eSynchronicity

posted by The Vidiot @ 6:15 PM Permalink

is when one person emails you one thing and shortly thereafter, another person emails you something completely different that reinforces the first email so perfectly, you have to blog about it.

Email one from my Aunt:

End the University as We Know It

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

Email two from the Sailor:

The International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 14, No. 2, 212-231 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1940161208330904

The Irony of Satire
Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report

Heather L. LaMarre
The Ohio State University, HLaMarre@gmail.com

Kristen D. Landreville
The Ohio State University

Michael A. Beam
The Ohio State University

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

Key Words: political entertainment • comedy • satire • political ideology • information processing

Labels: snark