Horton & Wohl: The Classic Lego

Research into parasocial interactions between television audience members and characters they see on television has an extensive history. Horton & Wohl (1956) provided the largely descriptive yet seminal work on parasocial interactions.

Actors and audiences both have roles to fill and relationships are achieved through building a bond of intimacy. Horton & Wohl (1956) note that the mass media give viewers (and listeners) an illusion of face-to-face communication with the performer, and call this “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship” (p. 215). The performer is a “persona,” and the persona works within various technical devices to make a continuing and regular connection with the audience. This connection is achieved when the performer successfully duplicates the gestures and conversational style their character would use in a social situation to create the illusion of intimacy. The authors also discuss breaking through the fourth wall, but they treat it as a general goal rather than a gimmick. For talk shows, they may be correct, but for fictional programming, their assessment does not generally apply.

The authors argue that producers use numerous devices to coach audience attitudes, such as face-to-face interactions between the studio audience and a persona; technicians, guests, and professional assistants acting as subordinates to the persona, reading excerpts from fan mail. Within this complex set of relationships among actors, the audience is coached through a type of showbiz propaganda to support the show and actors in whatever way the producers see fit. A key point made by Horton & Wohl (1956) links television viewing to social learning theory:

The spectator is instructed variously in the behaviors of the opposite sex, of people of higher and lower status, of people in particular occupations and professions. In a quantitative sense, by reason of the sheer volume of each instruction, this may be the most important aspect of the para-social experience, if only because each person’s roles are relatively few, while those of the others in his social world are very numerous. In this culture, it is evident that to be prepared to meet all exigencies of a changing social situation, no matter how limited it may be, could – and often does – require a great stream of plays and stories, advice columns and social how-to-do-it books. (p. 222)

Some fans become dissatisfied with mediated PSRs and seek to make contact with the actual persona. Fan mail is a measure of this, as well as fan clubs. The fan desires some sort of “real reciprocity which the para-social relation cannot provide” (p. 227). Cohen (2003), for example, argues that parasocial relationships lack the intensity of behavioral components of real-life relationships but exhibit many of the emotional aspects.

Horton & Wohl (1956) also suggested that people get to play roles in parasocial interactions that they do not normally get to play in real-life. Therefore, parasocial relationships offer a means of compensation for lack of some types (or even all types) of social interaction. Indeed, for most people, “the parasocial is complementary to normal social life … it provides a social milieu in which the everyday assumptions and understandings of primary group sociability are demonstrated and reaffirmed” (p. 223). Others who suffer from loneliness may seek out a sense of sociability through parasocial relationships with TV personae, and television producers are quite aware of this segment.

All text is copyrighted by Phillip Madison, so if you wanna use any of it, contact me first and/or use the following citation.

Madison, T.P. (2011). Horton & Wohl: The classic Lego. Phil's Dissertation Lego Box. Retrieved (DATE) from (LINK).

Script Theory

Nobody seems to know anything about script theory. It's elusive, but Honeycutt (2010) mentions that II theory has roots in it.

I am beginning to think that PSRs, like IIs, lead to creating scripts with which we use when dealing with other people. "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

But how do you measure how much scripting goes on within a person as a result of watching TV?

That's a helluva question to ask and an even helluver question to answer. But answer me this: how would these bad boys spark your imagination if you saw them quantified?

RQ1: Does television content become scripted through PSRs?
H1: PSRs function as a means of internal rehearsal.
H2: PSRs function to compensate for lack of interaction or IIs.
H3: PSRs function to help us maintain real-life relationships with real people.
H4: PSRs function as catharsis.
H5: PSRs produce scripts for dealing with conflict.
H6: PSRs function to help us better understand ourselves.

IIs and Parasocial Interactions: Tyco Blocks vs. Lego?

Scratch that last post. IIs and parasocial interactions are two different things (and still debated by some seminarians). IIs are imagined interactions, discussions with people in our heads with REAL people, with more of a practical purpose. Such purposes include rehearsal, learning about ourselves, planning, catharsis, and so forth. Parasocial interactions, however, may serve some of the same purposes, but are more related to fantasy. Specifically, they refer to interactions with people we don’t know or (sports legends, politicians) and particularly, fictional characters. What I claimed were interactions with the Stargate SG1 characters were actually parasocial interations rather than imagined interactions.

There may be a gap in the theoretical literature between the two, but my gut feeling tells me parasocial interactions have different functions, namely alleviating boredom, possibly managing mood, and a whole variety of things that aren’t necessarily geared to prepare us for conversation like IIs. Horton and Woll (1950something) got this line of research going and it’s on my reading list, but I haven’t looked into the functions and characteristics of such interactions yet. They are, however, on my comps reading list.

If nobody has done as thorough a job as Honeycutt (2003, 2010, etc.) has with IIs in developing theoretical axioms for parasocial relationships, then I might just have to consider it as a dissertation idea.

IIs

The other day I stumbled into a comm studies course by accident and it turned out to be a box of Legos unto itself. Divine intervention may have had something to do with it. I was hoping for a lightweight course and picked "interpersonal communication" out of the catalog. On week 3 this course has proven to be anything BUT lightweight: so far I've run into new theories, some higher level stats, and what I think is the statistical software equivalent of a Lego box: AMOS. So far I've just run a few confirmatory factor analyses in it (and don't believe for a second that I have a handle on interpreting the results)!) and I think its main application is structural equation modeling, which I know zip about.

The professor has published extensively on IIs (Imagined Interactions), which refers to the conversations we have with others -- in our heads. This is particularly relevant to entertainment theory, as we all have IIs in some form or another with the various characters in television shows.

I for one have imagined telling Colonel (more recently, "General") O'Neill -- with 2 l's -- Daniel Jackson, Teal'c, and Colonel Carter all about what the bad guys are planning, but they never listen. Thankfully, the writers of the show know this and give me exactly what I want at the end of the episode -- to be proven right in my assessments of the galactic situation. Stargate SG1 makes me feel smart, which is one of the habit-forming properties of any television show.

As described by Honeycutt (2010), there are several measurable characteristics to IIs: Frequency, proactivity (rehearsing for interaction), retroactivity (reviewing real interactions), variety, discrepancy (in real-life and IIs), self dominance (we like to be in charge), and specificity (details in the II). There are also several functions that IIs serve: relational maintenance, conflict linkage, rehearsal, self-understanding, catharsis, and compensation (for lack of interactions).
So there we have it: IIs as another Lego in the collection of moving parts that comprise entertainment theory.

As I dig deeper into IIs and all the theories they feed in to, I will certainly have to update this post or create new ones. For now, I'm just going to identify IIs as a Lego in the Dissertation Lego Box. They belong in there, but I still don't fully understand them.

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.

The Sixth Lego

As a doctoral student, everything you do is tied together. As one professor put it, "The secret of life is to try to make everything you do work for you." She wasn't kidding. In an ideal world, everything I wrote would all be easily scoopable into a book or something. The truth is, we get burned out on things we do. We get tired of looking at the same page (or 8,000-10,000 words) over and over again and we want to put it down and never look at it again.

Life doesn't afford us that luxury. It might for journalists, but not for doctoral students. We have to keep hammering away at various topics until eventually some publication accepts them. Only then can we put them down and move on. Ultimately, we have to make our work count. And we have to make it count as often as possible.

Until this Spring I was fairly lucky -- everything I submitted to conferences had been accepted. Once I started submitting to journals, however, that changed. I got some pretty scathing reviews, and even had one paper declined from a national conference, despite incredible timeliness for the topic (it was about illegal immigration activism, and right after that Arizona passed a law allowing the police to detain suspected illegal immigrants.)

So the Lego I'm presenting here is this: it has to count. Anything I do, it has to count towards my dissertation and also be able to stand on its own as a conference paper or journal submission. This may seem like a no-brainer -- everybody with a PhD will tell you the same. The truth is, actually doing it is incredibly difficult because it's very easy to get burned out and sick to death of a subject.

A Fifth Lego

I chatted with one of the members of the legendary rock band Ed Hall today via Facebook chat. I saw Ed Hall play in September of 1993, and instantly was filled with both musical and ideological ideas that I wasn't getting from the standard content and advertising supplied by your normal TV and radio stations in a small west Texas market.

The Fourth Lego in The Lego Box

Marshall McLuhan was a nifty character who thought of various technologies as extensions of our natural sensory apparatus. A radio extends our earshot; a TV extends our eyeshot. Both allow us to explore the world far beyond where our bodies are located. He is famous for his comment: "The medium is the message." The more I chew on that idea and what I perceive to be his worldview, the more it makes sense while still making less sense -- simultaneously. No wonder McLuhan is hailed as "The Prophet" of the Information Age while, at the same time, being dismissed as a whacko.

In the 1980s, Neil Postman came along and wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. He was in no small part influenced by the ravings of McLuhan, but his argument is quite clear: we are living in a Brave New World characterized by the burlesque; we are, quite literally, building and living in a society with institutions eroded to the point of inefficacy. At the center of this erosion is television; to attract participants and inspire participation, religion and politics must conform to the television format. In other words, ritual and routine are replaced by show business and gags designed to attract audiences. Institutions must conform or wither away. The audience determines what concepts survive.

In the 1990s, Robert Putnam terrified the world when he claimed we are -- or will be shortly -- Bowling Alone. Flashing a vast body of rigorous and intensive research, he exposed a decline in social capital and civic engagement. Post WW2 America, he claimed, was a hotbed of social activity. Membership in bridge and lunch clubs, baseball teams, and all sorts of events and organizations to which people flocked, for the pleasure of interacting with other people, were at an all-time high. In the 1950s and 1960s, television diffused. Putnam fingers it as the culprit behind a marked decline in civic activity, with the logical conclusion being 1-person bowling leagues.

There are indeed a lot of problems with Putnam's assumptions and claims, yet there is probably something to some of what he says. Large bodies of research suggest he is right while other large bodies of research suggest he is wrong. Regardless, Bowling Alone is certainly worth the read, and every now and then he writes an update.

So what do we have here? What exactly is the Fourth Lego?

We have to take a look at cultivation theory to answer this. For now I will be brief, but cultivation theory is very deserving of greater elaboration than I am willing to give it in the middle of the night. Cultivation theory basically tells us that the format of television shapes us. By format, I mean segment-ad-ad-ad-ad-segment-ad-ad-ad-ad. Postman gets into this and almost goes so far as to suggest it is the cause of Attention Deficit Disorder, but he never quite gets there. McLuhan would probably derive a message of capitalist slavery from the format. Putnam might suggest it's what keeps us watching. Regardless, these three gentleman addressed the the format (as opposed to content) of TV and claim it has a powerful influence on culture.

Gerbner and associates argue that TV has two important effects on audiences. First, by being exposed to the the format over and over and over and over again from birth to death, television cultivates a "mainstream" form of thinking. It makes sense: by giving us a shared experience, television audiences think and generally behave alike. Second, the amount of sex and violence on TV create a "mean world" effect. People who watch a lot of television tend to think violence is more widespread than law enforcement reports would suggest. When surveyed, heavy viewers are more apt to believe they will be victims of violent crimes than those who watch less television. (Something I don't understand is this: Gerbner and associates claim content doesn't matter when it comes to cultivation, but at the same time they claim a "mean world" effect.)

So, again, what do we have? What is the fourth Lego in the box?

There is no simple answer for this one, so I'm going to try to weasel out of defining it in any operable terms. The closest I can get is this: television extends our visual and audio senses, and we spend a good deal of time watching it. The format of TV and to some extent the content shape how we think and, subsequently, who we are not only as individuals, but as a culture. Heavy use of television may erode our social capital (and I will get into fragmentation at a later time) while at the same time creating a mainstream of thought and, simultaneously, a "mean world" perception among heavy viewers.

In other words, television shapes us in various ways. Just as those who live in sunny environments have darker tans, and just as those who live in the tropics have greater immunity to tropical diseases, those who live around television are influenced by it, whether it is through the format, the content or both.

Television matters.

The Third Lego in the Lego Box

The theory of cognitive dissonance has been used as a means of manipulating people for probably 3 or 4 thousand years. Perhaps even more. It was best-articulated in 1957 by the famous psychologist Leon Festinger. Quite simply, it states:

(1) There may exist dissonant or "nonfitting" relations among cognitive elements;

(2) The existence of dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce the dissonance and to avoid increases in dissonance;

(3) Manifestations of the operation of these pressures include behavior changes, changes of cognition, and circumspect exposure to new information and new opinions.


Over the past 50 years psychologists, sociologists, marketers, churches, and many, many other people from many, many fields have tested and built this theory into an engine that fuels both campaigns to change the behaviors of the masses and research conducted by graduate students.

For me, the most interesting part of this theory is the idea that people seek out media sources consonant with their existing beliefs, be it news or ads, so as to feel better about decisions they've made or ideas they've bought into.

In the 1960s, researchers such as Freedman and Sears concluded that selective exposure as a result of cognitive dissonance was really just a bunch of hooey. As a result, the theory was thrown on the academic scrap pile (apparently with the F-scale, according to one of my reviewers) and lay dormant for a while. But that didn't stop selective exposure from making a comeback. Cable TV and Internet exploded on the scene in the 80s and 90s; these days we are FORCED to select media and a growing body of research is beginning to explain how and why.

Selective exposure, however, is a different Lego. The Lego at hand is cognitive dissonance. Though it may not fit my dissertation like a glove, it is indeed a noteworthy Lego, and actually sparked the exploration of selective processes as pertain to media consumption. It may not play a significant role in my dissertation, but knowing its background is important for understanding the current status of selective exposure theory.

The Second Lego in the Box

The second Lego is actually three Legos stuck together: the three domains of learning.

The cognitive and affective domains are pretty straightword and refer to thinking and feeling, respectively. It seems the original authors were referring to sports, PE, slug-bug, flinch, man-or-mouse, wedgies, and many other physical activities found in junior high schools when referring to the psychomotor domain. I haven't read deeply enough into the literature to completely make this jump, but I suspect he psychomotor domain could also refer to other types of behaviors. It suits my purposes to think of it as behavioral rather than purely physical.

The following is a lifted chunk of text on the topic.

There is more than one type of learning. A committee of colleges, led by Benjamin Bloom (1956), identified three domains of educational activities:

• Cognitive: mental skills (Knowledge)
• Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude)
• Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (Skills)

I believe these three domains are important considerations when writing about selective exposure, if for nothing more than frameworks for explaining the motivations or determinants, as well as the effects, of selective exposure to mediated information.

The First Lego In The Box

For many years hysterical mothers and conservative Christian groups have been financing research to create the impression that sex and violence on television lead to sex and violence in real life, particularly among kids. We also know that a significant portion of that impression attributes such dramatic media effects to "other people," and not the people making the claims. The third-person effect is nothing new; people have been using that old gag for millennia, perhaps even longer, to gain some sort of advantage over others. But thinking about this is leading me off on a tangent, and now isn't the time to explore it.

When researchers began using scientific methods to study media effects in the 1940s, they really didn't find much. It was difficult to fire up blood lust in soldiers using anti-German movies, but researchers did find one quite noteworthy effect of media; media exposure can lead to an immediate and lasting increase in knowledge. We might not be able to create a merciless fighting force or convince them the enemy has fangs just by showing soldiers a movie about Germans, but we can certainly educate them about political situations and hope that through repetition and other means their ideology can be brought into line with that of the authority

As previously stated, I am using the metaphor of Legos to describe all the pieces that will eventually work together to build my dissertation. The first piece in the Lego box is this particular media effect. As luck would have it, 75 years of media research has provided most, if not all of the nomenclature I need to describe my Lego set.

An Incredibly Simple Model

The other day I had some delightful 1-on-1 one time with the Associate Dean of Research while en route to observe some focus groups. One of our many interesting topics of conversation was dissertation strategies. Whereas my current strategy is clarifying my worldview and applying it to a topic, building on or creating theory in the process, he suggested something so obvious it had never occurred to me. What he called the “economics model” of a dissertation is basically an introduction, three related studies, and a conclusion. I must admit, it's a heckuva lot simpler than the almost bizarrely complex approach I've been using.

As a big fan of selective exposure theory, I think addressing the cognitive, affective, and behavioral implications of the theory may be a simple and manageable approach to the most complex task I have ever undertaken in my life. The following outline could be a very vague idea of what my dissertation may look like. I estimate it would be around 200 pages long, perhaps closer to 180.

1) Introduction

2) Literature Review of Selective Exposure/Selective Processes

3) A study on selective exposure as a result of affective states.

4) A study on selective exposure’s cognitive impact.

5) A study on behavioral implications of selective exposure.

6) Conclusion

7) Appendices

8) Works Cited

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.