Selective Exposure Theory

Rittinan Chanaka
2 min readNov 1, 2020

What is Selective Exposure?

Selective exposure is when people purposefully select the message or information that are matching their belief. Selective exposure can separate in 4 categories that people choose.

First is news and entertainment; whether people will option for news or for entertainment when given the choice. For example we’re kids when the news is come and we will change the channel to avoid it.

Second is messages about different issues; looks at which issues motivate people to gather more information. For example in my family members have a problem about the health. I will gather the information only about the health.

Third is certain medium (e.g., the Internet); places less emphasis on the content selected and more emphasis on the chosen medium. For example now today most people use internet for access the information instead of newspaper because the internet allows more choice, people prefer to go online for information when they disagree with or do not trust the reportage in more mainstream outlets.

Fourth is like-minded messages; received attention is the degree to which citizens choose like-minded political information. For example people will choose to talk with people who agree with them and avoid people who disagree.

I created an small installation by using MD wood and smartphone. I used smartphone to represent media because smart phone allow you to access different medium such as E Book, Internet, or watching television online. In the installation will have different frame to show that their are different media that I can choose but I choose to watch video. I used my own interest such as video to represent the media that I choose and the video is showed the location where I love to go to hangout with my friends. This is one of the visual experiment for Selective exposure theory that I created.

--

--