Saturday, July 19, 2008

Only 3 Percent


Only three percent of those people taking this political 'test' answered all 12 questions correctly. The average score is 50%ile, around 6 correct.

I dont know the 'n' of the study. There's a results page but it's very generic.

There was really only one truly 'trivial' question, the answer to which was (SPOILER ALERT) "Oprah Winfrey."

Maybe it doesn't matter if you know the name of the chairman of the Fed, or the president of Venezuela, or the US Secretary of State. It isn't 'essential' knowledge, like programming a tevo or an i-pod. None of the individual factoids, taken singularly, betokens a window through which one's responsible political participation may be safely assessed. But it seems remarkable to me that a sample drawn from this medium would yield scores so low.

Could this be an early manifestation of the televisionization of the toobs?

Or is it that, even in cyber-blogo-netspace, there really are only a very small number of folks to whom the process is actually important.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link, Woody (oh, that I could be "tokin" again).
As a fellow Steve Benen reader, I got a 12 out of 12.
Nice to be at the top of something.