A new study on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has revealed that stories written by children are much more popular than those written by adults. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford in England. The main reason behind this finding is that children have a tendency to share information about their lives with others more easily. While adults tend to prefer keeping their social interactions within the confines of the traditional family unit and/or within the comfort of their homes, children are quite happy to broadcast their every thought and feeling to the world via social media. You can view here in this article more details about The Issue of Child Story Books Re-Revisited.
Dr. Julia Cameron and Dr. Kevin Pelham of Oxford University did this research between April and June of this year. They used the social networking sites to collect data from users who had completed online forms to rate their friends or relatives. Each participant was asked to provide a profile that contained contact details, hobbies, interests and any references that could be made. This information was then stored in the form of a spreadsheet for the researchers to look at. They combined this information with data on reification - how people represent themselves in the public eye - to establish what types of posts on social media sites are more popular than others.
Interestingly, when it came to reification and what children find more appealing about their online friends, the results were quite different. For example, it was found that these stories written by children were more likely to contain reference to bodily processes, such as digestion, as well as changes in appearance such as growth and maturation. Also, it was found that a greater number of them contained a call-to-action. This means that there was a call to action - either an action required to be taken or an invitation to act. Dr. Julia Cameron and her team were able to conclude that this was down to children's need to connect what they were reading to real life events.
As you can imagine, this all poses serious questions about the role that Banality, Scrooge, Tweedledee and the entire unholiness of academic publishing have played in all this. In fact, some experts have suggested that Dr. Cameron's research may have actually been part of a larger conspiracy against academic publishing. This suggestion is based on the fact that she and her research team did not use the word "scrooge" in their title, but instead used a variation of the word "unclean" as their title.
The implications of all this go far beyond the replication of scientific journals and peer reviewed articles. For one thing, it casts doubt upon the validity of scientific claims and work. For another, it is highly suspicious of the methodology of those involved in founding the University of Oxford and its many satellite institutions, all of which have received funding from the British government's research arm, the Medical Research Council.
The question that I have as a result of all of this is whether or not the entire institution of higher learning is itself guilty of intellectual dishonesty. In the volume 7 issue of Time Magazine, psychiatrist Dr. Helen Thomas makes a strong case that the whole academic establishment in the UK, and indeed the globe, have a problem with honesty when it comes to publishing research and claims. She further charges that this dishonesty is facilitated by the fact that most institutions of higher learning do not engage in effective and honest peer review. In her view, academic journals should be more concerned with publishing only those research papers that are well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. In my opinion, they have a lot of work to do on that end. If you want to know more about this topic, then click here: https://www.britannica.com/art/childrens-literature.
