Found a great deal at Jury’s on Dupont Circle for the weekend and couldn’t resist a return Spring Break on the Mall. And I couldn’t convince Melanie to go to Acapulco and use our plane tickets on that winter vacation I’d spoiled with a sudden virus (but I did lose 5 pounds!), so this worked out well.

We had a fast and beautiful drive over the mountains on Friday morning. Traffic was lighter than usual. When we first moved out here in 1985 we didn’t hit heavy traffic until we were just a few miles off the Beltway on I-270. We’ve felt the growth of the area in that traffic push. Typically we now feel the heavy traffic shortly after we come off of I-68 onto I-70. That pressure showed up again this time, but it never really got bad. And, it was a beautiful sunny day. We hit Dupont Circle and Jury’s at noon then a quick check-in and off to lunch at Raku.

I didn’t want to leave. Did you have the soup? And the potstickers? Hubba-hubba. A great burst of taste and energy, then off to the Metro and the Mall. After stumbling through a bomb burst of children at the Natural History museum we finally got to the gardens on the Mall. You can just see the Capitol Building over Melanie’s shoulder as she stands in the garden at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

We’d anticipated that Easter Weekend might be a low traffic time for the Mall, but it was teeming with kids, carriages, tourists, and all that aimless, where-the-hell-am-I wandering you get in DC. But, it was a beautiful day as this shot outside the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art shows.

That razor edge on the exterior is so cool. And, unlike last year, the blossoms were blooming or the blooms were blossoming.

I’m not sure what that Apple-like sculpture means. Is it a Steve Jobs contribution?

After tramping around the Mall all afternoon we worked up a powerful appetite that could only be fulfilled with a dinner at Obelisk. They gave us the same table as always (do they really remember us?). And, then, a fabulous dinner as always. Man, that chef can cook. Just the appetizers alone are worth the price and make his reputation. They started us with: a lamb meatball in a light tomato sauce; a shrimp and olive oil delight; a salad described as an Italian chicory; and thin sliced duck breast with onion jam. Oh, and the bread was pretty good, too. Then, the primi – she had beet ravioli and I had a beef broth clam soup – and the secondi – we shared a suckling pig shoulder with various spicy veggies – and the dessert – her ice cream and my Cardinal’s Hat with dessert wine. Oh, yeah, there was a cheese plate before the dessert. And, yeah, yeah, I forgot, the burata cheese after the appetizers. We didn’t bring the camera, but we have our memories.

Obelisk is one of the best foodie restaurants in the US. Only 11 tables with 36 seats, so call ahead. And, the price is great for the quality of the food, menu, preparation, and service. We’ve eaten at other great foodie places and afterwards felt like you had to take out a loan. This is a fabulous experience.

After a long night’s nap we awakened to much cooler temperatures and a threat of rain. So, we shopped. This next picture explains much of my life as a married man.

Sure, you can get them chocolate or champagne, but in my experience if you really want to put them over the top, you buy them shoes or gems. From there on you’ve got the wind at your back and it’s smooth sailing. Normally this scene would be at a Nordstrom’s or a Bloomies and would be followed with a mule shot of me carrying several boxes and a glowing girl beaming into the camera. Today, no luck for Melanie. Nothing fit. Nothing. And she tried really hard. Instead we bought me a paisley tie and cuff links.

Then, after a hard day of shopping, you need a great dining experience to take the edge off. Last night, Obelisk, so this night someplace new, Zola!

Zola is in the wildly expanding Convention Center area of DC. We hadn’t visited this neck of the woods in a few years – my work is typically in Dupont or northern Virginia – so it was amazing to see the new construction out here (8th and F Street). Zola fits in well.

It is that new American style of place and menu. Clean lines. Sharp colors. Techno music surging just below your consciousness. The greeting staff wear suits – Zegna seems popular. I made our reservations through OpenTable.com and had requested a seat at a food bar or with a view of the kitchen. Our maitre’d gave us a choice of seats and toured us through the restaurant. We took a booth in the back of the place and asked our waiter to take a shot.

Like that red drape? I really enjoyed looking across the table all night with my blondie babe against that color.

Zola delivered a major good time with the room, the food, and the preparation. The bread was great. This is a repetitive theme in my blogging about restaurants, but it has become a truism for us. Great places serve great bread. If the bread doesn’t get your attention, it’s likely you’re in for a short, unhappy life that night. And, champagne helps, especially when she couldn’t find any shoes.

Where’s the Martini, you ask? Thank you.

DC serves the best olives in the US. No competition from New York or New Orleans or San Francisco or Chicago or fill in the blank. Smooth like chocolate. Hmmm. Also note the cuff links from Acapulco. Greetings to Harvey Gomez! And the paisley tie. That little gold band on my right ring finger commemorates our 25th wedding anniversary.

I had a cream of asparagus soup with prosciutto, then an Arctic char fish served with a thick, heavy brown sauce that was a bit sweet and filled with oysters and other little ocean delights. We also ordered a side of gouda fries just for fun. We brought most of them home. I know, french fries at a cool place is kinda uncool, but these were almost as good as the fries that Melanie makes. You know she loves you if she makes the fries. Here’s the way Zola does it.

Dessert was strawberries and cream, heavy, thick cream, like so thick and heavy if the Food Police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest find out about it, the cops might raid the place. And a nice port.

Zola did great by us. This is another chef who cooks like a crazy man and has that junkie palate I adore. Lots of salt and seasoning and fat with a light cooking touch. Everything is fresh and all that comes through, but the junkie seasoning highlights all the ingredients and pulls them all together (like that sauce with the char). We really liked it and will return at our next opportunity.

What topped off the weekend too was the success of the WVU basketball teams, both the men’s and the women’s. Each won through the first weekend of action. I’ve visited Duke a couple of times and worked with several Dukies and even tread the sacred court at Cameron Hall, so it was with just a little regret that I saw Old Gold and Blue take down the Devils. Better still was watching the Lady Mountaineers endure against the unbelievable NCAA system that had them playing as a much higher seed on the HOME COURT of their lower seed opponent. I thought college was about fairness and justice. How can anyone let a 12 seed play at home against a 5 seed? But, our women played tough. Let’s go, Mountaineers!

After a good weekend of the Mall, great food, shopping and basketball, we took a last look out our Jury’s window . . .

. . . then drove over the mountains back home.

Almost heaven, as we say in these parts.

My sincere regrets at this unconscionable delay. We attended the ECA Annual Conference in Providence last April (yes, 2007) and I’m just now posting on it. Been busy . . . getting old . . . feeling better! Really.

Let’s start with business. Melanie organized a panel on humor and communication. She included several serious people who actually study humor and try to explain it. And then try to be funny. The panel was well attended (usually academic conferences feature panels with more presenters than audience members) and everyone had a rocking good time. I took many furtive pictures, trying desperately not to look like Melanie’s proud relative at graduation. Almost all the shots were blurred, shaky, or out-of-frame, except for this one with Melanie and her colleague, friend, and former doc student, Melissa Wanzer.

Melissa is at Canisius University where she is a campus star and continuing source of fun, delight, and professional skill. She’s also just plain funny. Melanie had many other responsibilities because she’s a Big Shot and a former President of this Association. She has so many ribbons and tags that she looks like General Grant on the Fourth of July. I’ll try to get a picture of that sometime. It’s quite impressive. I don’t know whether to salute or . . .

While she’s handling her profession, I like to visit art galleries and museums. The fabulous Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is located near downtown Providence, just a short walk from our hotel, the Westin. They’re doing a major renovation of the place and here’s what you’ll see now.

It’s quite a nice building for something that is so accessible and cozy in the neighborhood. You feel like it’s your place rather than a national monument. Luckily for me, they were holding an exhibition of rare Japanese prints featuring Hiroshige. They let you take pictures as long as you didn’t use flash. Here’s the Opening Poster:

I tend to go on and on over pieces I see in museums and it drives Melanie crazy. She says, correctly, that its like listening to someone’s travel movie. So, I’ll be polite and just show a couple of shots, including my last one in this exhibition.

You’ll note the flash reflection in the glass. A nice docent struck me on the head with a rolled up “Notes on an Exhibition of Hiroshige” catalog, pinned my arms behind my back, and confiscated my Canon SureShot camera. I did not protest. I did not have proper control over all the many wonderous and confusing features of this modern piece of technology and I’d been warned a couple of times before about flashing . . . seriously, they scowled at me and rightfully so, and I put the damn camera away. Until I got to another part of the museum and saw this:

One of the coolest art moments of my life. They were (obviously) setting up for a major new display that opened a couple of days after we left town. Perhaps they’d heard about me and my flashing? The blue of the room is gorgeous, just one of my alltime favorite tones. And, all that excellent art from many different artists hanging in one large, well lit room is just a gas. Beauty, grace, just great fun to stand and stare. It was like those study visits I’ve had at the Metropolitan in New York, the Fogg at Harvard, and the Freer in DC where I’d go “backstage” and handle and view original masterpieces in study rooms. (I’ll blog on those experiences sometime.)

The RISD is one of the great art surprises of my life. It holds an oustanding range of work in a pretty, sophisticated, and comfortable space. This place alone warrants a visit to Providence.

And, so do the restaurants! Man, Providence is one great eating town and Melanie and I give it two Big Thumbs Up! You could almost get me to consult anywhere in Providence for just expenses. Big expenses. As brief overview we ate at Mill’s Tavern, Chez Pascal, Cafe Nuovo, and a nice place in Federal Hill. All were really good. And right now I’m blanking on the correct name of the Italian place in Federal Hill; my travel notes show scratchings that look like “Panne and Vino” but that can’t be right – sounds like the show name “Martin and Lewis” used before “Martin and Lewis.” If you’re a foodie, please help me before I defame again.

John, from the Westin, toured us around town and taxied us on two occasions to our dinners in the English cab. The vehicle is quite nice. Roomy, great sight lines, and easy for well dressed women to enter and exit without putting on a floor show for passersby. John gave us a great travelog and town history on our drives. If you stay at the Westin, take the English cab and ask for John, too. Please extend our regards.

Here’s Melanie in Little Italy, or Federal Hill as it is known locally. We almost didn’t make to our restaurant. So many delights in the window displays and food fragrances wafting onto the street through open doors. It’s a long and tempting walk to get to your destination.

We forgot to bring the camera along to Cafe Nuovo and I regret that. We also forgot to bring two umbrellas and to trust my sense of direction. Melanie planned this one and knew decisively that it would not rain on our walk and where the place was located. After 30 years, you’d think I’d know better, but love is blind, stupid, and unteachable. We wandered all over Providence in a steady rain with one small umbrella (I love, but don’t always trust) for 30 minutes before I dragged us into a dry cleaners to get directions. We only missed by a mile or less. Melanie considered it a victory for her sense of direction while I was really happy to have shared a small umbrella with a curvy babe for 30 minutes.

Nuovo has (had?) one of the great chefs we’ve tasted anywhere. Had a great server, too, who connected with our style immediately and provided excellent recommendations all night. I had a serving of raw oysters with a glass of champagne, then a main dish of veal and shrimp served on fettucini. The chef’s touch with everything was great. All the key tastes came through simply and clearly, yet played well with everything else in the dish. Cafe Nuovo is one of the best restaurants I’ve eaten in and I hope it’s still going.

Chez Pascal is close competition, but in a more romantic, bistro style. I had to touch up the photo due to poor lighting effects (need to read the damn manual again), but this shot gives you a sense of the place.

Champagne again with a three cheese appetizer, then a pinot noir with a roasted chicken dish in the line of coque au vin, closed with a fabulous custard desert and I’m not really a fan of custard. Just that nice neighborhood Frenchy joint. After dinner we walked into the night waiting for John and the English cab. People were out on the street just walking around enjoying the night. We talked with a young couple about Chez Pascal and sang its praises. Then a nice fella out walking his dog chatted us up about food, Providence, and dogs. He raises pure breds and let us have a Ken and Barbie picture.

Fun moments like this happen on all of our travels. Strangers are nice to us and share fun events and point our interesting features. They like Melanie a lot I think and most of the time if I take a picture of them with her, they’ll take a picture of me with her, too. I tend to be somewhat wary in a strange city (imagine that, plus I got robbed and mugged at gunpoint in a city when I was a young man), so I keep a careful eye out, yet nice folks still find us. We tend to stick out so that everyone skips the obvious, “You’re not from around here, are you” line and gets to the fun right away.

Once we were hustling out of a nice Baltimore restaurant at the Inner Harbor on a cold night getting into our taxi when a slightly, but clearly, drunk man ran over to us like a dog on the hunt, began shaking my hand and telling me that he recognized me and told the taxi driver to be careful with this ride because he was carrying a famous cargo. This was many years ago when I was wearing extremely long hair. Like this.

I ran into Janet Reno and her body guard on the street in the Federal Triangle in DC looking something like this. The body guard stepped between Janet and me, then saw Melanie and took his hand out from under his jacket. Then in a little-known hallway in a DC hotel I got backstage while President Bill Clinton was speaking, scaring the hell out of the Secret Service contingent. Had many people think I was Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman scouting out locations or else the lead singer in either a rock or nuvo country band. Then I got a hair cut, went to work for the Fed, and everyone just hands me the check.

I’m really quite mysterious, aren’t I?

Stop the sticks, there’s a new persuasion tactic that’s guarenteed to work 60% of the time on your unsuspecting customers, marks, and yokels. Named after its creator, Mr. Sullivan, the “Sullivan Nod” goes like this.

You offer a customer a list of options and provide a subtle smile and head nod with one of those options. This “Sullivan Nod” will increase the likelihood that the customer will select the option covered with this nonverbal gesture. Here’s how Mr. Sullivan himself puts it:

This great piece of body language can increase incremental sales as much as 60%. Salespeople should smile and slowly nod their head up and down as they suggest an item to a customer. You’ll be blown away by the fact that over 60% of the time the customer nods right back with you and takes your suggestion! For instance:

Customer: I’d like a vodka/tonic please.
Server: Would you like to try Stolichnaya (nod) or Absolut (nod) in that, sir?
Customer: (mesmerized) Sure. Put em both in there!

The Sullivan Nod even works over the phone for room service orders. It is a powerful tool. I always teach it in my seminars (and it’s featured in our popular MYOB Live! DVD for servers) and I’ve got a file folder of no fewer than 200 hundred letters from salespeople and their managers testifying to its effectiveness.

Wow. And it’s not just with Mr. Sullivan. There’s also a Wikipedia entry that describes this persuasion breakthrough. And it’s confirmed at thatsfit.com, correntewire.com, and boingboing.net, among others (search on “Sullivan’s nod” for more links at your pleasure).

However, not everyone is falling for this one. Some commentors on these postings are deeply suspicious and see only a persuasion benefit for Mr. Sullivan . . . especially regarding that claim of effectiveness over the phone – how do you smile and nod, telepathically?

So, Steve, persuasion maven, dispenser of wisdom, truth, and the scientific method, what’s your take on the Sullivan Nod.

To quote the immortal Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein, “IT . . . COULD . . . WORK!”`

Really.

I have not read a good scientific study that tested the Sullivan Nod exactly as described here, but I’ve read enough good research on the variables in play here to know that this is not fool’s gold. For example, I believe that if you ran an experiment that compared the same waiter doing either the Sullivan Nod or a No Nod script identical in all other respects that customers would be more likely to pick the targeted option following the Sullivan Nod. I’d expect the effect size to be at least 10% and if you added another variable like distraction or cognitive load, the effect might increase 30%. To be even more explicit, if the No Nod group chose the target option 20% of the time, I’d predict the basic Sullivan Nod effect to be 30% (20% + 10% = 30%, right?). And, if we had that distraction or load variable, the Sullivan Nod would increase to 50% (20% + 30% = 50%).

The Sullivan Nod operates as an information cue or indicator or suggestion that would affect customers who don’t have or can’t form a strong preference. The smile and nod simply direct the customer to a path of least resistance and if you read the consumer research literature you know that most of the time customers in service situations when faced with a lot of choices often don’t care and can be easily directed with something as simple as a smile.

The Sullivan Nod also contains affective properties. Smiles and nods typically generate favorable affect in both the sender and the receiver, and again, under circumstances where the customer doesn’t have a strong preference, these mild affect moves can direct action.

It’s also possible that there are differences depending upon the gender of the senders and the receivers and the context of the service. Yada-yada, I could go on forever like this, so I’ll stop in the name of all that is good and merciful.

I’ll bet my money on the Sullivan Nod as a simple main effect. If you want to direct people to a particular item in a list of relatively equal options, consistent use of the Sullivan Nod should produce observable benefits to you. You just have to do it ALL THE TIME.

But, you can’t smile and nod over the phone, so Mr. Sullivan is cleverly working us on that one, encouraging us to get him to explain . . . which I’m sure he’ll be happy to do. Maybe won’t even charge a fee. Maybe.

Have to be vocalics.

Wow, are people hating on Sarah Lacy of “Business Week.” She conducted a live interview of Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg in front of a large audience at the Austin South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW). She got the kind of response I experience in nightmares. Here’s a sampling.

I want to get video of the uncomfortable keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week’s Sarah Lacy at SXSW today so I can use it as an object lesson in my journalism classes about how not do conduct an interview. From buzzmachine with Jeff Jarvis.

Lacy’s interview w/Zuckerberg truly embarassing (for her) and awkward (for him and for audience). From valleywag commentor.

“Stop Sarah Lacy before she kills again,” pleaded MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. Also from valleywag.

. . . on-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion. From c|net news.

If you do your own search on Ms. Lacy’s name and Mark Zuckerberg, you will find even more graphic evaluations in the same vein. Finally, you can see and hear Ms. Lacy’s take on the interview and audience response to it here. She talks like a Big Kid who can take it, but she was definitely aware of the angst in the audience.

First of all this case is a fabulous illustration of the Internet and the world wide weirdness it creates. This is an event that most people did not experience, but are able to discuss through all the mechanisms available only through the Net. We can read real time blogs (text and images and sounds and video), learn about it from news aggregators like Google’s, and perhaps uncover it from traditional media sources like print, radio, and TV. Finally, virtually any human with a computer can comment (as I’m doing here) and possibly interact with other humans in real time and virtual real time. The Internet is a different medium, but remember, we’re all still the same humans we were before.

Second, this event is a massive illustration of attribution theory. Briefly, this theory looks at what factors determine how people view and explain themselves and other people in social situations. It strongly suggests that our perceptions and evaluations are widely and wildly variable not on the basis of physical reality, but of our role in the situation.

Consider, now, the “situation” here. We have Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, a booming Internet business in social networking. Sarah Lacy, a journalist with the respected magazine, “Business Week,” is interviewing him in front of a large audience who knows that an audience Q&A session will follow the formal interview. This all takes place at the South by Southwest Interactive, a “music, film, and interactive conference and festival” held annually in Austin, Texas. Now, add the fact that “we” (meaning me and most of you) did not see the event and have for now only news and blog reports and comments.

This situation contains people who are guaranteed to be at cross-purposes with each other. The audience is part of a large and diverse festival that pulls together music, film, and interactives in both a festival and conference format. The audience itself is composed of people with widely diverse expectations and goals.

Now add Zuckerberg and Lacy.   Zuckerberg is trying to run one of those dream/nightmare Internet businesses. The “dream” is that he is famous and rich and powerful. The nightmare is that this thing grew into a monster in just a couple years and Zuckerberg is just 23 years old and definitely swimming with much older and craftier sharks. It could all go south like Pets.com in a flash. What do you think Mark’s goals are?

And, Ms. Lacy. She’s a professional print journalist with a respected weekly magazine. She gets paid to find and make news and here she is with one of the biggest news makers in the world today and she’s got him onstage in front of a live audience. She will not have to worry about being accused of fabricating or twisting things that Zuckerberg says. Literally hundreds of people will witness his response to her questions. What do you think that Sarah wanted here?

I’d argue (until I see the video of the interview) that most of the negative evaluation you can find is based on the crossways goals of the people involved. Lacy played the journalist doing a live interview. Zuckerberg played the web wizard trying to swim with the sharks while keeping the fishes happy. The audience wanted . . . gee whiz . . . you could probably find as many different goals and expectations as there were different people.

The negative evaluations I’m reading are coming from the more web literate and technically oriented observers who all appear to be projecting themselves as actors in the situation they are observing. In other words, they are telling us what they would have done if they had been in Sarah Lacy’s role. Except, the SXSW planners didn’t invite them to interview Mark Zuckerberg, so these observers are truly engaged in fantasy projection.

One of my rules is this: You’re always the smartest person in the room when it’s not your job. I try to repeat this to myself like a mantra whenever I’m watching an event like the Zuckerberg-Lacy interview. Of course, I’d act differently than Sarah Lacy if I was up on the stage interviewing this guy. I’m Steve, not Sarah. And simply because I’d do it differently doesn’t mean it would work out any better.

One commenter suggested that Sarah Lacy had failed because she didn’t do any audience analysis prior to the event. The commenter advised that she could have contacted a sample of people (through the ease of the Internet) and gotten a sense of what the audience wanted to hear.

That’s great persuasion and communication advice and I heartily agree. Unless, of course, your goal is not to please that audience, but rather to make and get news for your magazine. And, how can any observer expect that Sarah Lacy, professional journalist with “Business Week,” is NOT interested in a story for her magazine and instead wanting to please the local audience?

Think about it.

Lacy’s behavior in the interview as it is described in currently available sources, sounds like an aggressive journalistic style where she is trying to make her target say and do things the target would prefer to avoid. That’s journalism, kids. Playing nice with the target to get cheers from an audience of SXSW participants is not journalism. Get Ryan Seacrest if you want that.

In summary, understand the much of the hubbub here can be understood from a great persuasion and social psychology theory, Attribution. We’re seeing here a great illustration of the actor-observer effect which demonstrates that our perceptions and evaluations of social events depends upon our role.

Once again we face the menace of new techology dividing the generations. The NYTimes runs a story today detailing fractured family relations, split asunder over cell phones, text messaging, computers, and that annoying shorthand (ykwim, dy?). The writer, Laura Holson, does a nice job stitching quotes from both teams of combatants and manages to get an Ivy League expert from MIT to provide a scientific overview. Did you know that kids are using new media differently than their parents? And that this is going to make those kids different from those parents?

In my previous life as a professor, I taught a large lecture (400 students) intro course on mass media and communication for 12 years. Given my penchant for quantitative and experimental tomfoolery, the course took a strong social science perspective, meaning that if you don’t have theory, randomization, and lots of numbers (including Greek symbols), it’s a bunch of opinionated crap you could get leaning over the fence with your neighbor. For a geek like me, reading such technical stuff is actually interesting, life changing, and perhaps the ticket to eternal salvation!

One of the most curious findings in the social science research on media and communication, especially in America over the past 100 years is the recurring theme of New Media Divides the Generations. It is a smaller example in the genre of topics that ebb and flow, like climate change. One of the strongest research programs ever conducted was the Payne Fund studies aimed exactly at understanding how New Media pitted young versus old. Here’s the fun part: The studies were done in the late 1920s.

Briefly, the Payne Fund was a nonprofit foundation, much like the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations of today, and it provided financial support to a wide range of scholars and scientists who banded together in a loose group to investigate the impact of the relatively new media of the time, motion pictures. The group produced an eight volume series of books that is still available in libraries and bookstores. What makes this series an amazing intellectual achievement is the range of talent, the variety of questions asked, the scope of methods employed, and the general cooperation of these different research teams. In its own miniature way, the Payne Fund studies were like those much larger and more famous research efforts, the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb or the Human Genome Project. It is an effort at Big Research and they did it in the 1920s.

My favorite from the series was written by Louis Thurstone and Ruth Peterson. It described a long series of experimental field studies of the impact of motion pictures on social attitudes, stereotyping, and prejudice. (If you study either or both media and attitudes, you’d find this book compelling. The methodology is rock solid and the results are as meaningful today as they were then. Of course, it lacks an fMRI measurement, so it may be a complete fantasy. Maybe you could write a grant application to replicate these studies with the latest toy in neuroscience. Might actually get funded even if it makes no contribution to theory development or practical application, but, hey, isn’t that the nature of funded research?)

Briefly Thurstone reported what we still find today: More exposure to a message creates more change and the direction of the message (positive or negative) determines the change. Thus, if people receive a lot of positive messages about a different ethnic or racial group, those people will have more positive attitudes. (Almost rocket science, isn’t it?)

If you trudge over to your favorite research library, you’ll find these books way back in dusty, ill-lit shelves, perhaps even in some ancient reserve building off-campus. Wear a breathing filter mask because you will be exposed to particulate matter from past! When you locate the books, just pull one down and start reading. You’ll actually be a little bit high from breathing in that old air and debris, plus you’ll be learning! Or else contracting tuberculosis!

The main point from these studies is that media messages did affect kids, and adults, too, and in similar and different ways. (Kids usually showed more extreme responses.) And, you’ll be struck at the identical worries people expressed back then to what the New York Times expresses today. In fact, there is a recurring pattern of media effects if you look over the long history of media in America: Kids embrace new media while adults eye it suspiciously. And universally, with every technological innovation you will find a chorus of parents claiming that the New Thing makes kids rude and impolite. Here’s a quote from today’s Times story to illustrate:

Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and hand-held video game players can be to family relations. “I see kids text under the table at the restaurant,” he said. “They don’t teach them etiquette anymore.” Some children, he said, watch videos in restaurants.

You can substitute any Old Media (movies, radio, TV) for the New Media (cellphones, iPods, handhelds) and you can reach back into the Payne Fund and find somebody saying the same thing about kids back then.

My point in this, beyond playing the nagging expert who’s smarter than you because he is willing to risk tuberculosis while going to the library, is to point out the false conflict that often arises in people’s perceptions of daily life. We tend to focus so strongly on our own point of view in real time that we cannot or do not step back and think more broadly about the social and cognitive events we are judging. In persuasion terms, I’d call this an illustration of both biased processing and attribution theory. First, we tend to find what we look for (biased processing – those rude kids nowadays) and second, we tend to explain things with convenient, top of the head reasons (attribution – it’s the damn cellphone!).

If you take a seriously nuanced view on New Media (wouldn’t you expect that from the New York Times?!?) you’ll find that there are reliable patterns of response to it. Sure, younger people seem to “get it” faster and they make more “creative” use of the media compared to older people. Yet, at the same time when you dig deeper, you’ll find kids who hate the New Media and won’t use it unless required; and you’ll find adults who are the inventors and early adopters who always seem to be living like Max Headroom, 20 minutes into the future. Media effects are rarely large, simple, and direct even if that’s the party line at the New York Times.

And one fact never changes: Those youngsters nowadays are just simply rude!