Research Is Like Dating

Or so they say. They being the unmarried librarians at the Harold B. Lee Library. Something about looking around for desirable characteristics before deciding on a topic that you want to be with. And if research is like dating, then the paper is like a bad girlfriend that you just can't shake. If you're lucky, you will find a topic that you really like that you will dedicate your life to, and be with for time and all eternity.

In my opinion, research is like homework. And the paper is like an assignment that you can't skip, or else you'll fail the class. But that's just me. For my English class, we are required to write an 8-10 page research paper on a new media topic, which is, all at once, too broad, and too narrow. After much contemplation, I thought I had found a good topic. It was about the transformation of the English language through social media. The original motivation for the topic was a comment on a Facebook wall post between myself and a couple of people whom I consider to be intellectuals. One of the contributor's little sisters then posted the following comment: "You guys talk wayyyy to formally. This is Facebook, not a spelling test! Say... Yo ya I would love ta!" Needless to say, this left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I left a very sarcastic reply (One that was not perceived as such...). However, as I began to research, I began to realize that I had little scope for what I was actually looking for, and no idea of how to narrow it. So I reluctantly left the topic. I definitely had a crush on it, but we just didn't understand each other. There was never a real relationship.

It then occurred to me to research a topic about video games. Truth be told, this topic occurred to me much before this moment in time, but I was now behind, because of the failure of my first topic. I really didn't want to do video games though. It was (is) so cliché... and I didn't really like either side of any video game argument in existence. So I set it aside, judging it to be a thing of naught. I moved on to education. How does new media effect our education? Well, that one might've worked out, except it was hard. And I don't have time or willpower to do hard things. So I dropped that idea. The day of a deadline came, and I needed a topic to work on my annotated bibliography with. With about an hour to work on it, I chose to do a video game topic. It took me about 15 minutes to find 8 working sources, and another 5 minutes to put them into a works cited page. Another half hour to scan and annotate my references, and then I printed it. So my research topic is about violent video games as a cause of aggression in teenagers/children. And that's about it. Once again, the easy course of action overcomes the best one.