Today I'm "Blego-ing."

It would be nice to wake up one day, say to myself "I'm going to write a dissertation on _____," do it, and be done with it. Simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Remember when you were a kid and had a box for storing Legos? Mine was cardboard and dog-eared. The box served as a means of keeping the damn things out of the carpet so you didn't step on them barefooted. It also helped keep them out of the vacuum cleaner. The Lego box offers a great analogy for what I'm trying to do with this blog. I want to store my ideas, maybe mull them over to an extent, perhaps reflect. The greater purpose, however, is storage. I would like to build an argument based on these ideas, add clips and snippets of other media (e.g. videos, podcasts, links, etc.) but I need a box in which to keep them. It's also nice to get comments, as any grad student will tell you they often get so submerged in their work they can no longer see their errors in thinking and writing.

This blog is it.

Furthering the Lego box analogy, some of the Legos I currently have in my collection are these: a worldview rooted deeply in selective exposure theory, a sparse bibliography of important work that contributes to that worldview, bits and pieces of previous work I've done that may or may not be pertinent to the dissertation, and a few general assumptions. Those assumptions are:

1) people cultivate themselves into a fragmented society by selectively exposing themselves to various media.

2) Selective exposure is both a dependent and an independent variable; it is a cognitive process and a result of many other independent variables (ideology, mood management, information processing, cognitive dissonance, etc.)

3) A fragmented society is generally viewed as bad for democracy. On the other hand, an ideologically homogenous society is mythological and sounds pretty boring anyway.

4) Gerbner, et al. claim that television effects come from the actual format of television rather than the content. I totally disagree. Media content does matter, and like our tastes, it shapes us in many different ways.

Here's another list of lovely, simple, and concise bullet points to help me further define the chore at hand:

1) Incubate my worldview. Get it down into a series of bullet points that work together to explain how I see the world.

2) Examine enough literature on culture and selective exposure that I can create a series of questions and testable hypotheses whose answers contribute to our body of science and the understanding of the theory.

3) Maintain a collection of all the potentially pertinent information so later I can reorganize it all into coherent chapters.