The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does nothing to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.
————————————–
This is a problem in Worcester, said Robert F. Pezzella, Worcester public schools’ executive assistant to the superintendent for school safety and violence prevention. He said students sometimes send threats to each other in text messages, which can lead to physical fights. Similar threats are sometimes made on social networking Web sites, like MySpace and Facebook, he said, and police have been called to schools many times to mediate conflicts that started in cyberspace.
“There’s an increase in text messaging going on,” he said. “This is a problem we encounter. … Students tend to become very loose in their text messaging. Sometimes these threats that are happening as a result of text messaging carry into school the next day.”
This story in todays T&G about the increased use of mobile devices by young people should have ended at paragraph three:
That came as a surprise to Kathy Martin, director of technology for Westboro Public Schools. “They prefer to text now than to have conversations.”
If your title is Director of Technology, for anything, and you’re surprised by the number of young people who have and use mobile phones you’re doing it wrong. When do we get a front page story story about municipal officials who are completely out of touch with and therefore unprepared to deal with the simple lifestyle changes we’ve seen over the last decade that kids now consider common place? That story would be Pulitzer material.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Misleading vividness = hysteria; hysterical.