Theme 3: Research and theory - reflection

This week we had quite a different theme to the two earlier ones. It was nice to finally start with the research and science part of this course, now that we have got the basics of philosophy and critical media studies. The instructions for this theme “research and theory” were less of reading a stated book/article but instead getting to find your own literature, which was very nice because then you had the possibility to find a subject which you are interested in. In order to prepare for the two seminars and the pre-reflective blog post I googled for interesting journals that had a connection to media technology. Sometimes you found an interesting journal but I could not find the impact factor which was a shame. The more important part of this theme though was to find an interesting paper to analyze. Then I tried to look at recent volumes of different journals connected to media technology, for example some of them that was listed in the wiki. I also searched on Google Scholar and KTHB for things that I was interested in, like social media, and looked after interesting papers which had been published in quality journals.

On the first seminar of the week we discussed, in smaller groups, the journals and papers that we had chosen. Then we picked one journal and one paper that we put up in the wiki page on the course website and presented to the rest of the seminar group. We picked the journal that I found, which was called Media, Culture and Society. It’s an interesting journal about media in different contexts such as politics, economy or culture. I also had an interesting paper but it was already on the wiki, which I didn’t know when I picked it. 

On the second seminar we discussed the theories used in our papers and what theory is. For me, this was the harder part with theme 3. When we discussed in small groups on Wednesdays seminar we agreed that it was hard to distinguish which of Gregors five types of theory that our used theories could be categorized as. Also the question of what theory is can be hard to define as we tried to edit the course wiki on the seminar. In the end we thought it was important that a theory was tested, not only accepted by the greater majority, to be regarded as true. We also thought that in the most cases it should be a majority of experts in the applicable field, not people in general. When we discussed the theories that were used in our papers, one theory seems to have been very popular, which was social capital theory. So for the task of updating the wiki we went with another one which we called signal theory. That theory was about what signals that can be drawn for e-commerce websites through design and functions. For example if an e-commerce site allows you to rate their products you can get the signal that they have a good product because otherwise they wouldn’t dare to allow this function. Because of the short and generalized name of our theory, we discussed that many theories can have the same name but signify very different ideas. When we presented it as signal theory, the other students in the seminar group thought it was about something else. So I think that you need to treat theory with caution sometimes because misinterpretations can easily happen.