was one of the closest presidential campaigns in history. Yet, as Bishop points out, nearly half of American voters lived in places where a single candidate won definitively. On a macro level, America is closely divided. But these elections aren't close calls in our communities, because we've moved to places with neighbors who believe what we believe and vote the same way.
Our changing demography isn't the result of mass migratory patterns such as those we have seen in our nation's history, but of people who are sorting themselves one by one. We are concentrating ourselves by belief, and the result is localities that are becoming "politically monogamous." Bishop calls this phenomenon the Big Sort.[14]
It was in his capacity as a columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, while trying to understand how certain cities like his were thriving economically while others remained stagnant, that Bishop came across the Big Sort. Despite an admission that his decision to locate to Austin was based on the same kinds of decisions that Americans are making throughout the country-to be in places that serve the food we like, offer the church services we prefer, and so on-Bishop believes that "democracy was not meant to be operating in an atmosphere where people don't meet or discuss or come across those who disagree with them."[15] If that were the case, would we even have a democracy? When we read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we aren't exactly seeing first drafts. The Founders didn't share the same outlook on all matters, but through debate and discussion they were able to come to consensus.
There is little that will hasten the death of why in our country more effectively than raising our children in ideological homogeneity. There just aren't many incentives to question when everyone around us shares our views. And it is in our neighborhoods, where we spend so much time, that we could most easily encounter those with whom we disagree, those whose lives and experiences might lead us to question our values and beliefs.
Ideological segregation in America is perhaps a natural outgrowth of the increasing ideological polarization gripping our nation. Although some dispute the idea that all Americans are more ideological, the evidence is convincing that, at the very least, American voters surely are. Our ideological identification determines how we vote, up and down the ticket, and how we feel about the issues. In a study of the 2006 midterm elections, ideology was identified as a strong predictor of the party a voter would support.[16] If we are more ideological, and our ideology predicts our party, then we vote by party. No need to ask many questions there.
According to a study by Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders, the gap between Democrats and Republicans doubled between 1972 and 2004. The same study reinforces the finding of a dramatically increased correlation between ideological identification, party identification, and positions on issues. On issues such as jobs, living standards, health care, and presidential approval, partisan polarization has grown significantly over time. Some political scientists, such as Morris Fiorina, claim that only political elites-not regular Americans-are more polarized; Abramowitz and Saunders disagree. Their study concludes that "these divisions are not a result of artificial boundaries constructed by political elites in search of electoral security. They reflect fundamental changes in American society and politics that have been developing for decades and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future."[17]
Despite President Barack Obama's impressive 2008 electoral victory, the electorate remained just as divided in 2008, segregated not only by politics but also by income, education, and geography. After the election, Bishop calculated that 48.1 percent of the population lived in landslide counties in 2008, almost exactly the same as the 48.3 percent who lived in them in 2004. In fact, in 2008 there were thirty-six "land-slide states" where a candidate won by 10 percentage points or more, an increase from twenty-nine states in 2004 (including Washington, D.C., in both cases). Writing a week after the election, Bishop concluded, "The country is split in much the same way it was divided four and eight years ago. People continue to sort by age and by way of life. As a result, our communities (and states) are growing more like-minded…It is easy to ignore people on the other side when they aren't your neighbors. But that doesn't mean the country is less polarized-because it isn't."[18] Obama's election victory might have brought change to Washington, but it certainly did not reflect a less divided electorate.
News We Can Believe (In)
Our ideology even directs how we choose to learn about the world around us. According to a study undertaken by Natali Jomini Stroud, using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, people are interested in consuming media that share their ideological bent. After analyzing newspaper, cable television, talk radio, and political Web site consumption habits, Stroud found that almost two-thirds of conservative Republicans consumed at least one conservative media outlet, compared to a quarter of liberal Democrats. On the other side, over three-quarters of liberal Democrats consumed a liberal outlet, compared to about 40 percent of conservative Republicans.[19] It's not a surprise, I suppose, that we, in our ideologically segregated neighborhoods, would invite onto our television sets only those who share our ideology.
The way Americans filter media through an ideological lens can be extreme. One study that tested whether the logo of a news company appearing on a screen would determine the likelihood of a participant clicking on the news headline found that "no matter how we sliced the data-either at the level of individuals or news stories-the results demonstrate that Fox News is the dominant news source for Americans whose political leanings are Republican or conservative." On political subjects, the likelihood of conservatives clicking on the Fox story was understandably high. But here's the kicker: this was also true for soft news. Conservatives were more likely to click on sports and travel stories that came from Fox. Apparently, sports and travel coverage also needs to be mediated through our political ideologies.[20]
This increased polarization in how we live and how we learn about how others live has profound implications for the policies that govern our lives. Because we are increasingly concentrated by ideology, we are increasingly electing people who represent that ideology well, by being either very left or very right. This extremism has led to a paralysis in our national politics.
Congressional districts, reflecting their residents, are over-whelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democrat. Bishop sees these landslides as an affront to the vision of the Founding Fathers, who intended that members of Congress would meet in D.C., bringing with them a variety of perspectives and beliefs, to hash out the nation's business.
"Now," Bishop told me, "they fly in on Tuesday, often-times they live with members of their own party, in their own dormitories with ideologically similar members, then they fly home on Thursday to their homogeneous districts, and they never have to do the work of politicians, which is to make deals and compromise." And when politics becomes merely an expression of ideologies rather than a process of figuring out how to actually improve the quality of people's lives, we all suffer.
Don't Know, Don't Ask
I agree with Bishop that ideological segregation is destined to have a negative effect on our politics, but not just because our politicians are illequipped or unmotivated to do the business of politicking. The environment created by the Big Sort instills in us a sense of complacency. We are less likely to ask questions of those who represent us, because we assume they have our interests in mind.
In 2008, the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy commissioned a poll to find out which policies the current and aspiring middle class think would improve the quality of their lives. We asked a random sample of Americans throughout the country about pieces of legislation that had been voted on by Congress, but not signed into law, during the previous session. For example, we asked about the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier for employees to join unions; an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program to provide health insurance to more middle-class children; and taxing the income of hedge fund managers at the same rate as everyone else's income. When we asked respondents how they would have liked their member of Congress to vote on these bills, the answer was overwhelmingly in favor of a yes vote, among Democrats and Republicans alike. But when we asked, How did your member of Congress vote on this bill?, the overwhelming response was Don't know.[21]
We don't know, and we don't ask. We figure that our members of Congress have our back, because we share a spot along the ideological spectrum with them. We agree on some big-picture issues, maybe on cultural values, maybe on the rhetoric about the role that government should play in our lives. So we don't ask what they are up to, and they don't feel obliged to tell us. Despite advanced communications at our fingertips, only one in four of our respondents reported hearing from their member of Congress on a regular basis. We don't ask, and they don't tell. And our problems do not get solved.
If we want to preserve our democracy, we will need to move away from decision making by ideological cues and toward helping American voters to access and understand the policies being debated by our legislators. This may mean that we opt for solutions that emerge from one side of the policymaking spectrum or the other, but no matter. If we are thoughtful, questioning citizens, we have a shot at making our politics-and our politicians-work for us. In the absence of this attention, we can expect them to continue to operate with impunity.
Ideological Polarization Online
If people aren't engaging in robust debate about their democracy in physical town halls-as many New England towns still do on a yearly basis, to set budgets, levy taxes, and buy and sell town property-what about their virtual town halls? Here, too, we find people choosing to locate themselves within circles of agreement. Despite the choices offered to users-or perhaps because of them-the Internet often functions as an intellectual and ideological cul-de-sac, full of places where only residents turn in, while those who accidentally enter may look at the houses but will then circle right back out. Cass Sunstein, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, argues that "the Internet is serving, for many, as a breeding ground for extremism, precisely because like-minded people are deliberating with greater ease and frequency with one another, and often without hearing contrary views."[22] Sunstein is essentially describing the online version of the Big Sort.
The extension of ideological polarization to the Internet is evident in the rise of political blogs. Top political blogs receive millions of visitors each day.[23] I'm one such visitor. I believe strongly in the power of the blogosphere to provide a voice for those who are otherwise left out of the political and policy formulation processes, and to challenge a mainstream political press (see chapters 3 and 9) that is too often in dereliction of duty when it comes to holding powerful entities accountable. In fact, I've helped to create two policy-focused blogs at the Drum Major Institute (dmiblog.com and tortde-form.com). I visit blogs to stay up to date on events as they unfold, to get perspectives I otherwise wouldn't read, and, I'll admit, to keep current on the latest political gossip.
Blogs have an increasing presence in my daily life and work, and I am not alone. Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore, an Internet marketing research firm, has pointed out the increasing significance of the Internet "in shaping the stories of the day that are so crucial in formulating public opinion on issues and candidates."[24] The 2008 presidential campaign cemented the blogosphere's role as the third leg in the opinion-journalism stool.
In September 2008, just before the presidential election, traffic to political blogs and news sites had exploded. According to the comScore analysis, huffingtonpost.com had 4.5 million visitors in September (up 472 percent from the previous year), politico.com attracted 2.4 million visitors (up 344 percent), and drudgereport.com had 2.1 million visitors (up 70 percent). A majority of the sites growing at the most rapid clip occupy spots on the left of the political spectrum.
How are people congregating in these online town halls? Do people engage in healthy debates and discussions with those who hold opposing perspectives? The evidence suggests otherwise, pointing instead to the same trend Bishop sees in our neighborhoods. People are self-segregating on blogs that speak to their political leanings. And because political blogs of one stripe are unlikely to engage with political blogs of the other stripe, there remains little likelihood of encountering something that might provoke a question on the part of the regular visitor.
One study of forty political blogs found that, just as like moves near like, so too does like link to like. The authors found that "12 percent of all outbound links from conservatives is sent to liberal blogs while 16 percent of all outbound links from liberals point to conservative bloggers." Around half of the links from blogs on one side of the spectrum that actually do link to the other side are in posts that offer strawman arguments, meaning, in the words of the authors who read all of these posts and came up with the system to categorize them, arguments "for ideologically like-minded blog readers" that "direct attention to the 'obvious' deficiencies of the ideological opposition."[25] Ah yes, the obvious deficiencies! With such a setup, it is hard to imagine substantive questioning of opposing viewpoints.
Researchers found a similar tendency among political blogs prior to the 2004 presidential election. For two months before that election, which the study cites as the first in which blogging played an important role, the researchers analyzed postings on "forty A-list blogs" to determine how often the blogs referred to one another and to identify any overlap in their topics of discussion. The researchers found a relatively small amount of cross-ideology interaction, with links from liberal blogs to conservative ones and vice versa accounting for only 15 percent of the links. Even discussion of certain political figures was concentrated among either conservatives or liberals, with people such as Dan Rather and Michael Moore cited predominantly by conservatives and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell cited predominantly by liberals. Mainstream media sites such as Fox News and salon.com followed the same pattern, with right-leaning media receiving the overwhelming majority of their links from conservatives and left-leaning media receiving the overwhelming majority of their links from liberals.[26]
Other studies emphasize that a small number of political Web sites dominate Internet traffic. In a study of millions of Web sites, Matthew Hindman, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and Judy Johnson found that "in each of the topical areas studied-from abortion to the U.S. presidency, the U.S. Congress to gun control, general politics to the death penalty-the distribution of inbound hyperlinks follows a power law distribution…[meaning that] the information environment is dominated by a few sites at the top." They call this "Google-archy-the rule of the most heavily linked," and consider it the dominant feature of political information online.[27] In articulating a theory of the political blogosphere's influence that situates mainstream journalists as key actors in disseminating information from political blogs, Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner emphasize this skewed nature of links and traffic.[28] Thus, not only do blogs tend to self-select ideologically, but also users limit themselves to a relatively small number of blogs as sources of political information.
The issue at hand isn't whether bloggers and those who read blogs are thoughtful and intellectually rigorous. Nor is it that people who sit in the same ideological camp, roughly speaking, can't disagree among themselves. The Drum Major Institute's progressive blog, for example, took a stand against the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (better known as the financial bailout) while writers on other progressive blogs disagreed. This happens all the time among thoughtful people, around the dinner table or online. The question is whether the culture of the political blogosphere and Internet news, unique to itself, creates incentives and rewards for people to spend time engaging with others from very different perspectives. My personal experience, and my review of the research, suggests it does not.
Sure, it is pretty easy to offer angry comments on the posts with which you disagree. The anonymity of the Web makes this easier and more frequent. I've been on the receiving end of those kinds of comments many a time, especially when I'm writing about something controversial, such as immigration policy. And, yes, the Internet does make it pretty easy to encounter viewpoints with which you disagree-a lot easier than moving to another town. But good faith consideration and engagement of those on the other side is not rewarded as much as creating or joining a strong community of sameness. And it is incredibly simple to spend all day online, learning about the world through my own ideological lens, without ever being forced to consider a reasoned viewpoint on the other side. But we are bigger than our online communities and our towns, and democracy depends on us having a shared understanding of what is happening in the world around us.
Transcending Ideological Segregation through Deliberation
Whether we are infants, members of Congress, or regular citizens, it is encountering the unfamiliar that prompts us to question. If people are living in their ghettos of belief, where is the catalyst to inquire?
Bringing people together who don't already agree is Carolyn Lukensmeyer's business. I know firsthand, because I worked for Lukensmeyer in my first job out of college. It was the late 1990s, and she was on a mission to engage Americans in a conversation about the future of Social Security. My job was to run the Social Security Challenge, a campaign within the broader campaign, focused on inspiring college students to talk about the seventy-three-year-old program and its future.
At the time, President Clinton wanted to "save Social Security." This effort was controversial. First, there was disagreement about whether Social Security needed to be "saved" at all. Experts lined up on both sides, some arguing that the program would soon go bankrupt and was in need of an over-haul, others projecting that the program would fulfill its commitments into the foreseeable future and attributing claims to the contrary to a political agenda of dismantling entitlement programs. The controversy, however, went beyond the analysis of the program's fiscal future. At the heart of it were questions about what exactly is owed to Americans as they age, whose responsibility it is to fulfill this pledge, and the best way to steward these commitments. Should the United States run a program of social insurance, in which everyone pays in, knowing that only some may need the contributions, or should it become an investment program, in which people can choose to invest their own dollars in the stock market however they wish, and where a higher return on investment was assumed in those days? Should people who make more contribute more of their paychecks to the system?
The idea driving Lukensmeyer's Americans Discuss Social Security campaign was that any discussion that might result in a change in the mission of a universal program such as Social Security couldn't just happen behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. Americans needed to talk. They needed to weigh in on a conversation that was about more than the mechanics of the program, that was about our values and commitments. And if politicians were going to be successful in whatever decisions they made (whether to keep the program or to change it), they would need the support of the American people. Lukensmeyer organized town hall meetings, inviting thousands of Americans to talk about the program, in their own neighborhoods.
The Americans Discuss Social Security effort was massive, spanning all fifty states and Puerto Rico. It involved four teleconferences between citizens in twenty-three states and policymakers in Washington (including Clinton), large-scale citizen forums in an additional seventeen states, and meetings on more than one hundred college campuses. The Social Security Challenge that I ran reached five thousand students.
The forums were far more than sessions designed to make attendees feel they had fulfilled their civic duty. Participants became better educated about the Social Security debate, and consensus emerged about what people expected from the program and desired from its reform. At the forums, diverse participants from diverse communities tackled thorny economic and political issues but were able to engage each other as well as policymakers in developing concrete, plausible proposals for policy action.[29]
Although Clinton's efforts to reach some kind of deal for the program's future collapsed in response to the scandals of the year, Lukensmeyer saw the promise in engaging people directly in conversations about the issues that affect their collective future. So, soon after the conclusion of Americans Discuss Social Security, Lukensmeyer founded AmericaSpeaks, where she continues to serve as president. This organization is hired by local and state governments, nonprofit organizations, foundations-anyone who wants citizens to come together to deliberate on a particular issue and reach consensus about what needs to happen next. For example, thousands of New Yorkers who lived in the area affected by 9/11 came together to develop their vision for how they wanted their neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan to redevelop. Thousands of California residents came together to decide on the kind of health care they would like to see the state offer. Six hundred students, university presidents, and young activists met as part of the Clinton Global Initiative to develop plans for student action on issues of global importance, such as climate change, health, human rights, and peace.
AmericaSpeaks calls their events 21st Century Town Meetings, and to look at the forums is to understand why. In person, the sessions resemble a cross between bingo and a trade show. Hundreds or thousands of people are seated at round tables. There is a laptop at each. A facilitator asks questions to help move the group toward accomplishing their goal for the day. As people deliberate, their responses transmit via computer to a central "theme team," which identifies the big picture threads around the various tables. The theme team posts results on the big screen at the front of the room. Participants hold devices that enable them to vote yea or nay with the push of a button as proposals are refined and prioritized. Opinions are constantly evaluated within the small discussion groups and within the larger forum, and feedback is ever present, with participants considering new proposals and variations on old proposals throughout the day.
But it isn't the high-tech tools that make the town halls special; it's the people. There is no Big Sort here. AmericaSpeaks picks participants through random sampling to represent their broader community. They are sitting next to people they don't know. There are no ideological cliques. They don't possess expertise in the issues they are there to discuss, and they aren't expected to. Their job, no matter what they believe, is to discuss an issue, debate the policy options, and reach consensus. And they do.
The participants are not unlike the residents of the communities that Bishop writes about in The Big Sort, but the AmericaSpeaks experience illustrates that, in the right environment, with the right incentives and support, we can transcend ideological segregation, both as a group and within ourselves.
"Many of [our participants] live in communities like Bishop describes," Lukensmeyer told me. But "even those people who come from very polarized ideological backgrounds, when placed in a context and facing real human beings who are really different than they are, and given the basic information that they need to participate in the discussion, and given questions designed to make them think-they think."
Perhaps the most striking element of the AmericaSpeaks forums is the capacity and willingness of participants to transcend their personal interests to consider-and to consider acting on-policies that might force them to make trade-offs in their personal lives. In a session to discuss recovery priorities for New Orleans, for instance, one attendee humbly noted to his discussion colleagues that "I am going to vote for [priority] three, but I am personally affected by number two."[30] The AmericaSpeaks forums are about inspiring participants to think beyond their own policy ideas and political ideologies; at the forums, participants must listen to and engage with other reasonable, respectful people with contrasting ideas, responsibilities, and life experiences. At Governor Schwarzenegger's urging, the California health-care forum concluded by asking, "How willing would you be to share in the responsibility of paying for health-care reform that covers all Californians?" Eighty-four percent of participants expressed some level of willingness.[31]
So it is not that we have lost the capacity to think beyond our frames of reference; it is that we aren't presented with enough opportunities to do so. But when we are presented with such an opportunity, surrounded by people we don't know and who have different experiences and views, talking about an issue that affects the quality of all of our lives, we wind up going in unexpected directions. Proof of this is the frequency with which participants change their minds.
"[The participants] follow lines of inquiry," Lukensmeyer told me. "And…they don't necessarily come out with the programmed answer that they would have come in with. Huge numbers, up to 70 percent of participants, change their position."
The experience at the CaliforniaSpeaks daylong conversation on health-care reform is typical of other AmericaSpeaks programs. Though participants represented a more engaged public than the California public at large, the deliberations had a significant effect on attendees' thinking and knowledge. One in two participants altered their views on health-care reform during the meeting[32] and over 93 percent of participants agreed that CaliforniaSpeaks had made them more informed.[33]
When we bump up against new perspectives and experiences, when we are asked new questions that force us to think more deeply about our assumptions, we can change our minds. We don't have to-but the fact that we can is most important. This type of interaction, these expressions of deliberative democracy, are the antidote to the inward direction of our daily lives. When we create the right environment for people to come together around a shared goal, and the format and the facilitation to help them expose their own biases but move toward an end, we can arrive at consensus. In that consensus, there is power.
In New Orleans, public input shaped the development of the city's Unified New Orleans Plan, later approved by the city and the state. After the Listening to the City town meetings in New York, which included almost six thousand participants, the initial plans for the World Trade Center redevelopment in Lower Manhattan were scrapped, and the consensus shaped the criteria for the next round of plans. In Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams's Citizen Summits, facilitated by AmericaSpeaks, shifted millions of dollars in city spending based on input regarding the city's strategic plans.
When we allow ourselves to question our assumptions and our positions, when we willingly emerge from our ideological isolation, we have more power to affect the decisions that determine the quality of our lives. Those in power are more likely to listen because they cannot use our divisions as an excuse for their inaction.
But when participants exit the town hall meeting, they return to a culture in which deliberation across ideology is not encouraged. In fact, according to Lukensmeyer, it is actively discouraged.
"For the vast majority of people's time," she said, "they are spending their lives and experiences in structures and processes that are not carefully designed to help them inquire and think and discuss; they are sitting in structures and processes that are intentionally designed to get them to think in a way that someone wants them to think."
Perhaps the problem is that we ask too little of ourselves in our democracy today. If we knew that it was up to us to ask the questions that would determine the quality of our lives, if we were given actual assignments to improve our communities (beyond voting every four years), maybe then we would view differently our responsibilities as citizens. Maybe then we would willingly undertake whatever questioning it took to get to consensus, rather than focusing on finding the perfect posture from which to hold our ideological ground. Maybe, if it were up to us to solve the problems of our whole city or state, we would see those with whom we disagree as necessary partners, would engage rather than avoid. But, isolated not only from one another but also from a clear understanding of how our participation matters, the Big Sort remains-until Lukensmeyer and those like her force us to question it, one 21st Century Town Meeting at a time.
3: Consuming Opinion
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AMERICAN MEDIA. BELLICOSE anchors opine about the state of world affairs, on cable news channels that don't actually report the state of world affairs. Political blogs and Web sites are visited by millions each day-millions of people who already agree with the points of view expressed there, that is. The New York Times television critic is given front-page real estate to analyze political debates between presidential candidates as if they were the season finales of network dramas. Media consolidation has left 90 percent of the top fifty cable stations in the hands of the same parent companies that run the broadcast networks, and the major media conglomerates in control of 75 percent of all prime-time viewing.[34] As Samuel Goldwyn once famously said, "When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you."
A culture shift is clear in the state of American journalism today. It is a transition that speaks to our changing wants and to the vested interest of concentrated, corporatized media in guiding those wants in the direction that best supports their bottom line. And it has led this organ of our democracy to stray further from its most important function: the asking of questions.
Let's start with the explosion of cable news, in which actual investigation is secondary to the cost-effective business model of headline reading, anchor chatter, and the pronouncement of opinion by "journalists." Median prime-time cable news viewership increased steadily in the early 2000s, growing 32 percent from 2000 to 2001 and 41 percent from 2001 to 2002. Growth slowed and then declined in 2005 and 2006 but rebounded in 2007, with the median prime-time audience increasing by 9 percent.[35] The Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media report identified a change associated with the 2007 spike: "programming built around a cast of hosts, often but not always the edgiest of cable personalities."[36] Personalities had replaced reporting on breaking news.
The more or less steady growth in median audience paid off for the networks that turned their airtime over to personalities. Fox, MSNBC, and CNN reported collective profits of $791.5 million in 2007, up from $133.9 million in 1997, with Fox by far the most profitable.[37] Though more people still watch the network news-it outranks cable by a factor of ten-fewer people are watching it with each passing year. Network news has lost more than 20 percent of its total audience since 2000, during which time the median cable news audience has grown by almost 125 percent.[38]
Cable news, though, doesn't offer much in the way of news; most of what we see isn't actual reporting. Fifty-six percent of the cable news programming studied by the Project for Excellence in Journalism was what they call "live, extemporaneous journalism."[39] We watch anchors interview guests, talk to each other, read headlines, and pontificate about the meaning of those headlines.
With their super high-tech sets and the anchors always at their desks, cable news is intent on "creating the impression that things are being reported as they happen," but they aren't. Only 3 percent of cable news time is spent covering live events. Most importantly, less than a third of their airtime is spent on "correspondent packages," a fancy way of saying "real stories," compared to 82 percent of network nightly newscasts and half of morning news programming.[40] We aren't actually learning about the world on cable news; we're watching current affairs stand-up.
And then there are those whose job is to tell us what they think and, by definition, what we ought to think. If ratings are any indication of affection, we love them for it. A prime example of this is Lou Dobbs, the consummate cable television news personality. Dobbs's questions aren't meant to be illuminating; they are statements wearing question-mark costumes. I can speak to this from personal experience.
"Andrea, this is Lou Dobbs."
True story. I picked up the phone, and it was Lou Dobbs-formerly Lou Dobbs of CNN Moneyline and now Lou Dobbs of Lou Dobbs Tonight, or more specifically, Lou Dobbs and his million-plus viewers watching tonight.
"I'd like to invite you to come on the show."
Dobbs was calling because I had written him a letter. The Drum Major Institute was very interested in the issue of immigration, so we embarked on a yearlong project to understand the effect of immigrants on middle-class Americans. Our conclusion, based on research conducted by our research director, Amy Traub, was that immigrants-both legal and illegal-make significant contributions to the economy that benefit native-born citizens, and that public policy needs to strengthen the standing of immigrants in the workplace or else the wages and working conditions of all workers will decline.
I felt strongly that Dobbs's portrayal of the immigration debate was incomplete. With the nonstop barrage of images of Mexicans illegally crossing the border and fearmongering about a "NAFTA superhighway" and a North American Union of Mexico, Canada, and the United States, I grew concerned that the viewers of his show weren't being exposed to any real discussion about the positive effects of immigration on our economy.[41] Viewers needed to know that, far from being a burden, immigrants are contributors to our economy-through their tax dollars, their entrepeneurship, and their contributions to systems such as Social Security, from which they will never benefit.
So I sent Dobbs a letter outlining the main points of our report and urging him to spend more time on some accurate discussion about how our immigration and trade policies actually affect the economy. He called me up, and a week and at least three layers of awful makeup later, I was introduced.
"The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a liberal think tank, is criticizing my position on illegal immigration and border security," Dobbs said, while I sat there, ready for my debut, too nervous to take umbrage at that characterization of my position.[42] I was on the show to talk about economics; I hadn't said a thing in my letter, or in the Drum Major Institute's work, about border security. We weren't proponents of open borders. Already, before my mic had even been turned on, I was typecast. In Dobbs's world, there are only two kinds of people: those who agree with him and those who don't.
And we're live.
DOBBS: Let's start with the first issue. I have said for a long time now, we can't reform immigration if we can't control it. We can't control immigration if we cannot secure our ports and our borders. Where does that logic fail?
Again, I was confused. First, I wasn't there to talk about border security. I'm not against border security. I was invited on the show to talk about the economic impact of the immigrants already living in the United States, so that we could figure out what to do with them. Second, that wasn't really a question. Was Dobbs asking me for my opinion, so that we could have a conversation, or did he want me to disprove his opinion?
So I did what I was supposed to: I went back on message.
SCHLESINGER: Three quick points. The first is that your viewers need to know that the middle class actually has a vested interest in this debate. They are positively impacted by the role of immigrants in the economy. So that's the first piece. The second thing is, knowing that, the only way that we can create comprehensive remedy to an immigration system that we agree is broken is if we both recognize the critical role that immigrants play in the economy, and then direct our attention toward the private sector that is interested in pitting immigrant versus middle-class worker-for their bottom line, not the bottom line of Americans.
DOBBS: All right, since you won't respond to my syllogism, I'll respond to yours. Is that all right?
It didn't get much better from there. I could make no point without interruption. I was asked no question that either allowed me to express the results of our analysis or forced me to think critically about that analysis. It wasn't an interview, nor was it really a conversation. More than anything, it was two people putting forth opinions that, even if we weren't contributing to a constructive dialogue on the topic, probably made for entertaining television.
As soon as the camera went off, Dobbs was all smiles. "Let's have you back on the show."
The rise of "opinion journalism" is seen in the success of, and investment in, cable news programs such as this. These hosts, with the exception of Dobbs, are usually settled onto networks that share their ideological leanings and are watched by those who share those leanings, as well. (I can attest to this because my e-mail in-box filled with hundreds of messages criticizing my views-and my shirt, my glasses, my name-just as soon as I turned on my Black Berry post-interview.)
The questions asked on shows such as these are rhetorical, but such shows aren't exclusively the province of cable. The crazy uncle of cable news opinion journalism is talk radio. The number of stations with talk programming exploded to 1,400 in 2006, up from 400 in 1990.[43] In yet another popular and potentially important medium, meaningful investigation of the news is simply not a priority. Talk radio feeds off of the big stories that lend themselves to ratings. As the 2008 State of the News Media report concludes, "Whatever one's view, talk radio tends to amplify the handful of stories best suited to debate and division." A case in point was the week between May 13 and May 18, 2007, during which several important stories were breaking. Just three events, however-the debate over Iraq policy, the presidential campaign, and immigration-"consumed 50 percent of the airtime. Many of the other stories of the week got short shrift."[44]
Talk radio, along with most other mainstream media, is in the business of magnification, not illumination. We don't need to ask questions about what is happening in the world; we are awash in a sea of pontification, bobbing along as though we know something, when we are really just being carried further adrift. This narrowing of the mainstream media is ironic, considering that we seem to have so many more choices-but perhaps that's the explanation. As others have theorized before me, there is so much information available that people need to find some way to get through it, so they turn to those who will offer a clear perspective on the issue (or three) of the day. We want the answers to understanding our world. And with every answer delivered, so, too, is a profit delivered to the sponsoring media corporation, which had to invest a whole lot less in opinion than in actual reporting. Not a bad deal.
A Different Kind of Talk Show Host
After hearing a neighbor say that he would rather be shot than be caught listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fireside radio chats, George V. Denny Jr. was inspired to take action against what he thought was a danger to America. How could democracy function if citizens didn't want to listen to those with whom they disagreed? Without listening, what potential was there to change our minds? In 1935, using the model of a New England town meeting as his guide, Denny hosted his first episode of America's Town Meeting of the Air.[45]
Each week, a voice would shout, "Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight! Bring your questions to the old town hall!," and listeners would know it was time to turn up the volume on their radios and gather around. From 1935 to 1956, up to 3 million listeners a week tuned in the NBC Blue and ABC networks to hear Denny moderate.[46] People formed discussion clubs-more than one thousand of them-to debate the broadcast's topics among themselves.[47]
Denny invited into the studio knowledgeable people with different takes on the issues of the day and let them have it out. The first broadcast of America's Town Meeting of the Air asked the question "Which Way America? Communism, Fascism, Socialism, or Democracy?," and included a communist, a fascist, a socialist, and a democrat as speakers.
"Having it out" was a slightly more civilized proposition on Denny's show than anything we would see today. Before introducing his program "Should We Plan for Social Security," one of the few of which an original recording survives, Denny defined the parameters of the program: "This is not a debate. It is a joint discussion in which two qualified authorities, approaching the problem from two widely different view-points, discuss the subject…These meetings are conducted in the interest of the welfare of the whole American people, and in presenting two or more conflicting views at the same time during the same hour we believe a highly useful and constructive purpose is served."[48]
As David Goodman notes in the definitive compilation NBC: America's Network, the program featured between two and four speakers with different perspectives who read from prepared scripts. There were no shouting matches, no fight to get in the thirty-second sound bite before being interrupted by the aggressive host ready for the next question.[49] The guests on the Social Security program, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and George E. Sokolsky, author of Labor's Fight for Power, each spoke for fifteen minutes, laying out their positions, interrupted only by applause.
It's difficult to imagine that kind of respect for the capacity of the audience to listen in today's media environment. But then again, it's hard to imagine Denny as a host in today's media environment. He had little in common with his counterparts in today's business. Whereas Denny wanted his listeners to be open to questioning their positions after hearing different views hashed out on the show, Dobbs and his kind want their listeners to agree with them. In fact, today's hosts just assume their audience does agree with them-and they are probably right, as I discussed in chapter 2.
The restraint of the format was not an indicator, however, of a lack of passion about the discussion. The show was known for the active involvement of its audience; the approximately 1,500 people gathered at New York's Town Hall were called "spectator-hecklers."[50] According to a 1938 Time magazine profile, "What makes [the programs] exciting is uninhibited heckling. The speakers heckle each other and the audience heckles everybody. The auditors boo and cheer, are made up of the rich and poor, the well informed and the ignorant."[51] But most importantly, no matter who they were, the audience could ask questions. This live audience questioning was considered "a significant innovation in American broadcasting." The questions were to be written down, to be fewer than twenty-five words, and were approved by a committee.[52] The best question earned the questioner a prize from Denny[53]
In fact, self-described "intelligent listeners" of America's Town Meeting of the Air "prided themselves on…their openness." As Goodman tells it, "They understood themselves as receptive to new information and open to reasoned persuasion." Indeed, research supported these assertions: Half of the show's listeners "usually" continued discussion after the program's conclusion, and "34 percent reported having changed their opinions as a result of listening." One in two of the listeners in the survey preferred that no definite solution to problems be arrived at in the show. "ATMA sought to persuade Americans that the truth was complex and might not be grasped immediately," writes Goodman.[54] And how could it be otherwise, when addressing topics such as "How Should the Democracies Deal with the Dictatorships?" and "What System of Medical Care Should We Have?".
Denny believed that his program's emphasis on openness would have political implications. "We'll educate the independents-those voters who hold allegiance to no party-so that political parties will have to produce candidates that appeal to them," he said of his program. "This will tend to counteract malicious pressure groups, sickening political campaigns and, above all, the dangers of dictatorship."[55] Discussion and questions-these were the things that would counteract dictatorship and narrow, ideologically rigid politics. Open minds characterized patriotism, not the profession of loyalty to the democratic system. Denny's job was to catalyze, not to proselytize.
Of course, America's Town Meeting of the Air was only possible because the NBC Blue network made it possible. There was no advertising, no commercial sponsorship. The show was considered a public service, produced after the debates surrounding the passage of the Communications Act of 1934. Though the act did little to ease the commercialization of radio that had taken place in the late 1920s and early 1930s, public discussion about the act did prompt media companies to take public service programming more seriously. According to Goodman, "The NBC hierarchy had a clear sense among themselves of the worth of the program in political capital, even as they wished to produce it as cheaply and uncontroversially as they decently could."[56]
Today, political capital is a lot less important than the bottom line. And dialogue is a lot less important to that bottom line than is a formula of strong opinion on one side or the other, which guarantees an audience. I wonder if Denny would make it as a radio talk show host today. I wonder if we would let him.
A Different Kind of Media Today
Of course, a lot has changed in the world of American media in the time from Denny to Dobbs, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. In Denny's time, NBC and CBS came to dominate commercial broadcasing, even while the former produced a public interest show such as America's Town Meeting of the Air.[57] Today, six conglomerates dominate the media environment. General Electric, Time Warner, Walt Disney, News Corporation, CBS, and Viacom rule the television, radio, cable, movie, and print media industries.[58] Name a source of news or entertainment and you can bet that one of these names is behind it. Watching 60 Minutes or reading The Secret? CBS Television and CBS's book publisher Simon & Schuster are behind those. Reading the Wall Street Journal or watching The Simpsons? That's Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Watching Batman Begins on digital cable while you surf the Web? There's a good chance the TV and Internet are being brought to you courtesy of Time Warner.
Aided and abetted by government policy, these enormous corporate entities have muscled out small, local, diverse voices and have concentrated media sources in a few very powerful hands. Media programming now skews in favor of the bottom line of these industries, leaving us with soft news, entertainment, and of course, Dobbs. Unless America's Town Meeting of the Air included a celebrity dance portion, it is unlikely that it would wind up on anyone's lineup today. The reduction of differing viewpoints in the marketplace, the pressure to make money, the disincentive to take risks in reporting on the industries that share an owner with the news station itself-none of this bodes very well for the role of inquiry in our culture today.
The media environment didn't always look this way. Before passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996-the first revision of telecommunications law in sixty-two years-regulations prevented concentration of media ownership, restricting mergers and acquisitions and limiting the number of TV and radio stations any one corporation could own. However, the Telecommunications Act and the Federal Communications Commission's subsequent rule making lifted many of these restrictions in the name of lower barriers to entry into the communications business and increased competition. The effect of the legislation, though, was the opposite, resulting in concentrated ownership and media behemoths. Whereas prior to the act a company could own only forty radio stations, the radio giant Clear Channel now owns more than 1,200. Relaxed restriction on TV station ownership had a similar effect, provoking mergers and increased concentration of ownership. Cross-ownership rules that had separated cable and broadcast networks were eased, allowing broadcast stations to gobble up attractive cable networks.[59]
The result has been not only concentration of influence over the media inside a handful of corporate boardrooms but also degradation in the quality, source, and diversity of the information these corporate boardrooms relay. Ben Bagdikian, media critic and author of The New Media Monopoly, believes that large media conglomerates have "damaged our democracy." He cites two main causes: the monopolization of media by large companies and the Federal Communications Commission's failure to act in the public interest.[60]
It was this mandate to serve the public interest that allowed Denny to air America's Town Meeting of the Air for nine years without commercials, without the need to raise funds through ceaseless pledge drives (which surely wouldn't have yielded much at the time), and without pressure to sanitize the programming so as not to off end advertisers.[61]
The incentive to maximize profits keeps the Dobbses of the world in business, maintains empty chatter as the norm among news anchors, and ensures that talk radio is ever present. We watch and we listen, for sure, but not without some reservation. Americans have grown skeptical of the media, with 55 percent believing that the press is biased.[62]
Indeed, if the perspective of those within the industry itself is to be considered, Americans' suspicions of bias are warranted. A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 66 percent of national newspeople and 57 percent of local journalists believed that increased bottom line pressure was "seriously hurting" the quality of news coverage.[63] Studies have found that concentration of local television ownership degrades the quality of news Americans receive, that coverage of negative economic news tends to be more about corporations and investors than about the general workforce, and that a change in ownership from a local entity to a chain reduces coverage of local issues. Conversely, in radio markets with more diversity of station ownership, there is greater variety in programming.[64]
The Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, and Free Press have compiled substantial evidence of the negative effects of media concentration, in filings to the Federal Communications Commission. "Editorial preferences are deeply embedded in commercial mass media not only on the editorial pages but also on the news pages," they argue. "Rather than claim that many outlets owned by a single entity will present a neutral, objective, or balanced picture, public policy should recognize that diversity and antagonism of viewpoints comes from diversity of ownership."[65] Denny's show would not have inspired his viewers to ask questions if he invited only one guest, with one view-his. Similarly, we can't expect that people will ask why in a concentrated media environment where the view of the owner determines the views of the news we see, hear, and read.
These changes in the media were not inevitable. Although corporate desire to make money is ever present, it is ultimately up to public policy to oblige them. Generally, this collusion is assisted by the absence of inquiry. The public debate about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was limited. Most people today have absolutely no idea what it was or how it has affected their lives. But then again, was there much incentive for media to report on the changes that would change how the media was to report?
"The Telecommunications Act was covered (rather extensively) as a business story, not a public policy story," writes media scholar Robert McChesney, who also notes that "the silence of public debate is deafening. A bill with such astonishing impact on all of us is not even being discussed."[66]
We got what we paid for. Thanks to no questioning from the public, we got a media that does less questioning.
Young people today not only must cut through the soft news that has proliferated during the past thirty years[67] but also must carefully evaluate information sources that seem diverse but are in fact owned and controlled by a very few, very powerful corporations. Unfortunately, there isn't much bottom line pressure to develop the skills of discernment in our culture today. Maybe we need some more spectator-hecklers today.
4: In Google We Trust
I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT TO SAY FROM THE OUTSET THAT I love the Internet. Its possibilities are endless. Technology has always been a big part of my life, thanks to my father. He studied computer science in college but had to drop out just prior to finishing his degree to support his widowed mother. Despite this, my dad taught himself how to make a living with computers, and that appreciation for technology put me through college. I run an organization considered by many to be on the leading edge in using technology to disseminate ideas. The point of this chapter isn't to dissect whether the Internet is a good or bad thing-that's beside the point. The Internet just is.
But if we care about raising children in a culture that values inquiry, I believe we must pause and investigate our assumptions about what the Internet does and what we do on it. At this moment of immense political challenge and technological opportunity, it is important to ask whether the very structure of the Internet creates rewards and incentives that affect the development of questioning citizens. We must acknowledge its incredible potential while also thinking critically about the default behavior that the Internet inspires. Only through such investigation can we figure out what, if anything, to do about it.
I believe that the Internet, and the role it plays in our culture, is changing us. It's changing how we think about information, how we learn about the world around us, even how we define our notions of truth. But most importantly, the Internet is changing how we think of the meaning of a question, and this matters to the future of democracy.
Discerning citizens, citizens who can process, interpret, and question the credibility of the information they encounter, matter to democratic discourse. Citizens with a shared base of knowledge, who use that base of knowledge to question events as they unfold, matter to our ability to influence social change. Democracy requires an attention span long enough to realize its promise.
We are so awed by the very possibility of all the information available to us on the Internet that the process of formulating our entry into that information is secondary. As long as we're on the information superhighway, who cares where we're going? But navigating the information superhighway is very different from navigating the local library or a print newspaper, and we have adjusted accordingly, if subconsciously. We are developing new habits of mind on the Internet. They are not all bad habits of mind, but they are new. And these habits have profound implications for our democracy.
Marcel Proust writes, "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."[68] I worry that the culture of the Internet is directly at odds with the development of wisdom, because the noise is so constant, the pace so fast, the choices so overwhelming, the openness to discovery supplanted by the skill of retrieval. The echo chambers tell us how to regard the world. We have come to believe that wisdom is accessible somewhere on a Web page, if we only find the right one. The very notion of an intellectual journey through the wilderness becomes irrelevant.
I saw a commercial the other night for a new cell phone that has a partnership with Google. There were quick cuts between scenes, happy music in the background. Do sharks have eyelids? asks a woman at the beach. Do we have the same fingerprints? ask twins. Can we get this cheaper somewhere else? ask a husband and wife riding a lawn mower in a hardware store. The tagline for this new phone? "Curiosity is everywhere." The Internet certainly makes it easier to find answers to these questions, which then makes us want to ask more questions like them. But what about the deeper questions that democracy requires? Will we grow accustomed to only asking the questions that we know we can answer by using our cell phones?
In meetings with my hyperactive young staff at DMI, I ask them to heed the advice given to me by yoga teacher: to register full. That is, after you've inhaled, take a moment to register that you are full of air. After you have exhaled, take a moment to register that you are empty. As you register full, you absorb. You take in. You reflect. Cruising on the Internet, we do not register full. We simply exhale when our eyes grow tired.
It is a disturbing irony-just when we have acquired all this knowledge at our fingertips we have lost the interest and capacity to truly engage with it.
Some technologists argue that critiques of the changes wrought by advancements in technology-critiques such as mine-miss the bigger picture of what is gained. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, captures this sentiment, arguing that "our older habits of consumption weren't virtuous, they were just a side effect of living in an environment of impoverished access. Nostalgia for the accidental scarcity we've just emerged from is just a sideshow; the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known."[69] Thus, according to Shirky, it is silly to mourn the loss of a particular newspaper (which I'll do in more detail in chapter 9), when it is confined to an average of sixty-five pages during the week (with at least a third of its space devoted to advertising) and when you can find newspapers from more than forty countries in at least seventeen languages at the click of the mouse.[70] It is silly to be wistful about the decline in interest in the nineteenth-century Russian novel when the Internet will inevitably widen our definition of who can and will shape our cultural identity. Isn't it?
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I argue that such analysis misses the ways in which the Internet is more than a communications technology-it has become a place where people live. I disagree that the hubbub about the Internet is simply the same as what happened when the printing press, radio, and television arrived. The Internet is more than a technology. It's more than a medium. It's an environment. But is it an environment in which inquiry is valued?
Information Drive-by and the Google Generation
"Google is the living (and highly capitalized) proof that the Internet encourages curiosity," Tom Watson told me. Watson is the author of CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, a Drum Major Institute board member, and a friend. He points to graphs and charts of online searches over the past decade as proof that we have become a search-oriented society-"not just unimportant, mundane stuff, either. People search for meaning, for answers in the digital realm."
He is right. We have certainly become a search-oriented society. Between August 2007 and July 2008 there were more than 175 billion searches performed on the top search engines-nearly 100 billion searches on Google alone. According to July 2008 statistics, approximately 550 million searches were performed using the top fifty search engines every day.[71]
And there is plenty to search. By 2008, Google's search index had processed around one trillion links, and the number of indexed Web pages increases by several billion pages per day[72]
Are these searches reflective of our curiosity? Absolutely. The Internet responds to curiosity as much as it creates it. Is our growing use of search engines reflective of a search for meaning, our growing appetite for inquiry? On that, I am not convinced. Unless we believe that searching for answers is the same thing as asking questions.
"It's not necessarily apples and oranges," according to Watson. "I think Google has made people more inquisitive, not less, and that's a good thing. It can be a quick thing-or it can be part of a deep inquiry process. Certainly, we're in far better shape, in terms of tools and ability, for deep inquiry than we used to be."
Are we?
When I survey the search engine landscape, I see conditions that are less than inspiring of "deep inquiry," especially for our youngest. I see the formation of habits of mind characterized by a dangerous lack of discernment. I see young people who casually plug key terms into search boxes instead of taking the time to formulate their questions. I see blind faith in whatever such plugging-in delivers-as if the results weren't produced by commercial, for-profit companies that have their own reasons for ranking things the way they do. The tools may be there; on that, I agree with Watson. But the ability to wield those tools effectively? I'm not so sure.
Three poor habits of mind developed on the Web pose a direct threat to the development of questioning citizens. First, young people search for information online without any intention. They bounce all over the place, hopping and skimming their way through content. When they plug terms into search boxes, they take whatever top three results are given to them and consider that research. Underlying their behavior is the assumption that Google or some other search engine, in its infinite wisdom, understands what they want and will deliver it to them. Young people then print these results out, assuming they have met their teachers' expectations. There is little room in that process for critical thinking, for deciphering the meaning of the information that was retrieved.
Second, young people don't question the sources of the information they find through their searches. Study after study of online research behavior demonstrates little discernment on the part of young people. They take whatever they get from the search engine and don't think about its origin-a habit as bad for their education as it is for our democracy. With more information available, it is all the more important that young people know how to scrutinize and assess.
Third, young people are barely reading what they find anyway-because the Internet is changing the very way they read. As they sit in front of computers for hours a day, and as the computer becomes more a part of their classroom and home environments, we need to think about whether the type of literacy encouraged on the Internet is compatible with a democracy whose history of struggle for fairness and freedom is inextricably linked with the people's use of the written word. Much has been written on the subject of the changing literacy of "digital natives," as they are called,[73] and it is not my intention to explore this further here. But it is worth noting that the changing literacy of our children in a culture dominated by the Internet should be a concern to us all.
The intellectual shortcuts encouraged by the Web are interrelated. If children read carefully, they might question the credibility of what they retrieve. If children think carefully about the question they are trying to answer, they are less likely to accept the first round of results yielded by their searches. In any case, let's start with the reality of where we find ourselves now.
First: the bouncing, lazy search. After a review of the literature and an examination of the tracks left by millions of scholars (both young and old) researching in virtual libraries, in what they called the Google Generation project, researchers at the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research at University College London compiled a definitive study about how children interact with the Web. They describe the way Internet users search for information as "horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature."[74] Students demonstrate little concentration, little attempt to actually engage with content. They are doing what the Internet encourages them to do-to get on that information super-highway and see how far it can take them. The downside, for the purpose of developing questioning students and citizens, is that this process begins to change the way they think of the actual search for information.
"Library users demand 24-7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for 'the answer' rather than for a particular format," the researchers report, "so they scan, flick and 'power browse' their way through digital content, developing new forms of online reading [along] the way that we do not yet fully understand (or, in many cases, even recognize)."[75] Of course they want the "instant grati-fication" of "the answer" and are willing to jump all over the place until they think they've found it-that's what our culture encourages.
Although the Google Generation study focused on younger adults, researchers found that professors, lecturers, and practitioners in academic communities fall victim to the same bouncing/flicking tendencies. They search "horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all." Ultimately, the authors conclude, we as a society are "dumbing down."[76] We are searching left to right, click to click, speeding through whatever our search engine renders. As our access becomes more complex, our thinking processes simplify.
Professor Ulises Mejias, who studies how information and communications technologies shape social networks, has a perfect laboratory: his own college students at State University of New York, Oswego.
"I do think that the Internet is changing our research habits and our relationship to knowledge, for the worse," he wrote to me. I asked him about his thoughts about an article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?,"[77] which met with quite a bit of controversy for suggesting that the Internet was reducing the author's attention span for longer-form reading and deeper thinking.
"What's interesting," Mejias wrote, "is that when I discussed the Carr article with my students, they said, 'The Internet is not making us stupid; it's just making us lazy.' That's even worse! We can't help it if we are stupid. But to be lazy suggests that we know there is an alternative, perhaps even a better alternative, but we consciously choose to go with the option that requires the least effort and that places less demands on questioning what we are doing. This is typical mass behavior." Our culture encourages the intellectual race to the bottom, and there are few incentives to be the exception.
Our children are engaged, en masse, in "information drive-by" behavior on the Internet, which speaks to the consumption impulse on the Web-an impulse to plug, click, browse, skim, and watch. Just because a person snacks all the time doesn't mean he is either hungry or eating well. Likewise, incessant searching isn't necessarily a reflection of actual curiosity. It certainly isn't a reflection of our ability to meaningfully inquire, to figure out just what we are asking in the first place, to digest and analyze and synthesize until we have answers-answers that can't simply be printed out and handed in. And if this is mass behavior, as Mejias states, there is popular incentive only to maintain the status quo. Anything else would take more time, more energy, more questioning.
"You Have to Read It"
Emily Drabinski is not what you probably think of when you picture a librarian. She is young and hip and her glasses are on her face, not hanging on a string around her neck. She is the Electronic Resources and Instruction Librarian at Long Island University in New York.
"I want my students to always have the capacity to ask, to know where to get answers to their questions, always with the idea of generating more questions so they can live an intellectually curious life. That's my ethos as a librarian," she told me.
She became a reference librarian five years ago because she "loved books and people, and wanted to work with both." And although she is far from a critic of the Internet and hasn't issued any manifestos calling for all research to be done only within university stacks, she is concerned about the way the young people in her library think about questions and answers.
In my conversation with her, she recalled what she described as a "chilling" encounter with a student the previous year. The student wanted to write a paper about the idea of the courtesan and how it manifests itself in modern society. Drabinski was using one of her favorite tools-Google Book Search-to help the student search by keyword to unearth appropriate sources. At one point the two were looking at a book on the screen, with the keyword courtesan highlighted in yellow, as Book Search does, when the student asked, "How do I know if this is about what I need it to be about?"
Drabinski asked, "What do you mean?"
"Well, I see my words highlighted, but does that mean this is relevant?"
After some confusing back and forth, during which Drabinksi was trying to understand the student's question, she finally understood the difficulty. The student didn't realize that, to determine whether the book was relevant to her research topic, "she had to read it. You have to read it, and think about it. She didn't seem to know. And I think that that's Internet related. I really do."
The young people that Drabinski encounters-high school and college students, and sometimes even their teachers-don't understand that only they can determine the relevance of the information they retrieve, not Google, not Yahoo!, not even their librarian. This discernment requires reading and thinking and evaluating, because there isn't one answer out there to the questions that require analysis. As computer critic Joseph Weizenbaum says, "There is only one way to turn signals into information: through interpretation."[78] And, unless I'm behind on technological developments, interpretation can only be done by the human brain.
What was life like before the Internet? "Before you had the Web, where you could just go to Google and type in 'Should there be a Palestinian state?,' when there was a card catalog, you had to think of your subject," noted Drabinski. "You had to think critically about the kind of words and language you wanted to use, because you had to guess where in the card catalog that information could be found." A researcher would begin by assembling a list of keywords-Palestine, Israel, diaspora, Israel-Arab relations. Then the searcher would pursue these avenues of research as each round of effort helped to refine the question. "Now you don't do that. You just type it in and take the top three results on that page and you hit Print."
For several years, Drabinksi worked at the library of a liberal arts university near a public high school in Yonkers, New York. This school is one of the few public schools to have an International Baccalaureate program, a rigorous educational and assessment program with an international focus. I went to speak with students who had worked with Drabinski, and their teacher, Brigid McMaster, a former nun and now a history teacher, whose classroom is decorated with question marks and handmade posters advertising academic databases.
McMaster decided that, in light of all of the talk about our economy entering its period of greatest challenge since the Great Depression, she would move around the curriculum of her History of the Americas class to talk about that period in U.S. history right away. This kind of switch would be unheard of in a typical class that had to adhere closely to the curriculum, which itself adheres closely to a standardized exam. But so would be a program that requires students to take a class in the theory of knowledge, which relates learning from various disciplines to concepts, historical events, current events, and issues of importance.
I asked Julie, a senior at Yonkers High School, how she would go about searching for information on the Great Depression to prepare for her classroom discussion tomorrow. I was prepared to hear that she'd Google Great Depression, go to the Wikipedia page, and take it from there. I was wrong.
"Well, 'Great Depression.' That's kind of broad." She proceeded to explain how she would have to narrow down the question and use keywords, and through a presearch discern a much clearer idea of what she wanted to learn.
With so much gained in terms of access to information, with the advent of online research tools, what's missing now, according to Drabinski, is "a sense of research as work." Previous research methods-including the use of card catalogs-forced people to be more creative and rigorous in the effort to access the information sought. Now, said Drabinski, students think all research will be easy. "The Internet makes research easier until it doesn't, and then students aren't equipped to deal with things not working, or going wrong. [The Internet] de-skills you."
Students can't find what they're looking for unless the Internet does it for them. Sure, it's reasonable to ask why students should have to work so hard to find information if it's not necessary. But then we are forgetting that the purpose of these research exercises is not to produce papers worthy of entry into academic journals-though they might-but to develop habits of mind that will serve these young people throughout their lives.
Drabinksi also worries that students fail to recognize that the way information is structured online-its content, form, presentation, and authority-is "invisible in a way that it wasn't before." It becomes invisible as information is privatized. The algorithms containing the secret of how our search engines give us information are themselves secret. Do we even think about where the information comes from or are we just happy to find the answers we are looking for?
Yahoo!-One Authority Young People Don't Question
"The speed of young people's Web searching indicates that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority and children have been observed printing-off and using Internet pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them," according to the Google Generation report.[79] This phenomenon-the search, print, and run-was familiar to every educator I spoke with across the country.
A 1999 report by Sandra Hirsh found that fifth graders "rarely mentioned" authority as an evaluation criterion and generally "did not question the accuracy or validity of the information they found from any electronic resources."[80] It's not that they couldn't figure whether the source was credible, if they wanted to; it's that they didn't think to question the legitimacy and accuracy of the information they got through their search engines.
Unfortunately, understanding the importance of the credibility of information, and the skills to ascertain that credibility, doesn't come automatically with age. A 2001 report by Michael Lorenzen found that high school students "had given very little thought to how to evaluate what they found on the Web," and they didn't understand whether the information they uncovered was "good." They didn't know how to figure it out.[81] Likewise, a 2000 report by Nathan Bos found that high school students conducting research online would be hampered in their ability to practice the evidence-based reasoning at the heart of science because they couldn't identify biases in the scientific resources they encountered on the Web.[82]
These findings and others led the author of the article "Children, Teenagers, and the Web" to conclude, "Young users encounter problems in selecting appropriate search terms and orienting themselves when browsing. They have a tendency to move from page to page, spending little time reading or digesting information, and have difficulty making relevance judgments about retrieved pages. Information seeking does not appear to be intuitive, and practice alone does not make perfect."[83]
In a culture that prizes finding "the answer," it becomes less important to evaluate the source, the relevance, or the authenticity of that answer. From mindlessly plugging in terms to power browsing through whatever is found, with little attention paid to whether those sources are relevant or credible, young people are determined only to find their answer.
Many recent studies indicate that children are not asking questions to make judgments about the information they retrieve. They're not asking, Is this information true? Is it relevant? Is it credible? Is it authoritative? Does it with-stand scrutiny? How would I go about scrutinizing it? They believe and trust that search engines are neutral actors, simply offering what is most helpful to them in their pursuit of an answer.
This belief in the objectivity of search engines is both inaccurate and dangerous. Even more than the World Book encyclopedias that my parents proudly brought home when I was in fifth grade-a sign that we had indeed arrived in the middle class-search engines are commercial enterprises with their own incentives and rewards. The Google Generation study found that teenagers believed that if a site was indexed by Yahoo! it had to be authoritative and did not need independent verification.[84] But Yahoo! cannot claim objectivity, and it certainly can't be responsible for the truth of the pages it indexes.
Search engines use programs called spiders (or crawlers) to "crawl" the Web, looking for Web pages and storing them in their search databases. These spiders follow the links that appear on every Web page. Search programs then quantify the relevant words and create a data tree or index from these terms. This index connects those terms with specific Web pages. Finally, the engines use a search algorithm to rank search results by relevance. Relevance is determined by many factors, including the number of times a word appears on a page, the title of the page, and where on a page a term appears. The algorithm might also, as in Google's case, rank a Web page higher based on "link analysis," which considers a Web page's association with other Web pages.
Ultimately, search engines don't search each Web page each time a query is submitted-they search the indexes or data trees, which are one step removed from the information itself. The algorithms used to accomplish this search are proprietary, and unlike the library, there is no help desk.
Google, Yahoo!, ask.com-these engines are not unbiased presenters of information. Neither is the mainstream news, of course, and we still watch CNN and read the New York Times. Yet, just as we should question the biases of the mainstream news, so too should we train our young people to be savvy, literate, questioning consumers of what they get from search engines. The service that search engines provide is invaluable, as is mainstream media, but only if it is understood in context. Understanding context requires discernment; ascertaining credibility requires inquiry.
As Jay Moonah, a market strategist whose job includes search engine optimization, puts it: "Everything has editorial choices, whether they're made by a human editor who's intentionally making them for a point or they're made for technical reasons. In the cases of search engines, there are editorial decisions made in the…way that content gets into those engines."[85] We simply don't understand those decisions, and we certainly aren't teaching our children about their implications.
In an era in which so much misinformation and distrust plagues our political discourse, in which online rumors are not accidents but rather intentional campaign strategies, in which neither expertise nor accuracy is a criterion for publication, it is all the more important that young people think about the credibility of the information they find on the Internet. To find the answers that our democracy requires, we need to think. We need to construct and synthesize our answers, not merely print them out.
Young people will need to be taught these skills of discernment and broken out of their habits of erratic searching and lazy search-term entry. We will have to stop worshipping the power of the Internet for just a moment so that we can see all the work we need to do to enable children to use it wisely.
Leaving Room for Observation
Those of us who aren't digital natives may already feel that, thanks to the Internet, we are living in a science fiction movie, some kind of invasion of the body snatchers. Our minds are working differently. Our appetites are changing. A friend of mine recently lamented that the Internet had given her attention deficit disorder-not an uncommon feeling.
To author Maggie Jackson, the issue is one of distraction. We cannot complete any of our tasks with intention because we are living in an era of distraction.
"The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Moreover, this disintegration may come at a great cost to ourselves and to society," she writes in her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.[86] She details the ways in which we have become distracted, diluted, and divided. We watch television while pretending to care for our children. We type on our BlackBerrys while having dinner with old friends. We have bigger networks and fewer close relations. We multitask incessantly. Even our toddlers learn the skills.
As Jackson recognizes, one of the major forces shaping this new period of distraction is the presence of the Internet. It is both the cause and the perfect manifestation of our inability to focus. People may be online longer, but their attention span decreases. They may plug in more search terms, searching for more information, but they have less interest in meaningful inquiry and less energy to pursue it. The authors of "Googlearchy" write, "Computers may offer us orders of magnitude more information than previous generations enjoyed; but human attention, it seems, is not a scalable resource…The Web demonstrates the consequences of a poverty of attention on a massive scale."[87] In the end, having access to an infinite amount of information is meaningless. What matters is how we use the information that we happen upon, seek out, and are taught.
In this sense, the Internet creates a different kind of focus-a seductive, "just the facts, ma'am" focus. We are so relentless in our pursuit of the answer-so focused-that we forget that the first step in asking a question is observation. As the kids we'll meet later are learning at the Institute for Inquiry, the first step is to encounter some phenomenon with which we are unfamiliar. We forget, in this answerbsessed world, that the cultivation of our minds isn't about the answer. As librarian Drabinski put it, "There's only questions and reshaping the question and grappling with different ideas."
I was talking about this book with a friend's son-he's about nine years old. He told me about his classroom teacher. When a student says something that prompts her to say, "That's interesting," the student gets a prize. Students are rewarded not for the right answer alone but also for interesting observations. Imagine if this were true in all of our class rooms, if we created space and incentives for original thinking rather than savvy regurgitation!
As they grow up spending so much time on the Internet, are our children learning to be observers of what is interesting? Are they in an environment in which observation is valued? Even efforts to teach children to use the Internet better often focus on their facility with the technology. But what about observation? Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation by contemplating the fall of an apple. Galileo Galilei challenged centuries of scientific "fact" that the earth is the center of the universe, upending science and religion by observation-not by learning more of what was already known. It is often serendipity and the blank state of mind that lead to the discovery of new truths.
The Internet can provide access to an overwhelming number of facts, if properly searched, but we also have to send the message to our children that all of the information isn't out there-otherwise, what is the incentive to create new truths through our observations of the world around us?
Geert Lovink, in analyzing computer critic Weizenbaum's work, writes, "The Internet is not a vending machine in which you throw a coin and then get what you want. The key, here, is the acquisition of a proper education in order to formulate the right query. It's all about how one gets to pose the right question."[88]
If we don't want our children to see the Internet as a vending machine, we have to empower them to focus on the question. I believe that inquiry can be the antidote to the distraction that the Internet offers us. I believe we wouldn't become distracted so easily if we investigated rather than viewed, if we questioned more than we consume. We must reclaim the attainment of wisdom as a goal that supersedes our need to know. We must view questioning as a form of liberation that is necessary if we are to be truly connected to one another. Communication among us cannot take the place of our personal journeys through the wilderness.
As Professor Mejias so eloquently told me, "We've come to believe that Google has all the answers, without realizing that what is changing is our ability to formulate questions Google can't answer."
Yes, what about the questions Google can't answer?
We cannot raise our children to measure their lives by their ability to navigate what is; we must encourage them to imagine what can be. This requires a recommitment to the art of the question. It requires taking a step back from marveling at the technical prowess of our young people and ensuring that they are developing the habits of mind that will prepare them to engage effectively throughout their lives.