Theme 6

Reflection from lectures:

It was really interesting to hear more about the researchers view on her own projects and what, according to her, could be classified as a qualitative research depending on what you want to find out. She said the project was about showing the many possible implementations of actDresses and therefore it was no need to make an extensive and time consuming qualitative research. I also found interest in her idea about a typical research process in which she defines the different steps by: You think, you go check it up, you take notice, you convince they and they accept it.

In the second presentation he talked about the necessity to sometimes take a step back to see what you can make by changing the approach to the problem and search for alternatives earlier in the progress or attempting a changing, for example, in the setup of the device. It was very inspiring to hear him talk about the subject and the examples he brought up showed how progress was created by mounting a camera on the person instead of improving a fixed cameras ability to detect the movements.

The paper I chosed was

Bottom-Up Technology Transmission Within Families: Exploring How Youths Influence Their Parents' Digital Media Use With Dyadic Data

It included a good qualitative study and in a way a relation to the paper about actDresses we read last week.

In the paper they look into the buttom-up (youth to parent) transmission process in areas of varied levels of technology diffusion, in such countries as chile.

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

They are measuring structural factors of the participants. these are youths age, gender roles, family socioeconomic status.
they also measuring the Family culture, parental authority and child-parent interaction.
It consists of a sequential mixed-methods research approach and dyadic, relation, data.

The methods used are interviews and a buttom-up transmission survey. I found the interviews good and in which they use one hour sessions with 28 participant.

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

That it is a lot of problems with the perception of the participants in what way they answer the questions. These problems involve the culture differences and social differences.

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

They put a lot of effort into the method used for the measuring the social aspects of the transmission.
Maybe they could have developed the technological aspect by more means and more comprehensive look into the what the kids actually know and explain what they know. Maybe they already have results regarding this and if that case they should have put more effort in pointing at this in the paper.

To improve the wide of the project they could have added a more specific comparison between different demographics and be more clear if previous work have showed any different.
Even do mention it throughout the text it would be nice to have more analysis about how the culture and other differences between the researchers and the participants affects the outcome of the results.

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

It is a exploratory research of a person or a group of persons. It is used to find underlying principles by exploring causation of the behavior of the person or the group.

When choosing the case group it is important to think of the representativeness of people by information-oriented sampling, meaning that you shoud aim to have a wide diversity of people in order to get a as good result as possible.

2. Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

They seem to be emotionally close to this subject so in some way they lack in how they perform the way to select the cases which may resulted in more tapered research. They are good at enfolding literature and nearly all statements are backed up by a reference to previous work.

THEME 5

In the paper they investigate the necessity of designing psychical language when controlling and programming robotic consumer products. As such products are in a physical, often without a screen, it is relevant to develop new and user friendly ways for these to be controlled by physical interaction. Given our human culture the text look deeper into how this affects our interaction with the computer, like how we dress for example.

They go through previous work and physical tools used when psychically represent the programming instructions and where they mostly need some sort of PC-based interaction. They see that it may be possible that instructions don't have confined to other physical devices, but visualised and possible to manipulate and change in the

ordinary use setting of the object that you want controlled. for example that interaction, like bending the arm of the robot, could affect the actual code.

By learning from comic, fashion and human behavior the importance of the sensed, desired and expected outcome from the actual user is getting increasingly important, to better understand the balance between appearance and action.

they use three main example:

Pleo:

A Role assembly dinosaur which you can dress according to occation.

In this example scenario they wanted to explore how the standard behaviour of the robot could be altered by letting it change mode or even acquire new abilities.

Glowbox:

With this product they wanted to specifically focus on actions and user interactions that can be sensed and performed by the GlowBots platform on a lower conceptual level than for that of Pleo.

Comic signs for a vacuum robot:

actDresses could enhance a task-oriented robot. This is based on Earlier studies points out that even technomorphic looking robotic appliances can engage users ‘socially’, make it less boring. In this example they have designed a set of comic book like magnetic patches that can be attached to the metallic shield on top of the vacuum robot

How can media technologies be evaluated?By evaluating the usability of the media technology. By collecting data from users measuring the three effectivness, efficiency and satisfaction experienced by the user throughout the evaluation process. Trainabilty can also be measured and give information about how well the specific technoloy is percieved by the user depending on the previous knowledge in for example technology of the user that you conduct the test on.

Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?While you inventing an idea you may be blind to the fact that this idea may not be shared with others. By investigating and comparing with previous similar products you know better if this is a good idea or not. By doing a proof of concept prototype you can see the experience from others and see if it gives any extra value to them and if they would demand it if it existed as a product or service.

THEME 4

Forgot to upload the text from my google docs but here it is!!

I´ve chosen the text “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study” which also was a big topic during previous seminar.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01580.x/asset/jcc41580.pdf?v=1&t=hofs4gbc&s=353814cbf8da9a0b2c7fa3d2a5e40190a9ece0b7

The paper is looking into the rapid adoption of social networking sites (SNSs) which raises important questions about the social implications of such usage. In the paper they also try to answer the questions about whether or not greater use of SNSs leads to greater social capital, and also how social capital develops over time. By investigating the behavior around the usage of SNS and how they reflect the interaction offline they draw conclusions about the how the interaction between people in “real life” affects their participating in SNS.

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

In this study they´ve used a survey to be able to reach a wide range of people (N=2000). The survey has been emailed to people in the span of 15-75 years old and as wide as possible regarding demographic.

Some problems with the chosen method are mentioned in the text. Some of them being that It´s not everyone that´s answering the survey and that it´s also a rather small amount of nonusers answering the research. It was also hard to foreseeing which group that beforehand will be the best to target with the survey and they also start with a wide hypothesis where they make a guess on the contribution of the whole group and then forming the questions around that guess.

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

The importance of selectively choosing your examination group so it includes a wide range of participants. Its important to collect the data properly and be sure of which results that are interesting for the research and that help the forming of a conclusion regarding the subject.

By using quantitative methods its possible to test a hypothesis with statistic data. That way it makes it possible for researchers to prove a theory. The reason for the study in the paper was to investigate whether upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) could be related to physical activity and perceived stress, or not. They sent web questionnaires to the participants and conducted regular follow-ups on the participants.

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

Quantitative methods can at the same show that the hypothesis don't really correspond with the data collected and its also faster and less time consuming than doing more specific qualitative research. In this case the amount of different people from different demographics and with different social background, gender and age is important which makes quantitative a good choice. Regarding the subject of the research its difficult to measure the previous experience with the health care and to know exactly the grade of stress experienced by the people getting the survey.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?Its good for accessing a big amount of data that answer the why, how, when and what with samples from a big group of people. It is also good for investigating the impact over time and make it easy to reach the participants. Because you have to keep the answers short you do not get a very deep insight into the experience of every participant and you have to come up with the specific questions before which may affect how you look at the problem and how you set up your hypothes.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?Its a good way to gain deeper answers and better more extensive answers to the questions Why, How, When. This form of methods demands more time and also demands a better in-deep answer to be beneficial over the quantitative method.

On the other hand It is making it hard to generalize the results due to the few participants. Limitations is for example that the analyse of the data is time consuming and takes a lot more effort than the quantitative. The qualitative methods results in longer and more extensive answers which is good to get a more broad perspective of the issue.

THEME 3

New Media & Society

Publishes key research from communication, media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, geography, anthropology, economics, the political and information sciences and the humanities. It is committed to high-quality research that aim to explore the relationship between theory, policy and practice. Impact Factor: 1.824

I chose an article covering an area in which I have a great interest. The title is “Alternative news sites and the complexities of 'space'” and it is written by Lina Dencik and published the 7th of february 2013.The article seeks to contribute to the debate on new media technologies and political space by exploring the way in which space comes to matter in the context of alternative user-generated news sites in today's media landscape. It also talks about the problems these news sites face when they move from a domestic space to a global space. The aim is to make a case for a much more comprehensive integration of research online practices into the often parallel debate on the globalization of politics.

Theoretical framing
The article will illustrate the complexities in shifting from local and national space to a global space, despite the maybe common assumption about the internet as a global medium.
It will try to challenge the linear perception of the relationship between new technologies and political space as necessarily as one of expansion towards the global.  

Research method
Drawing especially on the case of OhmyNews International and the difficulties this site has had with moving from a domestic space to a global space of activity.

Some of the findings include: Shifts in political and social activity have become popular not only in scholarly debate, but also in mainstream political discourse, arguing that we are moving towards a global space of politics. This due to the media development, that suggest that new media technologies are expanding and enlarging political community, significantly reducing the role of territory in communicative exchange. The debate have mostly been about the perceived opportunities for new alternative media outlets to nurture and sustain democracy “from below” on a global scale but there has been a significant absence of grounding of these speculations in actual research on online practices.

Briefly explain to a first year student what theory is, and what theory is not.Rational type of abstract thinking around a problem. Somehow pointing out the core problems or topics of interest. A proximity and a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature and is explained so a scientist are in position to either support it or contradict it. The starting point is basically to highlight what may be a problem with a guess and see what possible approach that may attack this from several angles.
It is not, according to Sutton & Staw, references, data (empirical evidence), variables, diagrams and hypotheses. Empirical data for example is not necessarily measured in quantity but used to discuss, represent or to construct relationships between the data. The theory may also not necessarily be based and motivated by previous data which may control and affect the outcome of the theories.

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?It gives example of earlier contributors to the new media space and say some about how, where and why the situation is as it is today.

II Explanation: The article is a contribution to the ongoing debate and doesn't dig that deep into where this debate is going and how the debate may or will form the future media space.

Even though most of the article focuses on the I Explanation, Gregors II Prediction is somehow also included. In the conclusion she definitely mention that there might be future problems if the globalize political activity will be the only progressive response to the “hollowing out” of the national political space and that this may mask the power relations and the deeply unequal nature of any global constellation in which social media is used.Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?She doesn't have to come up with a proper suggestion on how this could actually be taken into concern. Previous research and opinions in the debate may also limit her approach to her theory about this ongoing debate but its a benefit that because her discussion on WHY this is important its beneficial for the reader to easily understand the complexity in the issue regarding the future broader media space.

THEME 2 - what is enlightenment

What is Enlightenment?
Enlightenment aiming at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion in a way of gaining access to a view of more critical thinking.
What is the meaning and function of “myth” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument?
The increase: in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The enslavement to nature of people raday cannot be separated from social progress.

False clarity is only another name for myth. something that´s not true and lacks of reason.

As an example of today the defrauded masses cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful. Just like they mention in the text myth can be used to imbue the outside world with an arbitrary meaning and used as a tool to mass deception.

Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them and here myth can be used as an instrument of control.

What are the “old” and “new” media that are discussed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment?
Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure. the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the work from that of society.

As an example they mention the telephone and the radio and their different impact. the former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject when the later Democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations and where private transmissions where condem. the listeners were degraded to passive listeners

This is still how it works today but with the development and impact of internet more and more people actively contribute to “new” media and as traditional mass media actors struggles to keep up we see a small change in who is gaining the most impact today.

Easy saying: more usergenerated content in todays “new” media landscape.

What is meant by “culture industry”?
Its millions of participants demand reproduction processes which inevitably lead to the use of standard products to meet the same needs at countless locations.

Films and radio call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products. The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance.

What is the relationship between mass media and “mass deception”, according to Adorno and Horkheimer?

The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system.  The industries are tightly clustered which leave smaller space for a wider range of broadcaster which affects the public and creates a more unity of politics. Sharp distinctions that you find in between A and B movies for example do not so much reflect the real differences as assist in the classification, organization and identification of consumers of the Mass medias.
The mass medias hierarchy serial qualities purveyed to the public serves only to quantify it more completely. The audience is supposed to behave spontaneously according to a selection of mass product manufactured for their type which gives a mass deception of a wide range of products but its actually only a few providers behind it.

As seen here:

Mediakartan 2013:https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.fria.nu/extern/artikelbilagor/Mediekartan2013.pdf&sa=U&ei=a5t7UvS0CYGZ4gTI8ICQBQ&ved=0CBQQFjAD&sig2=sWsQFbZI52THU0ehFPDaDg&usg=AFQjCNHmDEY8NmSILVZGBMCHjPLu0WB7OQ

Please identify one or two concepts/terms that you find particularly interesting. Motivate your choice.

Unified standard of value:
conspicuous production, the amount of investment put on show. Is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power.

This is relevant when discussion ecological issues and highlight our strive to gain better status through mechanically differentiated products which are ultimately all the same.

Promissory note of pleasure:

That the promise disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that for example that the dinner must be satisfied with reading the menu. The desire inflamed by the glossy names and images is served up finally with a celebration of the daily round it sought to escape.

Its basicly the culture industries endlessly cheating its consumers out of what its endlessly promising.

THEME1 - Theory of science

1) In the begining of the text Russel asks the question “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” This question would probably be answered with a straightforward and confident answer but we should, according to Russel, be more aware and realizing about all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas, Our current deterministic view of the world and how we choose how to view different things as “sense data” in this case is how we choose to see, our immediatly sensation of things as, for example with the chair and the table, the color, shape etc. He wants to highlight the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy - the distinction between “appearance” and “reality”, between what things seem to be and what they actually are. It all depends on how we choose to view it and on what “level”, with the naked eye or for example a microscope. But thinking of how what we mean when we talk with confident about how something appear the confidence with which we began can desert us and the things we may have viewed at as knowledge may turn into to something more uncertain. By judging things so unreflectingly we think we actually see the real shapes which as the practical men we are attracts us. He also put it in another way, he mean that if there are any things that exist independently of us they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations which “Sense data” presumingly is.

2) By proposition he means the statements about something, for example an object, name etc. This description will vary for different people, or for the same person at different times. the proposition that “A is so and so” means that A has the property “so and so” but The description usually makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the proposition. When we make a statement about something as a fact, which is only known by the description, we often intend to make our statement, not in the form involving the description, but about the actual thing described. As with a verbal expression in math which we know from history as a description to help us organise and define our mathematical system, we know nothing beyond what is logically deducible from this propositions or if it hold the whole answer.

3) Russell talks about two different descriptions, Ambiguos and Definite. Ambiguos is any phrase on the form “a so and so” and definite a phrase in singular on the form “THE so and so”. When one object, no more, have one certain property and we do not have knowledge of the same object by acquaintance, we did not actually interpret with it. As an example russell mention “the man with the iron mask”, We can know that he existed and many propositions are known about him but we do not know who he actually was a long time ago. We can only know ONE to be the man in the iron mask but we do not have any “sense data” of him, for example color, smell etc but still a definite description of him as THE man with the iron mask

4) Russell talks about what we mean when we say that we know something and how do we know if that is true. A fact will not exists, besides the knowledge constituted by the actual belief, or also the knowledge constituted by perception. A belief is based on earlier experiences connected to different “sense data” which been collected along the way. We can never be sure if a knowledge is actually all true and we may interpret it differently depending on where we hear/read or from who/whom.

We can't neither say that nothing is knowledge because such a definition is at once too wide and too narrow but more that knowledge is what is validly deduced from _known_ premisses known by us.