Theme 4: Quantitative research

Study of article
I chose an article written by Tracii Ryan and Sophia Xenos with the title 

”Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage”. The article was published in the journal Computers in human Behavior in 2011.  The article aims to determine who uses Facebook, to carry out the study's goal the authors examined 1635 Internet users from Australia between 18-44 years old. From these 1635 persons 1324 completed the first questionnaire and the other 311 were removed from the study. The Authors decided that the participants needed to be between 18-44 years old to get an average of the Australian Facebook users.  Since Ryan and Xenos  tried to observe the Australian Facebook population by looking at a representative section of people I believe they did a cross-sectional study. This method is a good way to get a fairly good look at the big picture, the study is often cheap to proceed and can reach out to a large scale of persons. I also believe the study is using a Hypothetic-deductive method since the authors establish a hypothesis about who is using Facebook and who is not and then through a cross-sectional study try to determine whether their hypothesis is correct or not.

In this specific case the authors sent out questionnaires to reach the participants and to collect data. One of the study’s weak points is that Ryan and Xenox searched for people to take part in the report on the Internet and therefor most of the participants are regular Internet users and most of them (1158) are on Facebook. This could have effected the results in a different way than if they had advertised for participants offline and gotten an even dispersal between Facebook users and non-users. 
Sending out questionnaires is a great way to collect larger amounts of data but on the downside in a questionnaire you don’t get the opportunity to explain the questions further. Another negative thing is that the risk for misunderstanding is bigger in a questionnaire than in an verbal interview. 

I think Ryan and Xenos have considered the negative parts of their chosen method. I think it’s important that they evaluated and criticized their choice of methods and how they implemented them. I realized how vital it is to think through your decisions and the implications of your choices when writing a paper. If you do a really good job motivating and criticizing your methods I believe your articles credibility will increase.

Questions
The paper Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection aims to examine like the title suggests the relationship between physical Activity, self-reported URTI and stress. They establish that physical activity lead to a lower risk of URTI and that physical activity is more important to those with high stress levels.

1. A quantitative method is relatively cheap to use and in the same time reach out to a lot of people without being to time consuming. A quantitative method can be a good way to start your study and to figure out the most essential information about the target group.

2. A qualitative method is good to use when you want a deeper understanding for the target group since this method give the opportunity for the target group to interfere and share their opinions. For example in a design process the designer may believe that a certain function is the most important for the user when in fact the function is useless. In a case like this a qualitative methods opens up for discussion and a deeper understanding for the user can be developed.

References:

Ryan, T. & Xenos, S., 2011. Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(5), pp.1658–1664. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563211000379.

Post-refelction on Theme 3

I found it easier to see the connection between the course and this week's theme than the past themes. Theory feels like a relevant topic in our education and especially before writing a master thesis. To me it was very interesting reflecting upon what theory is and how to put it into words. I really appreciated the seminar when we discussed about theory and different kinds of theories used in the articles we've read. I still think the term theory is a bit abstract and sometimes a bit hard to understand. Theory is easy to mix with hypothesis and therefor I think it's confusing. But after the seminar today when I've heard other student's thought and explanations I feel I have a better idea of what theory is.

What I really liked the most at the seminar was the idea of creating and writing together by updating the course wiki on KTH social. When we did this it got me thinking on how different we perceive things and how we make up ideas and explanations to understand complicated things. I realized this when we read the course wiki on What is theory?. When reading this text I thought it consisted of a lot of fancy non-meaning words, words that sounds complicated but didn't actually contribute to understanding what theory is. Maybe I started thinking of this since we a couple of minutes earlier defined a theory called Naïve Theory on the other course wiki; Examples of theories. This theory really interested me since it's something everybody does everyday when taking in new information. It's probably why we have different ideas and thoughts about things. I think this could be the cause of many misunderstandings since the way I perceive something doesn't have to correlate with how another person perceive the same thing. Further more, if we then make up a naive idea about the situation and about what we just perceived to understand it better we'll probably not end up with the same idea at all.

I find this Naïve Theory especially present in media. Something happens and a journalist is there to observe the situation he makes up his idea of what happens and then make it in to an article. People like you and me read the article and make up our own naive ideas about the situation. I think the media is an excessive example since media is trying to make headlines to sell more newspapers and draw peoples attention. But it is fascinating how often this happens and how difficult it is to let go of our own ideas even though we find out that the data about the situation was incorrect.

I feel that this week's theme got my thoughts spinning in different directions. The thing I'm going to keep in mind from this week is how important a good and well explained theory is in an article. In the article I read this week the author didn't use theories to her advantage which made the article loose credibility. So I'm going to keep in mind to use theories in a good way in the future when I'm writing an article.

Theme 3: Research and Theory

Journal
I chose the Journal Media, Culture & Society is according to their webpage a major peer-reviewed international forum for research in the field of sociology. They publish papers on media and communicational technologies from a political, cultural and economical perspective. It has been published since 1979 and you can find it in databases such as SCOPUS and Social Sciences Citation Index. The Journals impact factor is 1.092

I found a paper written by Maria Bakardjieva. The article I chose is this one: 

Bakardjieva, Maria. (2003) Virtual togetherness: an everyday-life perspective. Media, Culture & Society. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 25: 291–313

In the article Bakardjieva explores how online relationships and interaction effects everyday life. The study is based on an ethnographic study of 21 Internet users participating in online forums. Her main questions are:

• Why do users participate in these forums? 
• What does it mean to them? 
• How does it reflect on the public understanding of the Internet? 

From her research she draws conclusions of Internet as a new communication medium. 

What struck me when reading Bakardjiev's paper was that already in the abstract she has three questions. I feel these questions should be more connected and maybe she should chose a main focus to keep a red thread through her paper. On the first page she also states:

"... by engaging in different forms of collective practice online users

transcend the sphere of narrowly private interest and experience. Why do

they do that? What does it mean to them? How does it affect public

understanding of the Internet? The concept of ‘virtual community’ has been

only of limited help in understanding of this practice and I will try to

explain why in what follows."

This makes me even more confused. What's the main question? It's easy to loose the reader already in the abstract or first couple of pages if the main question isn't clear. 

Questions1. Theory explains and describes things around us for example Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Newton has a hypothesis that the apple will fall to the ground and when he drops it does fall. But to be a theory it needs to be general and not only apply to one apple. By observation and experiments Newton can construct a theory. If what he constructs not is logical and if he doesn't put the information into a context it wouldn’t have been a theory. Since Newton explains how and why things are drawn to the ground if we drop them, it’s a theory.
2. Bakardijeva collects data about Internet usage from her 21 test persons. She analyses why, how, when and where they use the Internet and social forums to map how relationships are build through Internet. Therefor I believe she uses the second type of theory in Gregor’s Taxonomy; Explanation.
3. The theory explanation can only be used when a papers main question concerns a fairly new subject or an unknown. For example in the article I read, it was written in 2003 when Internet relationships were still very unexplored. If the theory is used correctly and with the right kind of subject it will provide a broad knowledge and understanding. 

Theme 2 - Reflection

I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between some of the texts and this course. It always takes some time to grasp the core of a new course and since the first couple of classes were canceled it made it even more difficult to know what to expect from the course. I started of last week's theme thinking the themes had no connection to the course or to each other. In the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Adorno and Horkheimer I struggled to keep focused since I didn't see how enlightenment and last week’s theme critical media studies were connected. I was relieved when I started reading chapter four “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” as I thought, "Finally I see a clear connection". I think it’s much easier to stay focused and motivated when reading a text if you understand why your reading it and when you feel like you are learning something. I still have a hard time understanding what I was suppose to learn the first week and the only thing I took with was that I could think critical and not trust everything I see or hear. In comparison to the first week I learned a more last week. I found the part about the culture industry really interesting. Because what Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing are things I grew up with like TV and movies etc. I’m so used to these medias and the way of consuming them that I don’t even reflect over it when I get home and start the TV. I feel like Adorno and Horkheimer treated the question about the new media a bit dramatically by being so negative. In my opinion movies and TV-shows can leave room for critical thinking and I would unlike Adorno and Horkheimer call it a kind of art. I feel like they were overreacting to the changes in the culture industry and the mass media.

It got me thinking about a topic we were discussing in another course here at KTH called Social Media Technology. We read an article by Nicolas Carr, Is Google making us stupid? (2008). This article is proposing that using the Internet makes us stupid and that it have serious effects on cognition. Will people who read this article in say 60 years feel like I did when I was reading Dialectic of Enlightenment? Or will this happen even sooner since the technology advances more and more rapidly?

Sources:
Carr, Nicolas. (2008). Is google making us stupid? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Theme 2: Critical media studies

Enlightenment 

I started reading the chapter "The concept of enlightenment" thinking I already had a vague idea of what it meant. The age of Enlightenment was when people broke free from fear, religion, myths and the unknown. It was when people  started to believing in science and knowledge instead of fantasy. While reading Adorno and Horkheimer’s text I found that the concept of enlightenment wasn't a bit different from what Kant is describing.  The Enlightenment according to Adorno and Horkheimer is far more negative and darker. If the Age of enlightenment was suppose to exceed our limits and let go of our fear of the unknown it has failed in their opinion.  The Enlightenment has gone out of control and instead of releasing people it has done the opposite. The following quote summarizes the negative thoughts Adorno and Horkheimer has about enlightenment: 

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s programs was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer)

Myths

Myths is what we use to explain things we don't understand or the unknown. When something happens and we can't understand why, we use our imagination to get it to make sense. Myths deceives us and keeps us from knowing the truths. Myths is what the Age of Enlightenment tried to get ride of by replacing it with knowledge but according to Adorno and Horkheimer the myths that the Enlightenment tried to remove were actually products of the Enlightenment. The science became mystified and replaced the religion, people started to worship the science and therefore it lost it's purpose to make a change. The science it self became mythology. 

New and old media, the culture industry and mass media/mass deception

Adorno and Horkheimer describes old media as a book or a painting while new media are things like TV, film  and radio. Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be pretty skeptical to the new media. They seem to be even more concerned about what was produced and how the media was consumed. Their opinion was that media only strived to generate money and that the mass-production of media such as TV-shows made the media impersonal. The new media wasn't good for the humans, it  didn't make her think and left no room for critical thinking. Adorno and Horkheimer states that the media made the humans passive observers that consumed what the media served. In difference to old media for example a book or a painting that made the humans think. The new media made the culture industry change, the culture industry fooled people to think media was a good way to relax and get entertained but it actually brainwashes people. For example the increasing numbers of "special effects" and the faster speed in movies is suppose to make people get used to the increased pace in the labour market. 

Interesting concepts

What really interested me was the part about image of the product and the brand. How important the image of a certain product is and how market is filled with something for everyone. Adorno and Horkheimer divides a product value in to two pieces, the use value and  the exchange value. The use value is what the product is actually worth and the exchange value is what the product is worth on the market and for the consumer. These two doesn't have to correlate, the brand it self can be more important than the product itself. A good example is designer clothes. The market value is high compared to what what it actually cost to produce them.