Final post and comments

Final post

Comments:

http://jennybern.blogspot.se/2014/10/theme-6-qualitative-and-case-study.html?showComment=1414669525513#c8116028970436978080 (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-6-qualitative-and-case-study.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-5-design-research-pre-seminar.html(1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-5-design-research-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-4-quantitative-research-pre.html (2 comments)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-4-quantitative-research-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-3-research-and-theory-pre-seminar.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-2-critical-media-studies-pre.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-2-critical-media-studies-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-1-theory-of-knowledge-and-theory.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/heme-1-theory-of-knowledge-and-theory.html (1 comment)

In total: 11 comments

Reflection:

I commented mostly on my own blog posts. At first I did not plan to comment on anything. But I felt like I had to respond to the comments other people gave on my blog with somewhat good answers.

When this course first started I was a little skeptic about the content of the course. I though the course was going to be about research in media technology and but the lectures were about philosophy. While I think philosophy is interesting I doubted the real world implications what we learnt would have. In my first blog postings I tried stated that I least learnt some English reading comprehension.  I realize now that the facts that I learned during the first lectures was not the important, the important thing is the way of thinking with criticism and not take everything for granted or what other people say they are, I should think for myself basically.

I very much like the layout of this course. With requirements and tasks to do both before and after the lecture it ensures that both that the student will come well prepared to the lectures and seminars, but also pay attention to the lectures and reflect on things as they happened rather than perhaps waiting until the exam is closing in to start paying attention. I like how the seminars were like a recap on what we learned during the week, hearing some of what you learnt again, as well as clearing out thing that was unclear I believe will result in students remembering the topics better and also help laying the whole puzzle so to speak, once you understand what the whole puzzle looks like it is easier to remember the picture.

I like how we got to choose for ourselves what we wanted to read before the seminars. I can see that it can lead to difficulties discussing too many different researches on one seminar, but with the blogs and all this turned out to work out well. As we got to choose the topics for ourselves I believe that the students puts more effort into the tasks related to them as they find the topics more exiting (one is likely to choose a research they think will be interesting to read).

I also liked the workshops were the students were divided into small subgroups to compete against each other. This was very exciting and I believe if the seminars are exiting people will learn more.

I think the course should have focused more on actual research studies during the lectures. It would be nice if along with presenting the methods some done research was presented to illustrate how they made the method conform to their study. Eva-Lotta had a lecture like this where she focused a lot on her own studies. While I think this was interesting I had unfortunately already read her course in haptic and were familiar to all the researches she presented. It would also be nice if the course focused more on not only what research methods are available but also how one should think when performing a study of their own and choosing to work with some of these methods. I know it might not be in the span of this course but I would like to learn more about how one performs an actual study. Perhaps something I will learn in a future course, at least I have knowledge about the basic methodology.

Combining everything we learnt about ways of critically thinking with the knowledge about research methods and the experience of reading different media technology research studies I learned a lot in this course. Depending on what you are investigating a different approach will always be used, different methods and different ways of thinking will be used.  

In Haibos lecture we learnt that one should spend a lot of time thinking about the problem. In the case of research studies this can mean; what do we want to get out of the study or what do we want to investigate? It is first after you thought about those questions you can start planning how the actual research will be conducted, what methods will be used and so on.

For example when doing something simple like investigating how users feel about this new application to Android one can have many methods and different questions to be answered. Is it vital that we know how users interact with the application? Is it the functionality of the application that we want to test? Do we want to investigate whether this new function is going to be useful for some groups of people? Questions like these needs to be answered beforehand in order to begin planning on what research method we want to use to get answers to our questions. Perhaps a user evaluation with several participants might be handy, or perhaps a beta test. Perhaps it is only necessary to study other similar applications and critique about these. Perhaps we need to investigate how useful some of these functions are in order to tune down the messy layout by removing some of them.

I feel like i will bring a lot of the knowledge I gained in this course to my future investigations. I have not done my bachelor thesis yet but I will most likely do a research on eye tracking in games. I will remember what I learnt during this course and use it to improve my research

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (Post seminar)

During Haibos lecture this week i learned that to solve a problem you need not only to focus on solving a specific problem, you need to think about if the problem can be seen from a different view making it perhaps easier to solve or more interesting. He showed us a clip from Johnny English where Johnny chased a more agile crook up on a building. Instead of jumping over the obstacles in a fancy kung fu style Johnny simply walked around them. I believe that this is not only the way the lazy engineer does it but this way will help you save time and focus your effort to do your company good or even solve problems that at first seemed unsolvable.

On the seminar we discussed what a case study is. To be honest I am still not sure what a case study really is. I mean, I know the definition of a case study but it is very hard to tell which study is a case study, why it is a case study and why it is not. I am not sure my selected paper is a case study, there were a case (2010 UK General election) and the area of investigation was quite general (to investigate how social media monitoring allows for analysis of social dynamics. The thing I learned was that a case study is does not have well defined problems and hypothesis, you investigate a case for the purpose of getting further insights and the case and maybe learn something from it. I believe my paper was a case study having learnt this.

Theme 5: Design research (Post)

Theme 5: Design research

This week we were supposed to have two lectures, and we had no seminar this week. One lecture got moved to the week after so I have not been to it the moment I write this. The first lecture was held by Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander and was mostly about haptic collaborative research. I had already read Eva-Lottas course in haptics so I was already familiar with the research she talked about so unfortunately I did not learn much. She talked a little about how you can combine quantitative and qualitative methods to get the best possible output. This was kinda new to me even though I had reflected on it earlier by reading the texts.

I was also familiar with all the 3 papers we were supposed to read. We went through many haptical research projects in the haptics course before we did our own project. I guess it was useful to read the text from more of a design research perspective rather than a haptical (technological) perspective. I got a lot of insight how a research can be conducted.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (pre seminar)

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

I choose to read the paper “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Social Media Analysis and Public Opinion: The

2010 UK General Election” by Nick Anstead and Ben O'Loughlin which I found in the journal of computer-mediated communication. The goal of the study is to investigate how social media monitoring allow for analysis of social dynamics through which opinions form and shift, for example how peoples opinion changes during a election campaign. The study as a whole consists of both qualitative and quantitative studies. The study contained a quantitative analysis of social media data, that could for example be how many times the name “Jimmie Åkesson” occurred on twitter the last hour during his speech.

The study also consists of several qualitative semi-structured interviews of of people different skills in the area of investigation. For example pollsters, social media researchers and journalists. The purpose of the interviews was to get information about the link between social media and public opinion. They use the interviews and also some qualitative content analysis of some papers along with the interviews to define what is the meaning of public opinion, how will we define it, an how can we include the social aspects into the definition.

The benefits of using these kind of qualitative and semi structured interviews is first of all that you are very likely to get good quality data, because the participants all have great knowledge of the questions asked and are likely to give in dept answers. The cost of conducting these interviews are probably low because of the few correspondents. On the other hand when you interview this few people the results obtained is heavily dependent on the single person giving the answer. You cannot interview one social media researcher and make that person represent every researcher, that single persons vision can be different from others and therefore you cannot take what that person says as fact. This is a possible flaw in my chosen paper but I believe that the thorough discussion made it clear how to interpret the concept of public opinion as the sum of discrete preferences.

From reading this paper I learned one way to take advantage of both the qualitative and the quantitative methods in a research. I can see how the qualitative methods are used to obtain information in order to define concepts and gain a wide knowledge of the research area, this was used to define how the quantitative methods were constructed. Then qualitative methods are used to analyze large amounts of data and formulate results and proof aswell as backing up the information obtained in the interviews.

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

It is a method of research with the purpose of doing an in dept analysis of a event of phenomena where you focus on a single or several cases, events or scenarios and analyzing them in dept. It is a qualitative study where you use a few cases to perhaps test or formulate a new hypothesis. The methology can consist of various methods, for example interviews, observation or reading literature with content analysis.

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.

At the start of the research the research questions was not properly defined. They wanted to see what conclusions could be made by monitoring social media flows about matters such as public opinion and social dynamics. They did not really know how to define some of the concepts such a s public opinion so they had to do some research in order to know how the investigation should be done. They were using multiple data collecting methods, both quantitative collections from social media network flows and qualitative interviews were the selected correspondent consisted of people who the researchers beforehand saw as knowledgeable people in the area of investigation. Because that they used both quantitative collections of data as well as interviews (multiple data collection methods) I would say they had a sufficient amount of overlapping data which made proof of the same hypothesis. They did also used a lot of enfolding literature in order to define concepts and back up some of the information gathered from the interviews.

Theme 4: Quantitative research (post seminar)

This week we had a ”workshop” instead of a seminar.  During the workshop we split up in smaller groups to compete against each other in discussing topics like advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantivative studies. I think this workshop/seminar were the most exiting of all because I felt like I could contribute a lot to the workshop by the means of helping my group. The competition got quite fierce and I like that.

Some of the think I learnt is the benefits and limitations of quantitative and qualitative studies. The conclusions of the workshop were very similar to my own conclusions and research on this topic. I also learned how to combine the both methods in order to make a research. You can use qualitative studies to gain insight on a topic in order to formulate a hypothesis and the quantitative study to test and prove the hypothesis.

During the workshop I also learned advantages and disadvantages of web survey vs. paper forms. Web surveys has easier and faster distribution and are cheaper for large amount of participants though web surveys might have larger dropout rate (in some cases, but can be avoided) and it might be hard to reach some groups (for example old people). Paper surveys on the other hand has low initial cost but high distributional cost for large populations, paper surveys also has some psychological advantages that makes people more willing to answer them thoroughly.

Before the workshop I read the paper “Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection” and reflected on the limitations and benefits of quantivative/qualitative studies. I also read “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study ” by Petter Bae Brandtzæg. I investigated the research methods used in the study and proposed some improvements as well as giving critique to their methods.

Theme 5: Design research (pre seminar)

Theme 5: Design research

Reflection part 1

When designing media technologies, especially previously unexplored technologies such as the hapics used in the paper “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008) I believe several steps are necessary in order to come up with a good concept of the product or program. As a first step you obviously need some product idea with theoretical support of why this product might be a good idea to invest into. In the case of this paper the idea was quite wild but backed up with the theoretic explaining that the vibrotactile sense could harvest a lot of information.

A later step is to evaluate whether this product actually is useful or not. In the case of the paper I believe it is useful to design a prototype to test the basic mechanics of the product, in this case if the vibrotactile sense could be used to follow the football game or if it was too complicated, distracting etc. If the technology is quite unexplored I feel like a designing a prototype followed up by user tests and evaluations might be a good idea. If the potential of the technology already is explored this might be an unnecessary cost, for example if one were to develop a faster computer or a screen with more colors.

The potentials with designing a prototype are that you can test you hypothesis in a non-theoretical environment. You can use user evaluations to gain knowledge about the topic and to prove theoretical concepts. A prototype can be demonstrated to the public in order to gain attention and trust towards your product.. There are different kinds of prototypes high and low fidelity prototypes. A low fidelity prototype might be used to illustrate a concept, while to evaluate something more carefully a high fidelity prototype might be more useful. The downsides of developing a prototype are obviously that it is costly and time consuming, and if the prototype turned out to be a failure, or if dramatic changes had to be done to it the investment might have been for nothing. If you use a low fidelity prototype the costs might decrease dramatically and it might be worth making a prototype for the case of illustration. You can gain knowledge about what works and what does not by developing a prototype, but it might be big investment.

Reflection part 2

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

During a collaborative setting users can communicate with each other. A problem with collaborative studies could be that users interfere and affect each other, that could both be problematic ( if some thought get held back or affected by for example group pressure) and positive (participants might stimulate each other to get more well thought off answers. We can example of a collaborative study in Sallnäs text  "A haptic tool for group work about geometrical concepts engaging blind and sighted pupils" we see example of a collaborative study where visually impaired and blindfolded people work together with sighted people to perform tasks. The result might be harder to analyze in collaborative environments as more variables have to be taken into account for.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

One thing I learned in the seminar last week was that qualitative studies can be used to gain further insight on a previously (relatively) unexplored topic. The qualitative study can be used to formulate hypothesis and the hypothesis can be used to formulate good questions that might be suitable in a quantitative study. The quantitative study is then used to confirm and prove the hypothesis in order to form a complete study.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

I believe that subjective and objective methods can give different perspectives on a topic as well as complement each other. Feelings, for example, is a subjective measure. To investigate how people feels after being treated by something one might use both subjective and objective methods to analyze. You cannot definitely say that “to fix a tooth hurts” as the result of someone saying that is subjective, and not objective. Nevertheless objective methods can be used to compile data gathered by subjective methods. If a large enough percentage says that to fix a tooth hurts a lot one might consider usage of narcotics to lessen the pain as a standard procedure.

Theme 3: Research and theory (Post seminar)

Theme 3: Research and theory 

This week has been a lot more interesting to me because this week you got to choose what you wanted to read and there were many exiting papers to choose from. I guess what i will remember best after this week is how a research paper can be done and I will keep the things I learnt in mind for when I will do a similar investigation of my own. I learn to criticize the methods of the investigation as well as some of the results.

 I also learnt what research and theory is. During the lecture Leif talked about the difference between practical and theoretical knowledge. He also said that theory is a way of describing how phenomena work for the purpose of explaining. Leif gave an example of the theory of man. Man can be a biological creature (medicine), spiritual being (religion), or a social and political animal. We also learnt that theory is different from hypothesis. A theory provides a framework for explanation regarding some observation, and from the assumptions of the explanation we can have a number of possible hypotheses that can be tested in order to prove or disprove the theory.

Unfortunately I could not attend to the seminar this week due to sickness, so I guess I did not contribute much to that. From what I've heard you split into small groups and talked about theory and hypothesis regarding the research paper.

I feel the trend of this course is that things get easier and easier to understand.  The first two themes (especially the first one) were very abstract and really hard to understand. Now we actually got to read a research paper providing an explanation of some very common thoughts about real practical problems and not just theoretical problems.

Theme 4: Quantitative research (Pre seminar)

Theme 4: Quantitative research

Paper analysis:

The quantitative paper i chose to read was “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social

Implications — A Longitudinal Study ” by Petter Bae Brandtzæg. The study compares people that use social networking sites (SNS) to people that do not for the purpose of seeing the differences in social capital, here defined as amount of loneliness felt, numbers of acquaintances, Face-to-face interactions and Bridging capital. The quantitative study was conducted with the help of a survey site called Norstat that according to the study seems reliable with a good mix of different minded people in a wide range of ages. The survey was made three times over a period of three years where the same people participated in all the surveys. 2000 people responded to the first wave of surveys, and the amount of people that used SNS and responded to all surveys was 391. In an attempt to ensure their data was reliable they made an investigation to see if the dropouts were all from a specific gender, age or had a specific educational background. Their conclusion was that the dropouts did not make the investigation that much less reliable. In addition to that they studied already available material in order to for a hypothesis and to see if what kind of differences were made compared to their study.

I would argue that the benefits of using a website for surveys online are that it is really cheap compared to other options and easy to perform the surveys. As the site was a website where the users were registered on the site for the sole purpose of making a contribution to studies I think that the responses get more thought put into and the correspondent takes the studies more seriously. However I would think that making a study online still makes for less well thought off answers, shorter answers and more people making the survey without being serious about it than if the study was performed offline.

Some of the problems I see with this study is obviously the dropout rate. I think that categorizing dropouts only after gender, age and education does not ensure that some subgroup were not more likely to make dropout (which would corrupt the data). Another problem might be that some subgroup of people does not want to respond to the survey at all. Some subgroups might be overrepresented in the study while the goal of the study seems to be to represent the whole population in Norway. This is obviously very hard problems to solve, you need to be more active in making sure those who took the study the first year follow ups the study the next year (perhaps by offering them more points on the site). The second problem is even harder to solve, first of all you do not know what subgroups might respond differently, what subgroups will not make the survey or if there are any subgroups that might make flaws in the data at all. I think they made a good job considering all in the study.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative methods are very useful when performing research with many correspondents for the purpose of investigating or proving some hypothesis by taking in a large number of correspondents. The quantitative method requires a well-formed hypothesis and research questions in order to produce a useful result. Therefore you have to have a good insight of the problem or scenario you are investigating before investigating it further. Limitations are that a quantitative study (for example online study) can never be performed with the same quality as a qualitative study because it would be to costly and correspondent would lose interest in responding to a to much time consuming study.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative methods are on the other hand useful when you are investigating a complex or previously uninvestigated phenomena. This method is useful in producing hypothesis and gain insight on some problem. The method allows to produce a deeper investigation with more complex questions, longer interviews and perhaps more follow-ups and research material (provide correspondents with material required to perform the research). However the qualitative method is to a larger extend a subjective study where you have to rely on a few correspondents and perhaps different twists in the analysis depending on the people performing the interviews as well as the few correspondents picked.

I would argue that the best way to perform a study on an uninvestigated topic is to perform a qualitative study in order to gain insight on the problem, and then follow it up with a quantitative study in order to test hypothesis and produce reliable results.

Theme 2: Critical media studies (Post seminar)

Theme 2: Critical media studies (Post seminar)

This week we had one lecture and one seminar. We have also read Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Walter Benjamin ”The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity”. I think this weeks literature was easier to grasp than previous week (especially Kant) but still very challenging (at least for me).

During the seminar we discussed some questions related to the literature. One interesting thing that I realized during the seminar was that a society relying only on the concept of nominalism will look very different from todays society. A society that takes things for what they are will for example see the strong peoples dominance over the weak as a natural event (because that happens all the time in nature, right?), a stable society needs something more than just the nominalistic views, we need some rules and norms in order to maintain a stable society.

The semininar also made me reflect some more on the differences between the two texts, and also reflect on when and where these texts were written and under what circumstances. I learn a lot on this topic by discussing it with my seminar group.

In order to understand the texts better I looked I read the Wikipedia summary of Adorno & Horkheimer and I used Oxforddictionaries.com to look up some of the key concepts before reading the text.

What I so far feel like I am getting better at is thinking in philosophical terms, and taking in complex philosophical concepts and understanding as well as reflecting on them. I was at first a bit skeptical whether philosophy was useful working as an engineer. But I feel reading these texts and reflecting upon them develops my mind in some sense. It is still early in the course but I think that after this course I will be able to see things from another perspective, criticize them and from that come up with solutions on various problems.

Theme 3: Research and theory (pre seminar)

Theme 3: Research and theory

Journal:

I chose the journal “Social Networks” (impact factor 2.931). It treats the impact of networks and social relations in terms of disciplines related to the subject. It also treats analysis of social behavior and social structure in relation to social networks.

Paper:

 I chose the paper called “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study” by Petter Bae Brandtzæg. The purpose of this paper was to investigate how SNS (Social networking site) users differ in social capital and also how th social capital differs over time. The meaning of social capital according to this paper is a measurement of Informal sociability, loneliness and bridging social capital. That basically means the amount of offline (face-to-face) interaction with close friends one has, how lonely one feels and how many friends you have (people that you call friend and meet regularly). The study also investigates how different types of SNS users differentiate from each other. The users are categorized into 5 subgroups, sporadics (do not visit SNS very often but occasionally), lurkers (only watch but do not interact), socializers (only visit the SNS to socialize with friends and family), debaters (uploading content and participate in debates and discussions) and advanced users (frequent SNS users with diverse and broad SNS usage).

The research was conducted via a series of survey given out a total of 3 times during a period of 3 years. The sample size was decently large 700-2000 samples but according to me not enough to investigate things as age and gender differences as well as difference between the user groups with an undoubtedly solid conclusion.

The conclusion was fairly well matched with the hypothesis in the cases that SNS user have more face-to-face interactions with close friends and that they have a greater set of friends who they see regularly. However some interesting results were to be found. For example, lurkers and sporadics reported less social capital and male debaters and advanced users reported increasing loneliness!

One thing that I think the study lacks is an evaluation on which personalities tend to become active SNS users and who does not. I think the conclusion can be compromised if you do not take into account that some groups tend to become heavier SNS users than others (for example people with greater social demand). That could mean that already social active people use SNS in a larger degree and   less socially active people do not see the benefits of it. Perhaps a more interesting conclusion could be found if the question was if SNS usage increases social capital(interview people before and after they started using SNS) and not if SNS users have a greater social capital than non SNS users?

I also think that the study should focus more on emphasizing feelings rather than quantitative results (how many face-to-face interactions one has). Do the users feel like they have a greater social capital in terms of feeling socially active, feeling like they have a lot of friends and feeling lonely?

Theory:

Theory is about explaining phenomena that occurs for the purpose of explaining and enhancing our understanding of the world. According to Gregor (2006) he characterizes theory into subgroups, theory of analyzing (how things are), explaining, predicting, analyzing and predicting (EP) and the theory on action and design (how to accomplish tasks). Theory is not data, empirical pattern and hypothesis. These things might be a tool in order to frame theory and knowledge but are not theory in themselves.

I would say the characteristics of the theory used to explain things in my selected paper are to a very large degree from the theory of explaining and predicting (EP). Explaining what the relationship looks like of SNS and non SNS users according to the study. Also explaining and discussing why the results were as they were. The paper included both testable propositions and casual explanations of the result. Predictions were included in terms of explaining previous articles and trying to predict parts of the result in order to formulate hypothesis.

The theory of explaining and predicting was for sure the right was to go for this paper. What we want to know from the conclusion is; what is, how, why, when and where. We also want proof in terms of results conduced from testable propositions with a discussion aiming to explain them.

Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (Post seminar)

For this seminar I red the two texts written by Plato and Kant. The texts were very complex and hard to grasp at first. I used a Youtube audio book version to casually listen to the Theaetetus dialogue before reading the whole thing. One thing I got better on for sure this week was my reading comprehension. I also learnt a lot on how philosophers think and how they argue about a concept. In addition to the texts I listen to this video about some of the concepts that Plato discussed.¹ What was most interesting for me this week was the fact that you can discuss something so thoroughly and still do not come to a complete conclusion. This made me realise that there are a lot of things about the world that I don't really understand, even if I at first believe myself to understand them. I realize most things can be criticized and nothing can really be taken for granted.

For the seminar I prepared by reflecting on the two texts (see previous blog posts). I tried to reflect about some of the most important concepts and have my own thoughts on the concepts and put them into some easy to understand perspective. I also prepared a question for the seminar, a little bit outside of the context of the two text. The texts displayed a very characteristic way of thinking and reasoning, and I was wondering if this philosophical way of thinking was useful for solving any “real world” problem like, how can this way of thinking help me make a better smartphone, or a faster computer? Unfortunately there was no answer to be found at the time.

On the seminar it was mostly the seminar leader discussing interesting concepts like if infants can feel hunger and what color is to someone who has no previous experience with colors (colorblind).

1(Theaetetus on knowledge, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uzLRA9NFDM)

Theme 2: Critical media studies (pre seminar)

Dialectic of Enlightenment:

A] Enlightenment is the process that makes people knowledgeable and able to think for themselves for the purpose of explaining. Rumors, myth and fantasy are replaced with facts, knowledge and independent thinking in the process of enlightenment.

B] Dialectic refers to various methods where logical reasoning, rational thinking and discussion free from myth and biases helps people arrive at some truth about a matter of questions.

C] Nominalism seems to be about the fact that the definition of objects described in a certain way does not really conclude anything about the world itself but are just ideas that does not have to be true. Every object should be treated as unique and examined accordingly to gain a general comprehension of the object. For example someone points at a tree telling me it is a big oak tree. I can take their word for it, or I can examine the tree more thoroughly first to get my own idea about the properties of this “tree”. It might not be an oak, it might not be a “big” oak from my perspective and it might not even be an oak at all, it could be some different tree or even some kind of illusion. The term nominalism seems to go well with the previous described terms “enlightenment” and “dialectic” because it encourages fact and knowledge instead of rumors, myth and fantasy.

D] Myth as described in the book seems to be the opposite of enlightenment but is in the same way a method of explaining things about the world. Myths are not founded in facts and rational thinking but are rather general concepts defined without any dialectic reasoning and proof. Myths are used to persuade people of some view, for example the mythological gods were used to explain events in the world giving them purpose and understanding. Humans are natural seekers of understanding, and if the concept is incomprehensible one might use myth to explain it rather than remaining untaught. The myth should be opposed and replaced with enlightenment according to Adorno and Horkheimer's.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

A] My understanding is that “substructure” in the context of conditions of production could be things such as tools and technology that forms guidelines on how to work and what is possible to accomplish.  “Superstructure” could be about actually working with these guidelines. Things as culture and historical views might influence the pace in which the superstructure develops.

I think that Cultural production is often possessed by the social elite. In cultural context things are not taken for what they are, a painting painted by an acknowledged and famous painter is far more valuable than the same picture painted by some nobody. It is also easier for someone from the elite society to get acknowledged than someone dirt poor with no previous accomplishments. The problem with this is that it is unfair from a Marxistic perspective.

B] The photography and film industry is examples of cultural industries that have revolutional potential. Driven by the technological revolution these industries also make way for a social revolution. Being able to capture the world in a picture or promote a message through a movie can influence the way people perceives the world. These medias can enlighten people and change all kinds of opinions and change how people perceive the world. The views of Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer seems to be very similar in the way that they see understanding and enlightenment as forces that drives these revolutions forward.

C] Beauty is an example of something that can be both naturally and historically determined. From a human to human perspective beauty is something a human perceives as an indicator for the feeling of love. Perceiving a beautiful person as beautiful is a very natural way of perceiving beauty from an evolutionary perspective.  The way we perceive who is beautiful and who is not is arguably also historically determined where things as ideals, stereotypes, media and others shape what one should perceive to be beauty.

D] I understand the aura of the cultural art as something more than the matter that forms the object. Things such as cultural value and symbolic value but also things such as originality (not copied) and purpose (for what reason was this art made and who made it) defines the characteristic of this “aura”. Natural object can never have an aura shaped by these factors unless the object is made cultural first.

Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science pre seminar

Knowledge and Theaetetus:

If I were to define knowledge before reading any of the texts I would say knowledge is what the knowledgeable people perceive to be correct knowledge. I would that real knowledge is tested through scientific methods, except from the obvious knowledge about our surroundings which can be self evident for obvious reasons.

Socrates argues to Theaetetus that knowledge is perception. What I think of this is that knowledge can never be absolute. Knowledge is individual and can never be a general concept for the state of things, except if all individuals agree on what is the correct state of things. Of course no person can ever truly agree on something that another person perceive because perceiving is an individual concept. Socrates says: "When the same wind blows, one of us feels cold and the other not?" This means that we can never know whether the wind is cold or not, all we can know if it the wind makes us cold.

When Socrates argues that we do not see "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears I interpret this the same way as I interpret whether the wind is cold or not. It is not the wind hitting the skin that defines the coldness of the wind for it is the same for every person exposed to the same wind. The wind hits the skin and the skin measures the temperature, then it is up to oneself (the brain) to decide how to read what the skin signals. This is basically the same as an engineer measuring things, in some cases what the engineer measures is alarming and in some cases or for any other engineer it is completely fine. The skin, the eyes and the ears are only tools for measuring things regarding our senses. The eye does not decide what we see and the eyes cannot decide and make a common interpretation of what we see. It can only measure the light hitting the receptors inside the eyes. “With” in this case means that the eyes and ears themselves are not interpreting the signals, but they are just tools of measurement and then it is up to the engineer to define and make sense of this signal.

Empiricism says that sensory experience creates knowledge, and this seems to be true regarding Socrates argument that knowledge is perception. What we perceive to be the correct state of matters depends solely on our sensory experience regarding the matter along with our previous sensory experience which is what created our own opinion about the world. I would say this is true regarding some knowledges. For example someone argues that the stove over there is hot and you will get burned if you touch it. Whether you treat the words you hear through your ears as knowledge depends on many things. For example how trustworthy is that person, and that basically means how did that persons words combine with your previous experiences with the world did they seems to fit or does that person lie or misconceive the world compared to how you see it? It also depends on your previous experience with stoves. Did you get burned before? Do you know that a stove generates heat? Is there a red light indicating that the stove might still be hot? All of this can be seen as old sensory experience interacting with new experience creating knowledge.

Critique of pure reason:

“We assume that our cognitions must conform into objects” basically means that in our natural way of thinking is thinking about objects even if the thought is not itself about and object we can grasp or has any experience with. For example when we think of happiness we think of some person that is doing some task that makes the person happy and then how the happy person present himself instead of thinking about the happiness and only happiness without anything else involved.

Kant says that in this way of thinking we cannot learn from concepts about objects without sensing the object and put it into picture. For example, how can we learn what a fork is without putting the fork into place as an object in a situation that we are familiar with, for example eating at the table? Kant argues that in some cases it might be useful to think the other way around. Especially in the fields of metaphysics where we are dealing with things hard to put into picture (e.g. quantum physics etc.) we can try to think about these things as if they must somehow conform to our cognitions. Kant argues that this way of thinking might help us understand things we cannot comprehend.