Theme 3 (post)

Reflection theme 3

This week was more concrete than the previous weeks. But still it was pretty hard to grasp. I could only attend to the first part of the monday-lecture, because I had another lecture in another course at the same time and I wanted to attend to both of them. The seminar was good in my opinion, it was interesting to hear how others defined and thought about theories.

I enjoyed choosing an article on my own, which enabled me to chose something that I’m interesting in.

After the seminar and lecture I still find it hard to say what theories are and what they are not. In my text there was a theory of what social capital is, but when I read it the first time i just thought it was a definition. The difference between a definition and a theory is still unclear to me but as i understood it, definitions are more superficial and not dependent of time. I raised the question whether or not a description over what social network sites is if thats a theory or description and as i understood it and can be both, it depends on how the author formulates it. A description is often shorter than a theory and a theory contains maybe relations between the different components that are a part of the notion which you are describing.

One thing is clear that a scientific article must contain at least one theory, otherwise it's just an article.

Leif described the difference between a normative theory and a destructive theory. Normative theories are implicit theories and theories that are not true or false, like whether or not people have the same value, its just how people understand it as. And destructive theories are facts, "this is how it is". Its the opposite to normative theories.

The question if a hypothesis is a theory is also still unclear. It sounded like a hypothesis can be a theory if it is grounded in a theory. Like if you want to test a theory. Theories helps you construct good hypothesis and good hypothesis gives good results.

Theme 4 (pre)

Theme 4

1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

The research paper I’ve chosen for this week is “Measuring Mobile Phone Use: Self-report Versus Log Data” written by Jeffery Boase and Rich Ling. The research is about comparing two different quantitative methods for measuring how frequently the responders is using the mobile phone. 1382 respondent participated in the study.

The first method is a self-reporting questionnaire that the responders had to answer every day. The question was regarding how often the responders used their phone for calls and text messaging (SMS). They answered how much they thought they used it yesterday as well as the last week.  The author compared those answers with log data from the nearest month that they got from the telephone company (that funded the research as well). With the help of some statistical calculation (which I don’t really understand) they got variables that they could compare with. The research questions that the author tried to answer was: How well do the self-report measures compare to sever log data? and What are the demographic characteristics associated with over- and underreporting of mobile phone use?

The main benefit using these methods is that you get a easy interpreted data about the research question, and by comparing these two methods you get it even more accurately. The only limitation I can see with these methods is that the self-report method might give inaccurate data, because people maybe find it hard to remember, for example, how often they used the phone yesterday or the last week. But this research paper is meant to examine that, whether it is a limitation or not. The other limitation with these methods is that you don’t know if it was the same person that used the phone all the time when you look at the data log.

It’s hard to say if I learned anything about quantitative methods when I read this paper. I guess the only thing I learned was the result of the research, that self-report measures generally do not compare favorably to log measures. The human factor is too strong.

The first problem with how the research used the methods is that the responders was only from Norwegian. If they were from different locations the result might have been different, perhaps other countries answer the questions more accurately in the self-report questionnaire. Another problem was that they got the log data only one time per month, which meant that they had to calculate the average use of phones per day in order to be able to compare with the self-report data. This might lead to uneven results. The reason that it’s hard to find problems might be that they only compare data between different methods, which is a quite simple procedure.  

Olle Bälters text was about whether or not physical activity have any effect on upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). They used a quantitative method with 1509 participants. The results were that people that reported moderate to high physical activity had a lower risk of URTI. And highly stressed people, especially men, benefits more from the physical activities. I don’t know if I learned anything special after reading the text, more than the result which I already suspected.

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

Quantitative

The positive aspects of quantitative methods is that it gives a broad overview over the subject. The method gives statistical data which enables one to compare opinions between different groups  and the data are easy to measure.

The negative aspects are that you only get answers to the questions that you ask and it can leave you without an view on why they answered like they did. It doesn’t give an in depth analysis over the subject. Quantitative methods can only detect patterns in the answer, not more than that.

Qualitative

Qualitative methods are the opposite of quantitative, it gives an in depth analysis of the subject and it enables you to understand patterns. When using a qualitative method you don’t have to follow a strict script, you can change the question over time to enable the respondent to give a good and deep answer.

The negative aspects are that qualitative methods are often used on a small group, and small groups can’t be seen as statically correct, you might get different answers if you use another set of responders.

Theme 2 (post)

Theme 2 post (reflection)

First of all I think it was a pity that the monday lecture had to quit 15 min early. The last slide that Åhman showed was perhaps the hardest one to understand and it had to be quickly explained, which resulted in that I didn’t understand much of it. At the seminar we were 6 people but I think it went quite well anyway.

Once again I thought the papers that we were suppose to read was difficult to understand. Unfortunately I read it like three days before I started to answer the questions which made it even harder. During the seminar I realised that I might be wrong on most answers, but I made a “good” attempt anyway.

I think the essence of this theme is in enlightenment and nominalism. The "battle" between the idea world (the conceptual world) and the world of the senses. If we are suppose to just make ourselves an opinion from what we can see and can measure or if we should accept a conceptualized world.

The author of the text went from believing that the enlightenment was a good thing, that we become masters over our own existence, that we just believe in what we see and create knowledge from that instead of myths and concepts, to a bad thing. We don't get forward with our thoughts and knowledge if we only believe in world of the senses.

I thought it was interesting when Åhman made a parallel to the political world, and the thoughts of nazi vs communism. The nazi believed very much in the world of the senses, that some people are better than others, just because they are stronger/faster. They didn't accept the concept human and that we are mostly all the same. The communism believed in the conceptualized world, and believed in the concept human, which is necessary to discuss human rights and a world of equality.

Theme 3 (pre)

Theme 3

The research journal that I chosed was “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications” with an impact factor of 2.019 and with a 5-year impact factor of 4.748. The journal covers the interdisciplinary field of computer-mediated communication, just like the title says. The journal was established 1995.   

The research article I’ve chosen is “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications - A Longitudinal Study” written by Petter Bae Brandtzaeg in 2012. The article aim to investigate the relation between Social Networking Sites (SNS) and social capital. The article has an impact factor of 2.17

The media have for a long time been accusing SNS to be antisocial, and reducing the amount of time spent face-to-face with others, and increasing the feeling of loneliness and isolation. This media-hype is due to the fact that the media has few research findings to report on. According to the author there is no, atleast few, studies that compare SNS users with non user in this type of question.

Information to the study was collected through a longitudinal study in Norway (from 2008 to 2010) with 2000 participants between the age of 15 to 75 years. The study compared both the level of social capital among SNS users and nonusers, and the level of social capital among distinct SNS user types. The five SNS user types was: Sporadics, Lurkers, Socializers, Debaters and Advanced users (people who use SNSs frequently for almost all purposes, such as socializing, debating and so on). Hypothesis were created and was tried to be proved. The responders answered a questionnaire and then gathered into the different SNS user types.

The result of the study indicates that SNSs is associated to social capital and strengthening social bonds. But despite the social benefits of SNSs the study also reported that SNSs contribute to loneliness, compared to non users, and it was mostly common among males and the SNSs user types “Advanced User” and “Debaters”. Heavy usage of SNSs for males seemed to amplify the feeling of loneliness, the females are, according to the author, more skilled in social bondings online.

Regarding the SNSs user types and social capital it was reported that the type “Socializer” was benefited more from the SNSs and created easily social capital compared to “Sporadics” and “Lurkers” who interacted less in SNS, not surprisingly.

The result indicates that the media’s worry about SNSs as a “antisocial machine” were not warranted.      

If I should be critical to the way this report is done I have to comment the way that the different SNSs user types is categorized. I feel that its hard to determine which group type I should be in, and they are categorizing them according to their answers which should be even more difficult. This could lead to misleading results if the users are categorized in wrong group types.

I don’t think that everyone is the same user type, for example a lurker, in every SNS that they are using. They can be more social in, for example, Facebook and more like a Debater on Twitter. The author is proudly saying in the beginning that this research is combining all SNS, but that might have misleading results.

Another problem by grouping all SNSs together is when you compare the difference of SNSs use with gender and age in focus. Some SNS might be more popular in some ages than others which might trigger feelings of loneliness more than other SNS, for example. And perhaps females and males doesn’t use the same type of SNS as well, and then saying that females are more social on the internet can be wrong, it is perhaps just the SNS that females use that demand one to be social with others.

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

If I was suppose to describe theory to someone, I should describe it as Sutton and Staw does:

"Theory is the answer to queries of why. Theory is about the connections among phenomena, a story about why acts, events structure and thoughts occur."

References are not theory. Just refer to something someone else says or just refer to a theory without using it is not theory.

Data is not theory, data describes which empirical pattern were observed, and theory explains why empirical patterns were observed and was expected to be observed.

List of variables or constructs are not theory. A theory must also explain why variables or constructs come about or why they are connected.

Diagrams are not theory, because they rarely explain why the proposed connection is observed.

Hypothesis and predictions are not theory, because hypothesis is just saying what is expected to occur, but not why.

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?

The theory that is used in the article is mainly theory of social capital which in the short version describe social capital as: “social connections (social networks) and the attendant norms and trust that enable participants to act together more effectively”. This definition has been modified and components has been added by other articles, but this is the core of the definition. Since it’s a theory that describes the notion Social Capital and its different dimensions I would say that the theory is a Type 2 theory (Explanation).

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

There are many positive aspects of clearly defining a notion, which results in that other research as well use the notion in the same way as this one does. It’s hard to find negative aspects of a theory like this. But in this research article the author uses just a subset of the concepts/dimensions of the description of the notion Social Capital. If you do that and then uses just that subset of concept and still uses the notion Social Capital it can be misleading, this is not a negative aspect of the theory but a negative aspect of how the article uses it.

Theme 1 (post)

Philosophy isn’t my cup of tea, that’s for sure. I’ve had a hard time understanding the way to think and argue in philosophical questions and reasoning. It feels like the aim for philosophy is to question everything that we take for granted.

The texts we were suppose to read was quite hard I would say, at least Kant’s text. It felt like I didn’t understand anything when I read it, sometimes it felt like I understood some parts but when he (Johan?) explained everything on the lecture it felt like I was far from understanding it when i read it.

During the seminar it was pretty hard to find the “red thread”, I’m not quite sure what we were expected to learn from the theme, more than just familiar us to the philosophical way of thinking. Since this is kind of hard for me and it was difficult to understand everything and the way of thinking I sat pretty quietly during the seminar, together with the majority of group while the seminar leader kept his monolog going. I’m not at all negative to how the seminar went, quite the opposite actually, I found it interesting to listen to Johan talking about Socrates, Kants and his thoughts.

I would rather have the lecture and the seminar before reading the text, since it was that difficult. That would make the text more useful and more understandable.

The essence of this theme is in the word of Socrates in Platos, that you don’t percept with your senses but rather through them, you percept with your soul. Everything you see is actually just impressions and “qualities”, it can be primary and secondary qualities, but it’s your soul that interpret the sense data to things, objects and feelings. The world is not just impressions, it has more meaning, it’s the souls responsibility to interpret the impressions. But the world can’t be just impressions it has to have substance as well otherwise we can’t be sure that the book in a room exist when we leave the room. So, the substance and our impressions together with our soul creates the world we live in.

I found it interesting when he talked about science and that if you prove something and later prove something new in the same topic, that doesn’t mean the first discovery was wrong. The science and its exploring power accumulates and gives more and more understanding of the world.

Theme 2 (Pre)

1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

In this text enlightenment is when people are destroying myths and beliefs and replace them with knowledge. They are becoming masters of their minds. As Adorno and Horkhemier describes Enlightenment as: “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”. You fear what you don’t know and what you can’t prove, which myths and beliefs are. Instead they are gathering knowledge, which makes the myths and beliefs known to you, and not unknown as it previously were.

b. What is "dialectic"?

Dialectic is a method, which is used to find the actual facts by considering ideas with opposite ideas. By regarding the arguments from the two different opinions you then will be able to come to a conclusion.

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

According to Wikipedia ”nominalism” is: ”a position that denies the existence of universal entities or objects, but accepts that particular objects”.

As I understand it you can’t believe in everything that people are telling you. If someone is pointing at a car, I can’t take that as a truth that the thing he’s pointing at really is a car, I mean I can’t set the universal entity ”car” on the thing which he is pointing at without exploring it’s properties first, and by doing that determine whether or not that actually is a ”car”. It was the same with myths at that age, you couldn’t just accept the myths, you had to reveal the truth of the myths, with the knowledge that you have, in order to replace with myths with actual facts. 

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

Myths are, in one way, a explanation or solutions for unknown things such as enigmas. It reduces the fear in peoples minds by replacing the unknown with something that seems like an explanation but which might not have a logical foundation. In that way it calms the people by eliminating the fears.

2. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical 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?

I interpret superstructure as the culture in itself, and substructure as the different medieforms that exist to deliver the culture such as films, paintings, music, books and such.

To be able to have a well working cultural production you need a both a well working superstructure and a well working substructure. That’s why it’s important to analyse cultural production in a Marxist perspective.

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, culture has a revolutionary potential. Long ago, when every medium wasn’t as developed as they are today, the culture didn’t reach as many people as it does today. But now with films, photography’s and such, the culture reach a bigger audience. People who couldn’t access culture before are able to access it today. This perspective is quite similar to Adorno and Heckenheimer’s view, that the whole world is open for everyone’s disposal.

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).

I interpret it as when there are historical changes in the world, for example culture, humans adapt to these changes in the way of understanding the world and by doing so we perceive the world in a different way than we did before.

An example, which the author describes, is in the fifth centaury with its great shifts of population, which gave birth to the Roman art industry.

Another example can be the swastika, which had another meaning before the Nazis used it.

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

Aura is something that belongs to a work of art and which is being eliminated by mechanical reproduction. It’s a feeling of its presence in time and space, its unique existence. Every original work of art has its own authenticity, which the reproduction doesn’t have.

The aura of natural objects is another thing. It’s about the unique phenomena of distance. An aura in a natural object is that you feel “close” to it, both spatially and humanly.

Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (pre)

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?

Before that citation, the author talks about “the secure path of science” which he thinks mathematic and physics are traveling on. But he states that metaphysics haven’t yet found this path. In order to find this path we need to, as the author say, instead of that our cognition conform to objects the author states that the objects must conform to our cognition, the author has turned it around. What it means, as I think, if we can’t understand or to fully understand the object from our perspective we have to study it from the object’s perspective. For example: if we see the moon rise and falls you could interpret that as the moon is just moving in those directions, up and down. But to fully understand the moons orbit we have to study it from the moons perspective, then and only then can we determine the true fact about the moon and its orbit. Sometime it’s important to see things in other perspectives.  

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"?

As I interprets the dialogue when Socrates talks about ears and eyes and that we are seeing and hearing through our eyes and ears, he means that since they define knowledge as perception, at least at that point in the text, and perception is a process which takes place in the mind of a person, these impressions which travels from the object through the ears and eyes are then interpreted, in the mind, to the object in question. The reason why we are not hearing and seeing “with” our eyes and ears is because they are organs, which can’t make a perception on their own, which the mind can through the different organs.  

I’m not quite sure what “empiricism” exactly means but as I understand it, it says that the only true knowledge, which you can rely on, is the knowledge that you have experienced by yourself. This is exactly what they discus when they are saying the knowledge is perception. As they say early in the dialogue: “He who knows perceives what he know, and, as far as I can see at present, knowledge is perception.”. And that, things are to the man who perceives just as they appear to him and to another as they appear to others. If someone has knowledge about something and then he/she easier perceives things, because there’s more to perceive, which in a way contributes to empiricism interpretation of knowledge.