Final Reflection

When this course first started, I did not really know what to expect from it. My initial thoughts was that this was a fact driven, gather data and write reports kind of course, instead it appeared to start off like a philosophy course. This made it contrast extremely with all our others courses which are less humanities-based and more factual. I have learned much more in this course than I first thought I would. I have learned about how my perception differs from everyones elses and that knowledge and even things that feels like they can’t be different, like colors, are different. How everything we see and feel is interpreted by our minds, mixed with experience and changed to create different viewpoints depending on who we are. How seemingly similar things can differ so much from person to person is truly interesting.

As the course progressed I feel like it changed direction away from the more philosophical part, to a more analytical one and actually, as I first thought the course was going to be about, it took a turn for the more gather data like, practise research methods and go through theories, to later be able to make the most of our reports. I guess it did so pretty quickly, even though I feel like half the course was about philosophy.

We started to read a lot about, big spoiler, theory and different methods. I have learned what the concept of theory actually means and to reason and analyze it in a way I couldn’t before. The theme that I think gave me most was the theme “Research and Theory”. It focused mostly on what a theory are and what it’s not, which gave it a very clear picture to use for reference when continuing to delve deeper into the course. To give an example, pure data or research are not a theory though they are the building stones on which a theory can grow.

Later in the course we started to read and discuss about the different kinds of theory. Analysis, explanation, prediction, explanation and prediction, and design and action. A word ‘theory’, that earlier ment only ‘idea’ for me, now have many different underlying meanings which differs depending on the situation which they are used in and focuses on different aspects when subject changes. I found it easier to get a better grasp on ‘theory’, when these different separations arose. It’s interesting to see the development you can go through in just a brief period of time, in the beginning of the course theory doesn’t mean that much and at the end of the course you know different kinds which lets you choose the best possible action for research.

Not only can theories be categorized in the different kinds I wrote about above but theory also changes depending on the subject. Theory in natural science is not the same as theory in social sciences. Theory in the former is more about making predictions, something that is very hard in social sciences since everyone and their perception is different, instead the focus lies on explaining the occurrence of certain phenomena.

With the theory mindset now established the course progressed into the explaining and usage of different research methods, quantitative and qualitative. The former makes it easy to conduct surveys, structured interviews and observations. They are primarily based on numbers which lays the ground for easy to generalize, statistical tests. Qualitative methods on the other hand are based on focus groups, in-depth interviews and document reviews. Unlike quantitative methods this is more subjective, the condition described are from the point of view of the one experiencing it which makes it more in-depth than quantitative methods but also harder to generalize and rather focuses on a certain group.

To be able to correctly identify a problem or to answer a question you have to know what kind of research has to be done, in what ways it gives you the data necessary, how efficient the research progress will be and how reliable the result will be. The knowledge of theory and methods is what makes this possible.

Most questions can, to some extent, always be approached using either quantitative or qualitative research methods, the one that is most suited depends on the underlying main goal. To give as broad a picture as possible of the question it is very useful in most situations to combine both research methods. Which in many situations seems to solve the problems a single methodological approach unfortunately can create. The design process of the research relies heavily on the method used to conduct it and combining both methods is considerably more time consuming than just having to account for one, however the way quantitative and qualitative methods outway each other's shortcomings is often worth it if the main goal is not very well defined. It’s also important to factor in what theory you want to build when designing the research and establishing the usage of one or both of these methods.

In one of the articles I read during this course the main goal was to identify the bias of search engines, how they affect the search results, potentially hiding different sites. To test this they created a bot which collected data for several months, which they then compiled to a result. The research question here I find to be really hard to conclude without the use of quantitative methods, I can’t think of a way to perform the tests necessary using a qualitative method unless creating an AI to conduct the research.

From this I drew the conclusion that for some research only one method is possible for use but often the result could be extended using the other research method to give background, incentive or something similar to the research. Therefore I think, to best answer complex research questions you really need to know the problem. From there you can build your theory, then you can start to think about what method or methods you want to use that best fits the theory, complements it and gives the best possible case to further evolve it.

Theme 6 - Reflection

This week we were supposed to pick both a paper that was using qualitative methods as well as a paper using the case study method. I found this very hard, having only read one text about case study research. Finding the differences just from reading the abstracts from a bunch of papers and to pick one which seemed both interesting and fulfilled the criteria was not an easy task. When I finally had found one which I thought would be a good fit for the case study method, I started to analyze it according to the different steps a case study is built upon found in Eisenhardts text. I soon realized that the paper I had chosen didn’t fulfill many of the steps and that it probably was not a case study. Ah well. Otherwise I found this week to be more fun than earlier weeks, partly because the texts I had chosen as well as the mandatory ones were really interesting to read, and partly because the end of the course is approaching.

I prepared this week by reading the mandatory text on social as well as choosing two texts from the examples. Since we had already read a lot about qualitative studies I don’t feel that I learned anything new in that area. Something new that I did learn about was about case study research, what is regarded as a case study, what it is used for, when and where to use it and what parts it includes.

On the seminar we mostly talked about which paper that was using the case study research method we had chosen. It was interesting to find out that most of our group all had chosen texts which, even though some of them had case study in the title, were in fact not using the case study research method.

Theme 5 - Reflection

This week I have read the texts “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration.” and “Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space” as well as “Differentiated Driving Range”. Even though there were three different texts to read I didn’t find this week to be very cumbersome, partly because the language weren’t that hard to comprehend and partly because I found them to be somewhat fun to read. Since we didn’t have to pick our own papers or journals it was easier and faster to begin the task and to get into the texts. I think I understood most of the material, and only needed to look up some words, I also found the texts to be kind of well paced and grouped together in a way which encouraged continuous reading. Some texts earlier in the course were not as easily comprehensible and needed quite a few stops to think about what I had just read, just to understand it.

We didn’t have a seminar for this week's theme and thus I did not prepare anything special, like questions and such. I don’t think it was a good trade off with another lecture instead of a seminar since I have learned a lot more on the group discussions than on the lecture.

As the theme suggests we learned a lot about design and the process and intentions behind it. How prototypes play a big part in development, what they are good for and where they stop helping. I have also learned about different forms of data, primarily empirical data. What it is, what it’s good for, how to gather and analyze it and also how to compare it.

Earlier weeks there have mostly been a couple questions which made it feel like I could put a lot of focus on them. This week, however, there were pretty many questions to answer which made it feel like i learned less about more. I guess that doesn’t have to be bad, but it’s different.

Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
I have chosen to read the paper “ Validation and Application of Electronic Propinquity Theory to Computer-Mediated Communication in Groups“ by Joseph B. Walther and Natalya N. Bazarova. (2008). The paper aims to present how the presence of alternate, digital communication media as well as some other factors affect the psychological feeling of nearness and how satisfactory the communication feels.

They conducted this research by observing test groups which were using some of these communication measures. This method is purely qualitative which means it doesn’t give a generalized picture of a whole society, instead they get results which depend heavily on the participants. On the other hand they get data which could not be gathered quantitatively. It’s really hard to measure true satisfaction or certain feelings through surveys and similar methods.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
Since I already knew what qualitative methods is I don’t really feel that I picked up something groundbreaking new regarding them. However they talked a lot about a theory they used to conduct the research which they feel had some faults and later corrected for them. They explain how their research was conducted, how the participants was tested and observed. Maybe I learned a bit about the importance of critically examine source theory material and to be very objective and thorough.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
I think they did a great job with the qualitative method they used. I found that they really had thought of everything. They had a large sample group, even though it was qualitative. They had set up multiple different test scenarios so that the result would be as wide as it could be. They critically examined the theory of which they based their research so that there would be no margin errors. Maybe they could have done some quantitative methods to further broaden the results gathered by the, in comparison to quantitative methods, small number of participants. The data they gathered are, as I mentioned earlier, not so generalizable, something that possibly could have been with some more research. 

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

According to Eisenhardt in the article "Building Theories from Case Study Research" a case study aims to analyse an event or a person, something that is happening. It investigates the phenomenon in a context which could be compared to real life with a focus on the understanding and exploration of the dynamics which are presented in a certain single setting. The data you get when conducting research this way are often empirically valid as well as testable.

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.

I have chosen to analyze the paper “Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA.” by Goldman, N. et al. (2013). Which is about storing digital data as synthesized DNA. Cool stuff. It isn’t about trying to collect data to prove a point, instead they prove that something can be perform a certain way using a certain method.

The steps declared in Eisenhardts research paper is: Getting Started, Selecting Cases, Crafting Instruments and Protocols, Entering the Field, Analyzing Data, Shaping Hypotheses, Enfolding Literature and at last Reaching Closure.

As most papers this one of course has both strengths and weaknesses, they don’t fulfill all of the steps. For example they don’t really define any research questions, instead they describe the method which they use to prove how something could be achievable. They declare how they have gotten their information and thoroughly analyzed the conditions. Since they performed actual tests the data was gathered qualitatively and compared with earlier similar works.

Theme 4 - Reflection

Like last week we were supposed to pick a journal and a paper, which I did. Now that I had already done it once before it became substantially easier to pick and extract information now that I knew more than before what to look for. However unlike what I thought when I picked the paper, the one I had chosen was not very interesting nor fun to read, which slowed down the reading and analyzing process. Despite feeling more advantageous I had trouble really understanding the text. We also read the text ‘Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality’. 

The paper was about looking to see if major search engines ‘favorited’ popular sites over less popular ones, alas if they are biased. The paper used quantitative methods in form of a bot to crawl around the sites which were in the top of the search-list, regarding different root words. As I understand the bot searched for certain words which were related to the root words and ordered them based on frequency and how they linked to other sites with similar content. I don’t really think this is a great way of determining if sites are ‘better’ than others, just because certain words are used more. I also have a hard time of figuring out ways to combine the quantitative data gathered with qualitative methods, it feels almost impossible regarding the problem. 

On the seminar we talked mostly about the paper regarding drum-patterns. I realized I had missed some parts of the paper, possibly by simply overlooking them while reading the text. I think the major way I contributed to the seminar was by asking leading questions to understand the parts that I initially missed, and to drive discussion as well as giving my opinions on the things I actually understood. 

I learned mostly about stereotyping from the drum-text, how initial thoughts impact our way of acting. (The black guy was dressed in a hoodie and the white in business attire, really?) I also learned alot about quantitative and qualitative methods of gathering data, what they are good for, how they are used, what advantages and disadvantages they have and such.

Theme 5 - Design Research

How can media technologies be evaluated?
In the article ‘Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration.’ by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008) they used user studies to evaluate media technologies. Which gives good, subjective feedback. However I believe it is important to perform these studies in a situation and environment in which they are later to be used, otherwise the results may be somewhat skewed.

What role will prototypes play in research?
I think prototyping makes it clearer for the researcher how the product are/will be used. This gives him insight into the possibilities of the product and what things are necessary to focus on. That information is really viable when conducting research.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
A prototype can never be a perfect, finished product. The meaning of prototyping is development, to see what works and what needs to be changed. What is missing and possibly what is abundant. To try out new ideas and to iteratively redesign and evolve into something a bit better with each version. A prototype always has room for improvement, because when it has not, it’s finished, and not longer a prototype. Prototypes could be released early, for testing and research and doesn’t have to work perfect. A finished product should on the other hand not be released to early, and should not fall short.

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What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?
In the paper ‘Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space’ by Fernaeus & Tholander they mostly collected data by watching and analyzing participants using the programming environment they set up. While in the other paper ‘Differentiated Driving Range’ by Anders Lundström the empirical data was extracted from online conversations, interviews and information based on prototyping.

Can practical design work in itself be considered a 'knowledge contribution'?
I think so. When designing and then testing new systems for real, you gain knowledge and get an insight into what is working and what is not, if it’s even relevant to use in the real world.

Are there any differences in design intentions within a research project, compared to design in general?
The way I understand it is that designing for the purpose of research is to gain new knowledge of an established system. While designing in general is more about creating and establishing a system for users. In that way they both realize a system but with different intentions.

Is research in tech domains such as these ever replicable? How may we account for aspects such as time/historical setting, skills of the designers, available tools, etc?
This is a really hard question and my thought is that they are not replicable since research are based on very many factors such as time, location, setting, quality and so on. 

Are there any important differences with design driven research compared to other research practices?
I think the difference is that general research are based mainly on observations where design driven research has its focus on the conceptual side. Design driven research are ment to intervene and improve.

Theme 3 - Reflection

I thought this week was gonna be a bit easier, since I finally started to get a grasp on the course structure. But then we were supposed to pick a journal and a paper. I took me way too long to find out there was example papers and journals to choose from, could have saved me a hour googling impact factors… When I finally found a paper which seemed interesting the rest went fairly quick. It wasn’t the easiest reading I have done, but still easier than the ordinary texts we usually read. I think I understood most parts of the texts correctly, even though I think the author went of track a bit, but I still found it hard to analyze and to find which theory was present. Also what was the actual question? Were we supposed to find out the theory which the author had used to write the paper or the theory the author, in the end, concluded?

Because we were able to choose our own subject, choose our own paper, I liked this week more than previous weeks. The text was more fun to read and because of that I understood the text better and could therefore contribute more to the seminar, even though we kind of drifted from the subject and started talking about next week's theme. Under the seminar discussion I asked question about that which I found unclear. But unlike previous weeks there wasn’t that many. The seminar was, as usual, more rewarding than the lecture but I think I mostly learned about this week’s subject by reading the texts. I’ve learned a lot about theory, what it is, how it’s structured and what it builds upon.

Under the seminar the group mostly discussed what theory actually was, and when a theory became the “truth”. The consensus was that when the majority of people regard a theory as the truth, it is. However since there are some theories which can’t be proved, the question is rather about how good or bad the theory is, not how right or wrong. Which I found interesting.

Theme 4 - Quantitative research

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

I have read the paper “Channeling Science Information Seekers’ Attention? A Content Analysis of Top-Ranked vs. Lower-Ranked Sites in Google” by Nan Li, Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele (2013).

The purpose of the paper was to determine the emphasis search engines has on search results, how biased those results will be depending on popularity. They wanted to look at how skewed the information would become when big, popular sites diminished the visibility of smaller, less popular ones. Could this contribute to an underrepresentation of minority voices, they ask. To measure this, the authors of the paper created a bot that empirically crawled across over 200 000 sites to look for root words regarding a certain subject. They then ranked these results based on the frequency of these words.

This is a pure quantitative method of gathering data, it’s consistent but lacks validity. However, they did also conduct some qualitative research methods by using data from a structured panel discussion about the subject to, together with qualitative data from a public opinion survey, formulate search terms which they used to get a better sense of what the user would see when searching for the same subject as the bot and to extract links related to the subject. Which later was used in the bot’s algorithm.

Because they used a bot to conduct research, to collect data samples, they performed a huge number of requests. This in turn yielded tons of data with pretty good reliability, distributed over months. This gives them a pretty good image, with not so much effort put in in the long term. They also got a lot of easy to use data, with numbers they could get a good grasp on the state of the problem without having to analyze different inputs. At the same time the data the bot gathered were of pretty poor quality. The way they measured what should have been higher up in the search results was questionable because the algorithm the bot used could have been more extensively developed, to consider a broader variety of factors than frequency across a set number of root words. 

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

I learned to not only rely on the top results when conducting research, other than that i wouldn’t say that this paper brought something new to the table than what I already knew. Maybe that using some sort of multi-method would be better to get a more comprehensive picture of the problem. They really only used a quantitative method to gather data, how they would use qualitative methods to look for search rankings I have no idea how to accomplish.

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

I think this goes hand in hand with what i wrote above, about what they measure. Can you really measure the quality of a text based on how often certain words show up and compare that to another text? I think they would need a more advanced bot to conduct research with some form of AI, to analyze the content if they wanted more “true” results. They drew graphs based on the word-frequency to see the state of the research more easy by comparing different root word searchterms, which I think contributed to generalized, saturated results. The bot malfunctioned under two months which made them lose about ⅙ of the data which I am sure made the results somewhat skewed. 

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

They make it easy to conduct surveys, structured interviews and observations. Quantitative methods gives a less biased, more objective point of view primarily based on numbers which lays the ground for easy to generalize, statistical tests. If the measurement device is objective and stable, the data is valid and reliable. The data that comes out is easy to analyze but the time expenditure of creating the quantitative method is heavy. 

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative methods are based on focus groups, in-depth interviews and document reviews. Unlike quantitative methods this is more subjective, the condition described are from the point of view of the one experiencing it. The information gathered is often unstructured but more in-depth than quantitative methods and consists primarily of text rather than numbers, which makes it pretty bad for statistical tests and harder to generalize. Using qualitative methods the time expenditure lies on the analyzis phase rather than the planning.

Theme 2 - Reflection

I found this second week to be somewhat easier than the first. The texts were still hard to read, but what i took with me from the first week made it a bit easier to understand them. Still it took a long time to go through them, look up words and extract what was necessary to get a good grasp on the subject.

Since I understood, or thought I did, more this week I was more active under the seminar and tried to talk as much as I could. I continued to do as I did last seminar and asked questions of that which I had not understood but this time complemented them with my own opinions of what I thought was the point of the questions.

Like last week I found the seminar to be much more informative than the lecture. The lecturer was more personal and slower paced this time than on the lecture which made it easier to follow. In our discussion-group we had mostly interpreted the texts similar to each other, but what I found most interesting was the fact that I had got big parts of the texts entirely wrong. My interpretation was that A&H liked movies and photography, and the revolutionary potential behind them because they made it easier to spread knowledge, instead I learned that they really thought the opposite.  They feel that movies and similar technology don't contribute to society because they make people dream instead of act. Benjamin on the other hand stood behind these technologies because when copies of movies are made, the aura from the object is destroyed. This makes it easier for ordinary people to own art, to be a part of something they earlier in history couldn’t. It is liberating and gives ordinary people dignity.

I also learned a lot about nominalism, how words are just a social construct and that a nominalistic point of view is about how it’s not good to generalize. I learned about substructure and superstructure and how the substructure is the base of society and about platonic realism and its abstractness.

Theme 3 - Research and Theory

What is theory?

According to Gregor in the article “The Nature of Theory in Information Systems”, theory is based upon abstraction and generalization about phenomenon. Theory itself is not just a set of data, references or hypotheses, even though it can be developed from it. Instead theory is a combination of Analysis, Explanation, Prediction, Explanation and prediction, and Design and action. These categories poses different questions, or rather the answer to these questions. For example, what something is, how it is, why, when, where, what it will be and so on. She says that you could look at these cateogories "as abstract entities that aim to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world and, in some cases, to provide predictions of what will happen in the future and to give a basis for intervention and action".

Research Journal

I chose the journal “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication”, from the examples page. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1083-6101)

As the name implies it publishes articles with focus on computer-based media technologies with the subject of social science research on communication.

Research Paper
The paper I have decided to examine is called "A very popular blog: The internet and the possibilities of publicity" by the author Brenton J. Malin (2011). (http://nms.sagepub.com.focus.lib.kth.se/content/13/2/187.full.pdf+html)

There are two different types of publicity presented in the article, the first one is for openness and the second one is for promotion. In traditional broadcasting as well as in more modern online communications these two aspects of publicity have contrasting, drastic implications. The purpose of dividing publicity into these aspects is to capture different problems in democratic communication. The more a communications channel opens up the more the diversity of opinions will increase, but at the same time the focus for particular topics will decrease. If a channel needs a good debate climate, the channel needs to be established the other way around, with great focus on certain topics. This will inturn increase the promotion for those topics. The problem with the second one is that with less different opinions in the channel, the discussion gets compressed into one big homogenized message, and the few opposing opinions will be excluded.

The two types of publicity are therefore really important in the structure of communicating means and the discussion of these democratic potentials should be increased and taken into account.

Malin argues that as the mainstream media continues to expand, and with that their promotion, we are at risk of overestimating the potential impact of open networks in the digital democracy. Everyone can easily publish and upload stories, articles and opinions online, but this is also the problem. Since everyone has the same access and tools, your own material will drown in a sea of similar works. Therefore it is really hard to reach an audience, to get people to see and read what you have created.

Search engines is also at fault for this saturation, by ranking results by popularity already established and popular sites will continue to dominate the market and push away less popular ones. Internet is prone to rapid change, and online communication is not immune to influence from powerful sources. Since the internet exists in an economic, legal and cultural context and since the corporations mostly don’t work for a neutral internet, the digital democracy and the publicity it lies upon may be at risk.

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The paper doesn’t go too deep into analyzing why things are a certain way, it’s mostly about stating the facts. Therefore my interpretation is that the purpose of this article is just to be descriptive. To reason about publicity and its cores, how our perception of the internet as a neutral, pure tool for democratic discussion should reflect these inherent properties. Something that I found to be a bit odd was that the author wasn’t very clear on where she was going, in the end she wound up arguing about digital democracy instead of putting more focus into the perception of publicity and the problems and consequences that comes with it. It felt kind of like she side-tracked a bit.

I think the major theory presented is open channels leads to a fauna of opinions, but with a bad discussion and focused channels leads to a good debate climate but with few opinions. The paper mostly argues what is, it tries to go deeper and analyze somewhat how and why, but not to much i feel. Still i think the most suiting theory may be theory number II, Explanation. This kind of theory is not trying to predict what is gonna happen in the future nor is there any solid arguments on which the best way of solving the issue of publicity are.

Theme 1 - Reflection

Since this was the first seminar we have attended, and since there are so many new words, concepts and theories to take in, I found it hard to get a good grasp on the subject. I struggled therefore a lot with contributing on the seminar and instead tried mostly to listen, to catch up. What we talked mostly about was about perception and how it differs from person to person. It’s really interesting to think about something that we all take for granted, our surroundings, and how it is affected by our experience and history. I think I contributed mostly by asking leading questions, to drive the conversation forward and so that I could get answers and other peoples opinions on the things i didn’t understand.

I had prepared myself before the seminar by reading the texts, which took forever. Since the language in the texts were very advanced, I had to stop several times to read the same piece over again and to look up words. Normally when I read something I usually read the entire page and reflect upon what I’ve read at the same time. Now i really had to concentrate to get forward and stop to think about what the text is actually saying after nearly every paragraph. I also wrote down some questions that I had, which I brought up on the seminar for discussion.

I feel that i learned more on the seminar than I had on all the previous lectures because the tempo of the discussion in our group wasn’t to fast, yet we had time to cover everything using our own words, which helped to clear a lot of things up.

This first real week I have learned a lot. The philosophic view of our perception and surroundings, how we see “through” our organs and not “with” them. I think of it as an empty room which we then, as individuals, apply our own textures to. I have learned to question perception and that it is us who gives objects their properties. What is and what is not? I change a bolt in my car, is it the same car? If i continue, one piece at a time, until everything have been changed, is it still the same car? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody's around to witness it, has it happened?

I have learned tons of new words, the 12 categories with which we shape everything we perceive, a priori knowledge, a posteriori knowledge (without and with experience). Synthetic knowledge, such as math. I have learned that conception without perception is blind and perception without conception is empty. I have learned about empiricism, about meta-physics, the laws that define our surroundings.

I have learned about analytic judgement and synthetic judgement. A synthetic judgement example could be, a bachelor I meet are single, I can draw the conclusion that all bachelors are single. Because single is a property of the word bachelor. An analytic judgement example could be, “all cars are red”, this is something we need to investigate because the property red is not inherent in the word “car”.

I think that the biggest thing I have learned is to think in a new way, a different way. In almost all other courses everything is factual, there is no argument. Now there are no absolutes, it’s challenging to go through such a drastic change in learning in such a short time, but it’s also kind of relaxing.

Theme 2 - Critical Media Studies

Dialectic of Enlightenment

1. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is empiricistic, based on logic, reason and natural laws and is an advancement of the earlier view of the world, which contained a lot of fear for the supernatural. That which are uncertain or impossible to measure is to be viewed with suspicion, this puts people in control and creates a sense of order.

2. What is "Dialectic"?

Dialectic means that for something to become what it is, it has to become what it’s not first. It’s a way of resolving disagreement. To get closer to the truth you first have to investigate different opinions and by reason reject what is false.

3. What is "Nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

Nominalism states that universals, concepts are nothing but empty words, things that has no corresponding reality. It defines what is (individual objects), and what is not (abstract objects). It discards myths and encourages knowledge. In that way it supports the Enlightenment.

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

Myths are based of the unknown, the untrue and the cause for superstition and fear. Far from logic and reason. It’s used as an argument for Enlightenment, eliminate myths which in turn eliminates fear.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity"

1. In the beginning of the essay, Benjamin talks about the relation between "superstructure" and "substructure" in the capitalist order of production. What do the concepts "superstructure" and "substructure" mean in this context and what is the point of analyzing cultural production from a Marxist perspective?

Superstructure is the production of cultural value such as religion, art or politics. Substructure is the general production of society, the material and economical value. In a Marxist perspective it is the general production that defines how the society will develop. That means that with a good base of well-functioning, rapidly improving substructure the superstructure will flourish and a more evolved society can be established.

2. Does culture have revolutionary potentials (according to Benjamin)? If so, describe these potentials. Does Benjamin's perspective differ from the perspective of Adorno & Horkheimer in this regard?

Photography can be seen as a revolutionary way of reproduction, and in the way it has the ability to influence a lot of people and to get information out quickly I think this form of culture definitely have revolutionary potential. Since this mechanical reproduction isn’t prone to one's own perception the core is fundamentally the same in a scientific way, which is great for the Enlightenment.

But because the image is developed from a negative, which can have multiple copies, it isn’t true art. I think Benjamins and Adorno & Horkheimer stands differ somewhat about this technological progress. I get the feeling that Benjamin thinks that it’s bad, because art loses its aura, its originality, but A&H on the other hand thinks that it’s good because it has the potential to spread knowledge.

3. Benjamin discusses how people perceive the world through the senses and argues that this perception can be both naturally and historically determined. What does this mean? Give some examples of historically determined perception (from Benjamin's essay and/or other contexts).

Our senses gives us information which we then combine with earlier personal experiences, knowledge of history and reason. This reminds me of a posteriori knowledge, the perception we get are strongly influenced by our backgrounds and how we have interpreted similar situations in the past. In enough time, even the view of our whole existence could change depending on how history and personal interpretation has gradually changed our perception of reality.

An example Benjamin wrote about is how a drastic change in the Roman population created the huge art industry and changed how the Romans perceived art.

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

Benjamin describes the concept of “aura” as being a “unique phenomenon of distance”. The real physical distance doesn’t matter. He gives an example of this by explaining the aura of natural things. If you follow a branch with your eyes and the branch casts a shadow on you, you feel the aura of the branch.

Art is a way of disconnecting from reality by removing limitations and distance, to get closer to something. In that way my interpretation is that genuine art has an aura, as long as it is authentic and not a copy. When something is duplicated the original thought behind the piece gets stripped away, the uniqueness of the piece is no more, which simultaneously destroys it’s aura.

Theme 1 - Theory of knowledge and theory of science.

1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?
   
   

To get a better grasp of metaphysics, the fundamental nature of things, we first need to establish the two forms of knowledge. The first is a priori knowledge, meaning knowledge obtained through theories. This form of knowledge is independant from experience and relates mostly to factual tasks such as mathematics and physics.

The second is a posteriori knowledge, and unlike a priori takes experience into account. This form of knowledge is a combination of imagination and logic and is regarded by Kant as the pure reason, the form of knowledge that leads to new discoveries. Kant argues that you can only understand the real nature by reason, not perception alone.

Since one can only percieve reality from ones perspective and viewpoint, and since this percieved image of nature is bound to our experiences, education, everything that has formed us as humans, it will be unique to us as individuals. Because of this, perception was said to conform to objects around us and not to reason. The Copernican revolution rejected the established perception and argued that objects must conform to our cognition, to reason. A gust of wind could be cold to someone and warm to another, our perception gives objects their qualities.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?
   
   

As I said earlier, we all percieve reality uniqely to our own experiences, this would not be true if everyone recieved information “with” the sensory organs, it would imply that we all percieved the environment the same way since we all have the same senses. This would give us a raw perception from senses not capable of analysis or creating a common understanding.

Socrates instead argues that our sensory organs are mere tools for the mind to gather information “through”. These impressions are processed and combined with experience to create a personal intepretation, even though we all have the same tools to percieve the environment. 

Knowledge comes from our reflections on sensations which are based on sensory information. Our understanding of nature, our knowledge, has therefore its ground in sensory experience. Which “empiricism” also declares.