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.