Re: nettime epistemological crisis for US tail-chasing politics
Those interested in the problems with poll sampling should look at some of the political methodology research on the issue. The most salient paper I know of is Gerber and Green's Enough Already with Random Digit Dialing: Can Registration- Based Sampling Improve the Accuracy of Election Forecasts?: http://www.yale.edu/isps/publications/regsamp.pdf -- fh # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime epistemological crisis for US tail-chasing politics
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Fri 10/01/04 at 01:45 PM -0700): I'm not certain Breslin has all facts straight. The NY Times specifically claims to use random number generators to phone pollees, and if they really do, that should include cell phones. Breslin's and the NYT's respective claims aren't exclusive. The numbers may be generated randomly, but that doesn't preclude filtering the resulting pool against known criteria: commercial numbers, emergency and public-service numbers, fax machines, pagers, dead numbers, etc. Until quite recently, filtering out mobile phones would have been quite easy because the structure of the number delegations was so crude (an extreme example being an entire area code in the NYC area set aside for mobile devices, 917). The delegation patterns are becoming much more obscure for all kinds of reasons: numbers that formerly fell within landline delegations are now being recycled into mobile delegations; and legislation about number portability is blurring lines between landlines, mobiles, and VOIP lines. But it's not like the telcos that hand out these numbers don't know what these numbers 'are' in contractual terms, especially with mobile phones; and you can rest assured that pollsters have direct or indirect access to that info. In any event, Breslin is just reporting John Zogby's critique. A different question is whether potential Kerry voters and potential Bush voters are equally likely to answer the phone, either because they don't want to be charged for a cell call while a pollster offers along list of questions, or because they screen calls or are out and about and available less, etc. The Gallup poll claims more Republicans than Democrats among its pollees, and that seems odd, quite possibly indicating a biased polling method. but Ted's remarks below seem valid. Uninvited/impersonal calls to mobile phones remains, amazingly, a big no-no in the US. Cheers, T # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime epistemological crisis for US tail-chasing politics
Coming in the future is the fact that with VOIP, you're allowed to have a phone number with any area code anywhere ... so you're getting situations where people living in Tokyo have NYC area codes, which when it gets bigger is going to foobar phone polling like nobody's business. On Oct 2, 2004, at 11:08 AM, t byfield wrote: Uninvited/impersonal calls to mobile phones remains, amazingly, a big no-no in the US. I wonder if this taboo is eroding. In the last few months I've received two telemarketing calls -- from a bot, no less -- from Earthlink at my cell phone which has a very unambiguously cell-only area code. Francis Hwang http://fhwang.net/ AIM: francisrhizome # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime epistemological crisis for US tail-chasing politics
[as poll results in the US election have become more erratic and the Dems/liberals/progressives/whatevers have put together a more effective media machine, noise about the problems that mobile phones presents for the process of 'manufacturing con- sent' is getting louder. venerable moral journo jimmy breslin weighed in a few weeks ago, demolishing the received wisdom that landline-based polls continue to present anything more than the biases of a fading techno-social constellation. but, then again, it seems like pretty much the same could be said of the elections that the polls try to predict. cheers, t] http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres163973220sep16,0,2532038,print.column Making call on sham of political polling Jimmy Breslin September 16, 2004 Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool. Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are indolent salesmen of falsehoods. This is because these political polls are done by telephone. Land-line telephones, as your house phone is called. The telephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington. There is no way to poll cell phone users, so it isn't done. Not one cell phone user has received a call on their cell phone asking them how they plan to vote as of today. Out of 168 million, anything can happen. Midway through election night, these stern-faced network announcers suddenly will be frozen white and they have to give a result: It appears that the winner of the election tonight is ... Milford J. Schmitt of New Albany, Ind. He presently has 56 percent of the vote, placing him well ahead of John Kerry, George Bush and another newcomer, Gibson D. Mills of Corvallis, Ore. It appears the nation's voting habits have been changed unbeknownst to us. Mr. Schmitt was asked what party he is in. He answered, 'The winning party.' Those who have both cell phones and land lines still might have been polled the old way - on their land lines by people making phone calls with scientifically weighted questions and to targeted areas for some big pollster. These results are announced by the pollsters: CBS-New York Times poll shows George Bush and John Kerry in a statistical dead heat in the presidential race. Beautiful. There are 169 million phones that they didn't even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham. The big pollster doesn't know what he has. The television and newspaper brilliants put it out like it is a baseball score. Except not one person involved can say that they truly know what they are talking about. I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them, John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. He began with what he calls blue highway polls, sheriffs' races in Onandaga and Jefferson counties in upstate New York. The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial, Zogby was saying. It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong. Zogby points out that you don't know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters. And the great page-one presidential polls don't come close to reflecting how these younger voters say they might vote. The majority of them use cell phones and nobody ever asks them anything. Common sense would say that the majority of the 18 to 25 who do vote would vote for the Democrat. The people who say they want to vote for Bush are generally in the older age brackets, and they don't have as much trouble with the lies told by Bush and his people. The older people also use cell phones much less because they can't hear on the things and when trying to dial a number on these midget instruments they stand there for an hour and get nothing done. The young people on cell phones appear not to be listening and they hear every syllable. They punch out a number without looking. They are quicker, and probably smarter at this time, and almost doubtlessly more in favor of Kerry than Bush. Older people complain about Kerry's performance as a candidate. Younger people don't want to get shot at
Re: nettime epistemological crisis for US tail-chasing politics
I'm not certain Breslin has all facts straight. The NY Times specifically claims to use random number generators to phone pollees, and if they really do, that should include cell phones. A different question is whether potential Kerry voters and potential Bush voters are equally likely to answer the phone, either because they don't want to be charged for a cell call while a pollster offers along list of questions, or because they screen calls or are out and about and available less, etc. The Gallup poll claims more Republicans than Democrats among its pollees, and that seems odd, quite possibly indicating a biased polling method. but Ted's remarks below seem valid. Best, Michael On Oct 1, 2004, at 8:40 AM, t byfield wrote: demolishing the received wisdom that landline-based polls continue to present anything more than the biases of a fading techno-social constellation. but, then again, it seems like pretty much the same could be said of the elections that the polls try to predict. cheers, t] http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny- nybres163973220sep16,0,2532038,print.column ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
