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.