Final post

This final blog post is my reflection to whole course or Theory and Method for Media Technology. I tried to summarize key points of the course and make the conclusion about importance of that course in my study program.

The first theme of the course revealed the concept of knowledge and process of getting knowledge. It was based on Plato’s Theaetetus and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I think the most important conclusion is that pure knowledge doesn’t exist, we perceive the world through our senses and form knowledge about it. In other words, the world is always our world, we cannot get knowledge about it as about independent unit. In my opinion, the first theme is very important in context of research methods as methods of getting knowledge, since this theme helped to understand nature of knowledge.

The second theme was very interesting for me especially revolutionary potential of arts and its role in soviet communism, national-socialism in Germany, and American consumerism. Modern media technology as tools of art reproduction and distribution plays great role in forming public opinion and sharing stereotypes that is commonly used for political purposes nowadays as well it was in Hitler’s Germany or Soviet Union.  Enlightenment, in its term, aims to uncover the real world, escape from myths, and put the human on place of master of nature instead of God. Nominalism is opposite, it’s a way of escaping of reality and define certain truth, for example, in Nazi Germany, Germans is title nation. Media is also plays great role in enlightenment process. Of course, the question about objectivity of knowledge and knowledge perception arises. But enlightenment or nominalism concepts don’t give an answer for that question.

The next topics were about theory and research methods. The crucial things that I’ve learnt are process of building theory and relation between hypothesis and theory. So hypothesis is basically certain statement that should be tested, and a theory is built based on that test or experiment. A theory is framework of rules that explains how and why the phenomena work, exist or appear. Research methods aim to test the hypothesis. Research methods have certain limitations and not always allow to get unambiguous answer or find “the truth”. There is a flashback again to the first theme about objectivity of knowledge. The example that illustrates relativeness of truth is that modern technologies allow to repeat the experiment after a while, but the results can be completely different because the idea of subject of investigation is changed, researchers can operate new data and new knowledge or estimate getting result from another angle based on new knowledge. This is relativism concept: any theory holding that criteria of judgment are relative, varying with individuals and their environment [American Heritage Dictionary]. "Relativism about truth, or alethic relativism, at its simplest, is the claim that what is true for one individual or social group may not be true for another" [Baghramian, Maria and Carter, Adam, "Relativism", "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition)", Edward N. Zalta (ed.),]. Thus, all theories basically reflect just human’s current idea of the world.

We consider quantitative, qualitative research methods, design research and case study within the course. I was familiar with quantitative research methods as I used them in my Bachelor thesis. Other research methods were quite new for me. Choosing qualitative or quantitative methods depends on subject of research and goal of the research. Quantitative methods allow operating big data, get general and wildly applicable results. Mathematical formalism is not applicable for every subject of research, therefore qualitative methods are mostly used in sociological or anthropological studies. Qualitative methods allow to investigate subject in-depth, but results have just subjective interpretation and don’t have empirical supports that quantitative methods give. We were learning these methods by examples of articles of our choice. I selected following articles:

·         “The Rise of Twitter in the Political Campaign: Searching for Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects in the Presidential Primary” by Bethany A. Conway, Kate Kenski and Di Wang published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

·         “When Online Dating Partners Meet Offline: The Effect of Modality Switching on Relational Communication Between Online Daters” by Artemio Ramirez, Erin M. (Bryant) Sumner, Christina Fleuriet and Megan Colepublished in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

·         “Don’t be dumb—that’s the rule I try to live by”: A closer look at older teens’ online privacy and safety attitudes” by Denise E Agosto and June Abbas published in New Media and Society.

The authors mostly used both qualitative and quantitative methods as, on the one hand, subjects of studies cannot be described just by mathematical formalism, on the other hand, certain statistic results and discovering data correlation is necessary for summarizing results. Just in the last research about online privacy and safety only qualitative methods were used. Another common thing for all selected research studies is that authors used several qualitative methods such as questionnaire, interview, and qualitative content analysis method.

Case study research has a special place among research methods. The point is that both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used in case study, but as opposed to other research case study doesn’t have any hypothesis, otherwise case study allow to build the theory and formulate the hypothesis. The object of case study is to collect data about phenomena to understand the phenomena instead of explain it.

Finally, we studied design research method that differ from other by presence of prototype. Prototype allows to explore the limitation and probably discover the new function of suggested model. I like the explanation of prototype by Tiago Barros and Paulo Melo in the article “Prototyping as a powerful tool in a user centered innovation process”. “Prototyping is important to bring abstract ideas to a more concrete level […] While prototyping, developers face several limitations that could not be identified while they were discussing abstract concepts only. Apart from that, prototypes bring light to new aspects and opportunities that have not been considered.” In my opinion prototype and case study have similar goals and approaches, for instance, both of the aim to get additional data, both of them can be sources of new knowledge and base of new theory, but prototype is testing the theory initially when case study is just a base for building theory.

To sum up, after taking course of Theory and Method for Media Technology I got know about different research methods, how they are used in the research studies related to media technology, and its role in building theory. Moreover, idea of impossibility to get “pure knowledge” and “absolute truth” allows to look at process of building theory under another angle. This course is very important and helpful for conducting research for Master thesis. Also I familiarized with different research study and possible research methods related to my specialty – Media Management.

Sources:

1.     American Heritage Dictionary

2.      "Relativism about truth, or alethic relativism, at its simplest, is the claim that what is true for one individual or social group may not be true for another" [Baghramian, Maria and Carter, Adam, "Relativism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition)

3.     Tiago Barros and Paulo Melo “Prototyping as a powerful tool in a user centered innovation process”