POST Seminar 3: Research and Theory

Last weeks theme was about theory and what it is. We had a lecture which gave me more insight of the concept theory. During our seminar we discussed our texts which we have been reading and what theories they conclude. Then we discussed theory from a more philosophic point of view. This is what I really enjoyed of the seminar. We discussed what a theory can be, examples like if we observe that if we drop a ball and it falls to the ground, and then we then say that balls falls to the ground when you drop it, is this a theory then? We talked about different concepts of theory and grounded theory, and the main differences between scientific theories and the actual meaning of the word theory. We ended up asking the question; What is not theory?

I learned a lot about what theory is during that week and I learned, what maybe is most important and what might will be most useful, is that I now know can determine what's theory and distinguish theory from hypothesis and methods. I also learned that there often is deeper and more underlaying theories when you read texts. 

PRE Theme 4: Quantitative research

For this theme I chose the paper Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings, written by Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell and Barry Dilouya for Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Volume 19, Issue 4. It is a study to show the relations between players and contexts of play, if participants of public events participate in virtual worlds.


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

This is a large-scale study of virtual worlds where they found their participants in public gaming events. There are a total of 382 participants in the study in four different environments; LAN events in England, LAN events in Vancouver and Toronto, Internet cafés in Vancouver and Toronto and Fan culture events in Vancouver and Toronto. All are asked the same question: “Do you participate in virtual worlds?”. They categorized people by sex, age, SES, race, and level of education. The study also provides stories from some users.


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

I learned that you easily can get statistics of things, in this case what type of user which participate in virtual worlds, and get relations between questions. But I also learned that you could never know why or how those relations exist. The stories, though, provide more insight from a few people.


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

The main methodological problems of this study from the point I see it, is what I was writing about above. The study never answers why the results are the way they are. The questions could be more semi-structured to get a bigger scope to understand the survey.




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


With quantitative methods you get the data you need to support your claims, prove hypothesis and show relations. But that’s it, you never gain depth in your knowledge.


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

Qualitative methods provides more depth and you can explain relations etc from a deeper point of view, but it demands good analyses.

POST Seminar 2: Critical media studies

In the lecture we were taught that to really understand a text, the context must be the same when you read it as when it was written. If the text was written in a cafe, you have to be in a cafe when you read it. The lecture contained history of what was happening during the time the texts were written, which made it easier to put my self into the context.
The texts were Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity. Benjamin wrote his text before the world war II, and the other text was written during the war. These texts were very difficult in another way. Though Kant was very abstract, these text's where very back and forward, so it was it was hard to keep up with the reasoning.

During the seminar we discussed dialectics, nominalism, the enlightenment and how relate to mass culture during the time these texts were written. If mass culture can have revolutionary potentials. We talked about how fascism made politics aesthetic and how communism made aesthetics political.   One really good thing that the teacher did was the drawing of a cave to better understand the concept of nominalism. There was this man in the middle, the shadow of the real world on the wall of the cave which we only can see, and then the "idea"-world outside. And we discussed how important it can be to step away and look out from the cave into the "idea"-world, which also is one of the main critique of nominalism. Sometimes in can be good to use the "idea"-world, because society in itself is just a idea.

PRE Theme 3: Research and theory

I chose Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication for the third seminar. It is an Internet based journal about social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies. It’s interdisciplinary and publishes work from communication, business, education, political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines.

The paper I read was Channeling Science Information Seekers' Attention? A Content Analysis of Top-Ranked vs. Lower-Ranked Sites in Google from the same journal written by Nan Li, Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele. It says that search engines on the web make larger and more popular websites more appearance and dominant while they discriminate smaller websites, according to researchers. But there is a lack of empirical studies if search engines may favor a certain type of websites. The main questions of this paper are how do the very top results that receive vast public attention portray certain issues? This paper provides a research about how the content in top-ranked websites about nanotechnology differ from websites of lower ranking on Google. The method used was to take samples of the 32 first links, and by a program that’s collect data of the textual contents and by the content of the “child links”, the hyperlinks that are attached to them. The result shows that the top-ranked websites was more about technical function, environmental- and risk related information about nanotechnology. On lower-ranked sites they found that they contained significantly different themes. That shows that Google, as the market leading search engine, has an impact on web based science information.

1. A theory explains why, how and under which circumstances acts, events, structure, and thoughts occur of a certain phenomena. To identify objects of the phenomena and their relations to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world. Theory, though, is not references, is not data, is not a list of variables or constructs, is not diagrams and not hypothesis. These are just tools to support a theory.

2. This is a paper consisting a hypothesis, which says that content in the top-ranked websites on Google differ from low ranked websites. This is tested with a case study, to show these results. Therefore I think this is a typical prediction with testable proposition, but no causal explanation.

3. The limits of a prediction theory is the design of the task, and might not meet the expectations of the real world. The data can be wrong, or not enough significantly. The prediction is nor focused on explanation and doesn’t explains why it is like the theory says.

POST Seminar 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

To prepare for the first seminar I red two text; the preface to the second edition of Critique of pure reason by Kant and Theaetetus by Plato and thought about the questions addressed to the seminar. What I first realized that these text was very philosophic and I discussed the texts with a friend who has studied idea history. Then on the seminar we first started to rehearse the texts and discussed the meaning. I am going to write about the main question we discussed.

•        How can we understand the world if can’t experience the real world, just the world we perceive?

We discussed that everyone creating an experience of the world in our mind. But how can we know this is true? The world as we know it meet certain criteria as time, space etc. The things we can perceive. But if there is more? What is the relation to colors for blind people? This is an interesting question, because for people who never has experienced colors can’t imagine them. There might be more things that we can’t experience. We also discussed how infants experiences the world? We said that things has a specific meaning. That’s why we experience them. And time and memory is important to perceive the meaning. And the knowledge you get from just agreeing. Metaphysics and critics are discuss what’s are truth about the world. But only to discuss you have to do certain agreements. No matter if your pro or against, if you’re going to discuss if a bock is blue or black, you first need to agree that there is a book and that it can have certain colors. This relates to a prior and also  where empiricism enters the discussion. As I feel that is more clear to me what both Kant and Plato meant after this seminar. But it also made me confused in from a bigger point of view.

PRE Theme 2: Critical media studies

1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is concept to spread knowledge built on rationalism, logic and autonomy about nature and in order to get rid the history of myths about the world.

b. What is "dialectic"?

It is about discussing what is truth by rational discussions. People have to clarify what is not truth and comparing and listen to each others knowledge and opinion.

c. What is "nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

It’s about that general concepts isn’t anything except of the individual object. Objects don’t exist only because it has a general thing named by it.

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

Myths are the explanation of things to fill the gap of knowledge. Myths are more based on feign and stories than by rationalism and logic.

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

a. 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?

Substructure can relies to what the production is constructed of and superstructure is what the substructure build. Like a painting consist of paint, paper and so on, but the superstructure is the art.

b. 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?

Yes, because it is easy to spread and it can contains messages that is easy to adept, and in this way is a kind of enlightenment.

c. 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).

Naturally perceive is how we naturally perceive things around us. But we can change our way to perceive things by historical and cultural changes. Benjamin mentions, for example, the way of how people changed their way of looking at art in the fifth century by Romans.

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

The aura is the authenticity of an artwork, like in a painting, that not can be reproduced, like a copy of a photo.

PRE Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

In this post I am going to reflect about two questions that are addressed to two texts, Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s second preface to Critique of Pure Reason.

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 he meant that we know the world in the way we experience it and how we are used to experience it. Like if we are standing on the earth and looking at the sun you see that the sun rotates around the earth. But from another perspective you see that it is, in fact, the earth rotating around the sun. Therefore he means that we can learn more about knowledge if we assume that objects must conform to cognition, instead of cognition must conform to objects as we perceive.

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 Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

I understood it so that he meant we see thing around us and hear things around us, but it is in our brains and in our minds we create the perception of what is around us, how things interrelate and so on. And it is how we perceive we know things, basically. Empiricism is about that as well. It is based on the idea that only that is proven by experience can be count as reliable. .