Photoshop Legos

If I knew anything about making Photoshop plugins -- or knew anyone in the company, I would try to invent a Lego plugin.

Photoshop has all kinds of wonderful tools for doing all kinds of wonderful things to communicate all kinds of wonderful ideas. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could use the "Lego" tool, apply it to photos, and make the content of the photos look like Lego sculptures? This would save the labor of actually having to make such sculptures, serve as a means of promoting Legos, and give Photoshoppers something to waste their time doing. I can't imagine a better waste of time!

The Innards of Research

This blog is a dissertation "Lego box," meaning that pretty much anything that I could use in a dissertation belongs in this. It is certainly not limited to the theory, methods, or topic at hand, but it serves as a repository for ideas and considerations. Certainly not everything in this blog will go into my dissertation, but between now and whenever the thing is due, it will make a great "storage facility" for stuff I don't want to forget. For a dissertation you need to have several things.

First, you need to have a theory with which to work. If you're building a theory, you need to have at least some theoretical support to provide assumptions upon which you base your research questions and hypotheses, and, ultimately, the methods you use to go about making knowledge. Perhaps you can use a model or a phenomenon previously observed. Regardless, you need some kind of a hunch that could explain your observations so that you can potentially disprove it. I won't get too far into it, but that's how science works: by disproving things.

I am currently in the literature review phase of my externship. My intention is to use a good portion of my externship work in my dissertation. It is therefore necessary to really dig in and make sure my bases are fully-covered. Entertainment theory, unfortunately, is more like a broad set of ideas, models, and assumptions than a clearcut theory. It draws from many mass media theories such as Uses and Gratifications, Selective Exposure, and Cultivation, as well as theories borrowed from psychology: You could also apply Diffusion of Innovations, Cognitive Dissonance, Framing, Agenda Setting and many others.

Second, you have to some means of collecting data. It may be an experiment, a survey, or some other manner of taking measurements, or it could be through talking to people to find out what they're thinking or doing. You also want to describe your method in such detail that somebody else could come along and replicate your work. Others may or may not come to the same conclusions from replicating your work, but you need to spend time writing about it so that replication is possible. You also want to acknowledge the limitations of your work. Acknowledging limitations opens the door for other people to later fill in the gaps and ultimately contribute to the process of building theory.

Third, you need all the support and guidance you can get. These are more like logistical requirements than a structural requirements, so I'm not going to go too deep into it -- at least today. But it certainly is worth mentioning. Before writing anything you should always consider the logistical issues, such as timeframe for research and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

You probably need lots more than just these three things I've addressed, but it's late and I think these pretty much cover everything. Most of the Legos I come up with will fit nicely into one of these three areas. As time progresses, I will also begin to throw Legos out, or exclude them from plans for the final product, though they might remain in the blog.

The Brain Lego

My wife is an incredible woman and insisted I post this. Not too sure why, but she's brilliant and following her advice is generally the right thing to do. It came from this website.

The "TV Makes You Feel Smart Lego"

I was watching a Matt Damon or Leonardo Dicaprio movie the other day. Unfortunately, I can't tell those two apart, but it doesn't matter.

From my God-like omniscient view of the action, years of experience with "the formulae" doled out by movie and TV studios, and knowing the plot is quite predictable, unlike those "choose your own adventure" books, I decided I was smart. Brilliant even. The hero couldn't figure out that the administration was using the war for political purposes at home, but I sure could. Cuz I'm smart. Brilliant even. Yep, I watched them string him along for an hour and a half knowing full well what was going on. Cuz I'm smart. Brilliant even.

People like being made to feel smart. Brilliant even. That's exactly what television and movies do -- they make us feel somehow intellectually or morally superior to the characters. I mean, who hasn't watched an episode of Jerry Springer and felt better about their own screwed up relationships? Who didn't figure out that lots of different groups had come and gone from the Island over the years and the Dharma Initiative was just a more recent one? The omniscient perspective entertainment producers give us appeals to that prideful and egotistical arrogance that most of us carry, even if in small amounts. They know exactly how to make us feel to keep coming back for more.

For a grad student perpetually staring at a stack of unread books and articles, I like to feel smart every once in a while, rather than intimidated by bodies of knowledge I may never fully understand. Actually, I like to feel smart all the time, and Stargate SG1 readily delivers that emotion to me. This explains why I can sit through 2 discs (8 episodes) in one day. It makes me feel like a genius. Who doesn't want to feel like a genius?

I don't know that any of the bits and pieces of entertainment theory have addressed this, but I'm certain someone has noticed at some point in time. Now that I'm aware of this phenomenon, I will be on the lookout for it.

The Methods Lego

Collecting enough Legos to build a dissertation is the ultimate goal of this blog, but I have a more pressing issue at the moment. That issue is the "externship."

The externship is a vague and shadowy requirement. The student receives 9 hours of credit and can either work as an intern and write a paper about the experience or, as most student do, write two full papers for submission to conferences or journals. I believe the expectation is that they be submitted to journals so that the student has a (required) shot at getting a publication or two before hitting the job market. My primary intention is to use it as an opportunity to break ground on the dissertation with any publications being extra fruits of my labors.

Like other independent studies, theses, and dissertations, it requires a proposal and some sort of approval by a faculty member. In my case, I won't actually be enrolling for the credit hours until Spring 2011, but want to at least have an approved proposal before registering in December.

My externship started as a proposal to explore Internet privacy policies. At the time I had it all cooked up (December 2009), I was actually enthusiastic about it. I had read a good deal of new media literature, various articles on privacy, and even had a sample for a content analysis. The idea was to measure various aspects of it and determine whether it fit in with the FCC's recommendations, etc., etc. It seemed like all was well with the world and I'd be ready to go in June of this year.

Things didn't work out as planned. First, by the time I had read 3 or 4 of these incredibly boring documents, I had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. If you give out any personal information to anybody online, you really have no control over how that information is used. The idea of online privacy is an illusion created and maintained by the mere existence of some document claiming to be a policy. The truth is, the privacy policies I read basically say the provider of a service can and will use your information any way they see fit. A common statement goes something like this: "We will never ever ever ever ever share your data with anyone except our partners and we have no control over what they do with it. If our company is bought, the data we have stored goes to the new owner, and we can't control what they do with it."

On top of that, I lack the mettle to slog through these things. I literally have a ream's worth of privacy policies printed out but I can't bring myself to dig in and actually read more than a page at a time. It became apparent very quickly that 1) there's no such thing as online privacy, 2) reading about the illusion is a waste of time, and 3) I can't crank 2 research papers out of something so -- disengaging.

So, just as any other good grad student would do, I panicked. No longer did I have a proposal for an externship. I was dead in the water.

But fate was on my side: I still had plenty of time. Over the years I've also absorbed a good deal of cognitive dissonance, selective exposure theory, mood management, and the like. I find these types of theories interesting and enjoy working with them. In today's information-rich world, selective exposure is particularly relevant -- not so much as a means of alleviating cognitive dissonance, but as a means of information processing.

Then, as luck would have it, The Psychology of Entertainment by Bryant and Vorderer (2006) fell from the sky like a beam of sunlight. I have spent the past month poring over this book, among others, reading it in excruciating (probably way too much) detail, and have come up with an annotated bibliography upon which I can base a decent review of the literature.

I'm now at the point of trying to develop some good research questions, find gaps in the literature, etc. Unfortunately, entertainment theory isn't as developed as other theories, such as diffusion of innovations, social learning theory, etc. Instead, it is more of a collection of hunches, models, observations, and ideas rooted in other theories. A Lego box is the perfect analogy for the current state of the theory -- a collection of vital parts that haven't been put together very well. (If I'm mistaken about this, I may be in a good deal of trouble!)

The challenge at hand is in developing research questions whose answers can bridge those pieces into something more coherent. To do that I need to narrow my focus, zero in on a topic or two. Hopefully once I do that, the rest will fall into place, and I'll have not only an externship to complete, but the beginnings of a dissertation as well.

Change Your Environment, Change Your Mood

One of the key assumptions of Zillmann and Bryant's (1985 or so) mood management theory is that people tend to arrange their environments in manners that help them to maintain positive moods and minimize aversive moods. We are hedonistic animals; the road goes on forever and the party never ends.

In a media rich world filled with all sorts of devices for delivering content, located in all sorts of places, entertainment is inevitably a major component of our environments. It is not unusual to hear Robert Earl Keen coming out of the speaker when we take our car to the mechanic. The electronics section at Wal-Mart assaults us with entire walls of entertainment as we stop in to pick up the new Robert Earl Keen CD and catch glorious 52" glimpses of his latest music video. Thankfully, the DMV has added flat screens to pacify us with Robert Earl Keen while we wait in line to renew our driver's licenses.

Ubiquitous Robert Earl Keen may not always be our first choice for entertainment. Instead, we may prefer pre-Y2K Pat Green. No problem -- our iPod, iPhone, laptop, or other device gives us that option, and therefore, an opportunity to create a favorable environment that alleviates the shock of an expensive CV joint repair, or the boredom while waiting at the DMV. Personal computers, televisions, etc. at home, and wireless devices, when we're away from home, give us a media component in our environments over which we have a great degree of control.

A process people use in creating these favorable environments is selective exposure. More specifically, the process of selective exposure determines the content to which people incorporate into their environments through their gadgets. Various other determinants of selective exposure have been identified, some of which range from the ideological, demographic, experience/memory, perception, type and availability of technology, cognitive dissonance, personality, etc. These determinants are important and, more importantly, measureable, but as I mentioned previously, about 80% of decisions are based on affective states. Now I just need to find a concrete scientific study that backs up that 80% number taken from The Persuaders.

What should I take away after writing this blog post? It is very simple.

The default environment provided by companies, education, and other institutions is likely to have an entertainment component. Therefore, entertainment is close to being ubiquitous in our world. If that entertainment component is not to our liking, we can pull out our cell phones, iPods, and laptops and find something that is to our liking.

Knowing this raises a barrage of questions.
1) What effects does ubiquitous entertainment have on our general emotional states?
2) What happens when the power goes out and we no longer have electronic means of managing our moods?
3) What effects does ubiquitous entertainment and control of the entertainment component of our environments have on child development?
4) Is selective exposure the new opiate of the masses?
5) What effects does ubiquitous and/or selective entertainment have on our political functioning?
6) Brave New World or 1984?
7) Is Robert Earl Keen really that entertaining?

Mood Management

The other day I was watching a PBS Frontline special called The Persuaders. The Persuaders is the type of thing you see in an undergraduate-level intro to PR or advertising course and documents how research contributes to persuasive content. One of the more interesting parts of the special was a segment on political research. Researchers used focus groups to figure out what political candidates should feeding their audiences -- I know, nothing new. What was new to me was this number: 80% of our voting (and presumably other decisions) is based on emotions. This is important; it gives us a root around which we can explore the fertile soil for more roots.

It isn't that big of a jump to say that our entertainment decisions are also guided by emotions, and, in fact, there is a VAST body of research that lends support to this. Though many, many studies contributed to the idea, the seminal study on entertainment as mood management came from Zillmann and Bryant (1985). As it is quite late and I don't have a copy of this book chapter at home, the details of their experiment won't go into this blog post (I know, I know -- poor-quality half measure #1). The point of their research, however, is that people use media to manage their moods. More specifically, people are hedonists and, 1) use entertainment as a means of maximizing pleasurable moods, and, 2) use entertainment as a means of minimizing unpleasant moods. In other words, bored people seek out exciting fare, angry people seek out comedy, etc. Later research suggests that people sometimes like to prolong sad moods by listening to sad music, but again (half measure #2) I left all that stuff at the office where it can do no one any good at 1am. Regardless, here's the point: the decisions we make surrounding entertainment are somehow geared to satisfy inner emotional needs or desires.

After reading a good 20 publications on entertainment theory, 30+ on selective exposure, and another 20 or so on cognitive dissonance, I feel like I am aware of most of the basic stuff forming the primordial soup of entertainment theory. I remind the reader (read myself) that entertainment theory isn't really a theory at this point; it's more of a jumble of moving parts that suggest scientists will soon come up with something less rickety.

The key thing to take away from this blog post is that emotions form the bulk of the basis of our entertainment decisions. Sure other things contribute to our selectivity: demographics, memory, availability of content, etc. But the emotional and hedonistic animals we are wants to be satisfied emotionally.

Anything else is beyond the scope of this post, but believe me, there's A LOT more out there.

Morality and Television

I never quite "got it" when Putnam (1996) blamed television for a lack of civic engagement in America. I couldn't quite grasp why this was such a bad thing -- what's wrong with choosing television over other people with their annoying rants, raves, problems, and insecurities?

Then it hit me: our sense of morality comes from our interactions with other people. Through actually interacting (and not in our fantasy head world of TV characters) we learn right and wrong. Of course the definitions of right and wrong will vary group to group, but the point remains. We learn from other people, and social learning theory addresses this.

TV, on the other hand, is divisive. It warmly washes over us with its representations of people and events and gives us something to look at other than other people and (horrors!) ourselves. Our senses of right and wrong become blurred in our isolation from others, or, at best, eventually adopted from the behaviors we see among television characters.

A friend of mine said that the first thing to go before an empire collapses is a common sense of morality. TV may have influenced our morality. The next thing to go is the monetary system. Locked in our homes feeding off imaginary interactions available through Netflix and the Internet, we are emotionally secure from watching the dollar collapse. The world's going to hell, and we feel great, so to speak.

I would call that a powerful media effect: when television feeds our emotions to the extent that we don't care about financial collapse around us.

Or maybe I just watch too much TV.