Theme 2 comments

Here are my comments on theme 2:

http://lard-have-mercy.blogspot.se/2015/09/post-theme-2-critical-media-studies.html?showComment=1443439010701#c5899774529187637409

http://capitalmyboy.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-2-post-theme-post.html?showComment=1443439856647#c5804627438600455995

https://tmmkappa.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/theme-2-post-reflection/comment-page-1/#comment-10

Theme 3 (post)

This week was about theory and I read “The Nature of Theory in Information Systems” (by Gregor, S.) and “What Theory is Not” (by Sutton, R.I. & Staw, B.M.). I like the approach this weeks texts has towards the theme of the week, theory. I think it was a lot easier to understand theory than it was to understand knowledge and I believe this is because the texts explained theory by explaining what theory is not. When we read about knowledge I felt like they tried to explain knowledge just to realize that they were wrong, try again, be wrong again etc. and this is almost like this week but with one major difference. This week the “goal” was to explain what theory is by explaining what it is not and that they did, very well.

This week I also read a paper called “Keyword extraction for blogs based on content richness” from the journal “The Journal of Information Science” with the goal to look upon the theories used within that paper. Identifying what kind of theories that was used in the paper after reading the texts about theory in generel was a good way to really grasp the theme. It’s a good way to let yourself know that you’ve actually understood what you have read in the previous texts.

During the seminar I felt confident that I had grasped what theory is and I felt that the seminar mostly was a confirmation of that and not a source of new understanding about the area like previous weeks. I think that the texts in general are starting to get easier and I must say that I appreciate that because I enjoyed realizing I had understood the area fully on the seminar. I didn’t feel the need to ask a lot of questions during the seminar but rather I listened to the different examples of theory that was presented as well as listening to the different questions asked by other students. We discussed what differs religion from theory and if religion can be a theory in some cases etc and discussions like that I find very interesting and those discussions are the part of this course I find to be the most fun.

I’ve learned alot about theory this week and this weeks knowledge I believe could actually be usefull in the future, more so than “what is knowledge” etc. The biggest “aha!” experience was when I understood that theory is not a hypothesis. Because in general people often says “I have a theory about this or that” and in reality they mean that they have a hypothesis and not a theory. Before understanding this I also believed that a theory was a hypothesis so I’m pleased to have been enlightened as Adorno and Horkheimer would’ve put it.

Theme 4 (pre)

1.       Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The paper written by Östman “Information, expression, participation: How involvement in usergenerated content relates to democratic engagement among young people” use a quantitative questionnaire as its method. This method gives the paper the possibilities to make statistical models from the collected data. The data collection itself was done on a total of 1812 people and since this was a quantitative method it wasn’t even near as time consuming as it would’ve been if they instead would interview the participants. However, there are limitations to this method and not only benefits, the method used limits the participants answers by giving them answers which they can choose from instead of freely answering the questions. One example of this is what the writer decided would be user generated content in the paper and therefore the question about this (UGC) are limited to only the answers the maker of the questionnaire choose to have.

2.       What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?

I’ve used both quantitative and qualitative methods myself so I don’t know if I learned anything new from reading about this method in particular. I prefer to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods so I guess this gives me a little more insight in how a paper would go about using only one of the methods.

3.       Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

I think that the main methodological problem of this study is the fact that it is only using a quantitative method. As I wrote in the previous question, I prefer to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and I think it has been shown that the best results come from a combination, looking at the problem from all angles. How to improve the quantitative method in this paper would be to elaborate the questionnaire and give the participants more answers to choose from. However, this would also increase the amount of time put into analyzing the data since there would be more variety. I don’t know if I think it is a good way to go, to make the questionnaire more “qualitative”-like but as I said, the best way to improve the methodology of the study would be to add some qualitative methods.

Drumming in Immersive virtual reality

I found the text written by Ilias Bergström and his colleagues extremely interesting! I think the world of virtual reality is a very interesting area with a lot of things to explore and a lot of potential. That you can make people feel “ownership” over bodies or body parts is something new to me but I find this to be very cool and a great thing for virtual and augmented reality. The uses of this fact, which they discuss in the discussion, are very fascinating; everything from changing ones perspective entirely to get new experiences, gain more empathy for other people in different situations or to use it as a way to make different tasks easier. I think that this is something that will keep getting more and more advanced and more integrated in our modern society. Virtual and augmented reality is something you could use in so many different areas like gaming, conferences with people from across the globe, socializing and things like city planning. So I think this study is very of our time and I look forward to see what happens within the areas of virtual and augmented reality in the years to come.

1.       Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

The benefits of using quantitative methods are that it’s easy to make statistical tests on the data you get since it is often presented in numbers. Quantitative methods are great for studies that want descriptive data but it is hard to interpret that data. For example you can see what a majority of the population prefers when it comes to a feature you’ve put into a product or service but you can’t see why this feature is preferred. It can also lead to some errors and confusion when using only quantitative methods when for example you see that the majority of the population like the feature previously mentioned but maybe just in some specific circumstances, these might not be the current circumstances when they are using the feature in your product/service however and therefore we added it for naught.

2.       Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The benefits of qualitative methods are basically the limitations of quantitative methods. The data you collect with qualitative methods can tell you a lot about people’s personalities, human behavioral and emotions in a way that quantitative methods can’t. The data can tell you why someone likes or dislikes something and/or under what circumstances. However, using qualitative methods are usually very time consuming, something that quantitative methods doesn’t need to be. The best results are often obtained with the help of both qualitative and quantitative methods to see the statistical data from quantitative methods together with the why and when from qualitative methods.

Kilteni, K., Bergstrom, I., & Slater, M. (2013). Drumming in immersive virtual reality: the body shapes the way we play. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on, 19(4), 597-605.

Östman, J. (2012). Information, expression, participation: How involvement in usergenerated content relates to democratic engagement among young people New Media & Society September 2012 vol. 14 no. 6 1004-1021

Theme 2 (post)

This week have been easier for me in terms of understanding the philosophical texts and terms provided to us. I do not know if this is because I’m getting used to the idea of reading philosophical texts and if I’m starting to think in a more philosophical way or if the texts we read this week was simply easier to understand than them of week one. This week has been about critical media studies and the texts I’ve read is “The work of art in the age of technical reproductivity” and “Dialectic of Enlightenment”.

This week I did not need to read summaries or study guides to get an understanding of the texts and concepts within them. That felt really nice and I would like to think it is due to me learning philosophical thinking rather than the texts being easier this week. There was ofcourse a few things that I didn’t grasp fully untill the seminar and some things I just wasn’t sure about. But this week, like the one before, I really feel that the seminar helps alot with explaining, in a good way and not too quickly, what the weeks theme is all about.

During the seminar we discussed the questions given to us earlier the same week and the term or concept I found most interesting was the “aura” concept. I think of it much like the soul of an object and I found it really interesting to discuss how you can’t really reproduce the aura of a natural object and if you try to you rather give the reproduction another, new, aura. I also found it to be facinating the way that you can “destroy” an aura according to Walter Benjamin and my group during the first hour of the seminar spent most of our time discussing this. This week I also was a bigger part of the discussion in my own group and felt that I was leading the discussion, trying to get insights and inputs from everyone in the group. I don’t know if it was because this theme was very interesting in my opinion or if I’m just getting more comfortable talking about philosophical concepts.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything more this week except for the actual meanings of the different terms we’ve discussed. Some of them I already knew like, “enlightenment” and “myth” but I didn’t know what a “dialectic” or “nominalism” was before this week. I think nominalism was the hardest concept to grasp and understand this week and if there is something from this week I am still alittle uncertain of, it would be nominalism.

Theme 1 comments

http://vadfinnsegentligen.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-1-reflection.html?showComment=1442741851802#c1901429783120574941

http://blog4course99.blogspot.se/2015/09/reflection-of-theme-1.html?showComment=1442743849091#c1293881962135394640

http://bjornsblogggg.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-1-post-reflection.html?showComment=1442744276288#c7310091850356726840

Theme 3 (pre)

The Journal of Information Science

I have chosen the Journal of Information Science that has an impact factor of 1,158. The journal describes itself as “a peer-reviewed international journal of high repute covering topics of interest to all those researching and working in information science and knowledge management”. The journal focuses on how to analyze and visualize information of different kinds. With articles such as “Keyword extraction for blogs based on content richness” and “Hierarchical graph maps for visualization of collaborative recommender systems” I find the journal to be very interesting. I think an important factor in media technology is the ability to handle large amounts of information and also be able to visualize that information in a way that not only people within the subject understand. Therefore I find this journal to be relevant, although not limited, to media technology.

Keyword extraction for blogs based on content richness

The paper I choose is called “Keyword extraction for blogs based on content richness” written by Jinhee Park, Jaekwang Kim and Jee-Hyong Lee. The papers aim is to examine a new method to extract topic keywords of blogs, based on the richness of content. They talk about how blogs today is an important way to distribute information and news on the Internet and about the problem that exists in finding relevant information among the thousands of blogs and blog posts. They mention different methods that already exists and why these aren’t ideal. Their solution is to extract keywords from blogs using a new measure, richness, which indicates how much a blog covers the “trendy subtopics of a keyword”. To obtain these trendy subtopics of the chosen keywords they used the web to find trendy and popular content related to a topic or keyword there. With the trendy information about a topic they could choose a keyword that better match what is popular right now, much better so than previous methods. This is because they measured the richness of blogs using the web context previously mentioned.

The point of this is to help readers understand the content of different blogs more easily and have an easier time finding the relevant information they are looking for. In the paper they compare the results with other methods for keyword extraction which are based on a statistical method and could see that the proposed method gave superior results in hit counts, trendiness and consistency.

I think this paper is very interesting and also very relevant for today’s society. We are a society based around Internet and the Internet is not getting smaller, rather it seems to grow exponentially. Blogs are an excellent example of what the Internet is doing with information distribution. Today everyone can be a “news reporter” and in this sea of information we need methods to navigate and find what we are looking for. Their method sounds great since they take the most important factor into account, the web itself. By looking at what’s trending right now on the web they make the information later presented relevant to the “here and now” which I think is really clever.

I might not agree with everything they do however, an example of this is the assumption they to that a topic in general consists of 1000 unique words. That seems like something that could vary a lot, especially when you consider the amounts of blogs, blog posts and topics there are on the web and that it is constantly growing. However I’m not an expert at these sorts of things so who knows, it might be an accurate assumption.

I would like to see if this is applicable on other things on the web rather than just blogs. I understand that blogs have a very easy to work with format but it would be interesting to see if you could generate “keywords” on other things online rather than just blogs.

1.     Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

Theory is not data, graphs, diagrams, lists of data or hypotheses but rather the how, why and when something occurs. Basically the explanation of why the data, graphs and so on are interesting and how different parts of the paper are connected. The data in itself doesn’t generate the theory; this is where the researchers come into the picture because it is they who generate the theory itself.

2.     Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

I would say that the major theory in the paper I choose is the theory for design and action. Since the paper is about how this new way of generating keywords is used to evaluate and prove that their method is superior, therefore proving their hypothesis. All in all the theory for design and action is about how to do something and in this case, how to do something better.

3.     Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The benefits with the theory for design and action is that it says how to do something because you can get an answer to the questions “what?”, “when?”, “how?”, and “where?”. In the text Gregor mentions that there are some limitations and that “the user requirements include a need to translate expert knowledge into actionable knowledge for non-experts” (table 8).

Theme 1 (post)

This week I have been reflecting over philosophical questions which I rarely do. I like questions that have a clear answer, e.g. mathematical problems. So it has been an experience and I feel like I’ve spent alot of time just to get used to these kind of questions, texts etc. I have learned alot during this week and my understandings about the texts we read, Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, have changed over the week, from when I first read the texts, to the lecture and finally the seminar.

First I read the text from start to finish and I feel that it gave me some ground to stand on but I wouldn’t claim I had a good understanding of the texts. So I went on with reading some studyguides and text analysis about Kant’s and Plato’s texts which led to a better understanding of the subject. I made my first blog post about the text but I felt during the lecture and the seminar that I’ve changed how I see and understand the texts so I don’t agree with some of my previous answers.

During the seminar I liked the first part where we discussed the texts in smaller group because then I felt that I had alot to add to the discussion and we talked about alot of interesting questions. “Is mathematics the only truth in this world?” “Are there as many worlds as there are people or animals living in it because everyones perception is different?” “Can we be certain of anything?” are examples of some of the questions we touched and I really enjoyed it. In the other part of the seminar I didn’t discuss alot but rather listened to people discussing similar questions that my group discussed earlier. I find it very interesting with all of the discussions that takes place when talking about these kind of questions. Even though I prefer questions that you actually can answer.

The biggest things I’ve learned this week is reading and writing philosophical texts alot better than I could before. I’m guessing it will only get easier from here on since I will keep on learning how to take in the text, understanding it, analysing it and writing more and more philosophical texts myself.

Theme 2 (pre)

Dialectic of Enlightenment

1. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is something that in its core is aimed at liberating people from fear and could be described as “the advance of thought”. You could look at enlightenment as “true” knowledge because it’s often used to disregard hoax or myths. When someone is using myths to gain power over others, often with the help of fear, enlightenment when exposing the myth liberates the people under the influense of the myth.

2. What is "Dialectic"?

Dialectic is a form of argument that resolves around a disagreement as most argument does. The difference from most arguments however is that the parts of the argument aren’t working against eachother but rather with eachother to discover the truth of the matter. This is often done with the help of reasoned arguments and is not to be confused with a debate. In a debate the parts of the argument often seek to be “correct” or atleast make the other part or other people think that they are correct. In a debate there is usually a “winner” while in a dialectic, as mentioned before, the parts involved work together.

3. What is "Nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

Nominalism is a doctrine that states that various objects that goes under the same name have nothing in common but their previously stated name. The object that exists in time and space doesn’t have anything else than the name in common with the name of the same object, that in it self also is a object although an abstract one. For example the word “tree” doesn’t exist in time and space but it is instead a way of considering the object that actually exists, in this case a tree.

4. What is the meaning and function of "myth" in Adorno and Horkheimer's argument?

Myth is what you could call “false knowledge” and usually comes in the forms of superstition or subjective individual experiences. Myth is the counterpart to enlightenment and once enlightenment is achieved about something the myth loses its “power” and is exposed as the “false knowledge”. The people spreading the myth doesn’t always know that it’s a myth and often think it’s enlightenment they are spreading.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity"

1. In the beginning of the essay, Benjamin talks about the relation between "superstructure" and "substructure" in the capitalist order of production. What do the concepts "superstructure" and "substructure" mean in this context and what is the point of analyzing cultural production from a Marxist perspective?

The concepts as I understand them describes the connection between production and economy. Substructure is all about the conditions of production and the systems within economics and politics. The superstructure however is reffering to the culture of men, religion and their practice. Since our culture and religion are dependent on the economic and political system in some sense and therefore superstructure is dependent on the substructure.

2. Does culture have revolutionary potentials (according to Benjamin)? If so, describe these potentials. Does Benjamin's perspective differ from the perspective of Adorno & Horkheimer in this regard?

The short answer to this question would be “yes”, Benjamin thinks culture have revolutionary potentials. He talks about how pictures became moving images with sound, movies and this could make way for a social revolution according to himself.

I think Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer have different understandings and views of how culture can have revolutionary potentials. I believe this because Adorno & Horkheimer says that culture that has the purpose to entertain doesn’t result in intellectual insights and that it is technology that has revolutionary potentials.

3. Benjamin discusses how people perceive the world through the senses and argues that this perception can be both naturally and historically determined. What does this mean? Give some examples of historically determined perception (from Benjamin's essay and/or other contexts).

When Benjamin says that perception can be both naturally and historically determined I understand it as this. When people percieve something it is important in which medium the perception is done and what senses are used. We all percieve things differently and we also percieve different things and therefore nature itself matters. But since nature and the circumstances around us change with time the historical individual circumstances can determine the perception. Examples of this is the changed way of looking at and understanding art that happened with the late Roman art.

4. What does Benjamin mean by the term "aura"? Are there different kinds of aura in natural objects compared to art objects?

The term aura refers to different things depending if it’s the aura of a natural object or an art object. The aura of a object represents the object’s unique “attachment” to time and space and its authenticity. A persons charisma is something very hard to measure or explain and this is a example of a humans aura, the aura of a natural “object”. The difference between natural objects and art objects is the fact that natural objects are unique. Art are often reproductions of something, a photograph is a reproduction of what the photo is supposed to represent for example. When reproducing something it’s aura changes and the authenticity decrease. If you take an object from its context completely you, in doing so, destroys the aura of said object.

Theme 1 (pre)

1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

I think this is all about knowledge and how we should view knowledge itself. There are two different kinds of knowledge and we know them as a priori and posteriori. A priori is knowledge you know is correct and true without exploring or testing it any further. An example of this is the statement “All chickens are birds”. An example of a posteriori statement is “It’s raining outside”  since you can’t know this before you’ve gathered more information by, for example, going outside and take a look.

Kants says that it has been assumed that our cognition must conform to objects, in other words we can’t know something about a object before we have some sort of experience of said object. He then states that this might now be the best way of looking at things and that we should instead assume that the objects themselves must conform to our cognition. What he means by this or atleast what I think he means is that we should look at the objects experience or from the objects perspective. An example of this would be how Copernicus changed the way we look at cosmology. If we look at the sun it looks like the sun is orbiting us. But if we look at us from the suns perspective we see that in reality we orbit the sun. It’s a way of thinking outside the box and I think we should look at knowledge as a combination of the two. We should always explore things from different perspectives in search for the “true” knowledge of that object or experience.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

When Socrates says that we do not see and hear “with” the eyes and the ears but “through” them I understand it like this: What we see and hear is not absolute. We are all different and thus we see and hear different from eachother. We do not have the exact same eyes and ears and what I see through my eyes doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else see the exact same thing, even if we are looking at the same object. Our eyes are organs, a part of our body, and Socrates clearly states that we do not see with our eyes but through them. What he says is that we use our senses and not organs to interpret and understand the world around us. We all interpret things differently and when we see or hear something our interpretations doesn’t match everyone elses. This argument is directed towards what we today call “empiricism” in the way that empiricism states that knowledge is based on experience and senses. This means that the “knowledge” and “truths” we take in with, in this example, eyes and ears or sight and hearing are based on our own experiences. Since no person have the exact same experiences as someone else that means that we all see things differently and no one knows what the “true” knowledge of something is because an experience can not be correct or incorrect.


PS. I didn't know if you were supposed to highlight single words or sentences so I just highlighted what I thought was good.