Comments

On Martin Johansson's Blog – Theme 2, Reflection

Hi Martin Johansson!

I also found the culture industry part to be the most interesting, with their standardized products and focus on the money aspect. You wrote a little bit about the Internet as a new media, but also that it is an interactive one. Since the Internet is becoming more and more used as a distribution channel (skipping the traditional CD-production for example) and with high quality recording and editing-equipment becoming cheaper everyday, I think it's pretty interesting to see if we will witness a change from big companies deciding what culture is, to the individuals deciding it. Maybe we won't even have big music corporations trying to put artists in the "boyband" or "Idol"-folder that you wrote about, which will leave the whole (or at least most of the) process to the artists and therefore getting a more diverse, non-standardized, media culture.

On Gustav Boström's Blog – Theme 1, Reflection

Hey Gustav!

I agree with you on the point that we should question things more than we do. But I don't think that it applies more to you than others, I think that almost everybody (including myself) should spend more time questioning things in our everyday life. It's pretty clear when reading the commentator's field or forum posts that most of them only have one reference supporting their claim, for example referring to an article on Aftonbladet when questioned by another commentator. And since mass media usually has their own agenda and choose a specific point-of-view on a topic - whether deliberately or not - I think it's important to form our opinions using more than one source if possible, and try to stick to unbiased media. And stretching it a bit more, maybe it would be a good thing for us to not just question our "truths" but also ourselves and our actions.  - Gustav Boström, Theme 1 Reflection

On Ingrid Larsson's Blog – Theme 4

Hi Ingrid!

I agree with you that loneliness is a bit more complex topic than a question of setting points to a 4-point scale. I think that setting points on this topic doesn't put much effort into deep reflection and might be more affected by how you're feeling at that specific time. But I think that it's okay to use to get a more general - even though far from ideal - pattern on how it correlates to social media usage since there is a large amount of users answering the questionaire. But since it's a four-scale system you HAVE to claim that you're either less or more lonely than the normal which may be a bit misrepresenting if you really feel like you're in the middle (even though these problems might be "solved" when summing and taking an average) . But then again, if it would have been a 5-point system people might be more prone to place themselves in the middle than really taking a stance, which is also a problem. It's not an easy task. - Ingrid Larsson, Theme 4

On Adam Rosén's Blog – Theme 6, Reflection

Good afternoon Adam!

Great to stumble upon your text, since I've never heard of the narrative method before neither and wouldn't have considered it being a valid source of information. But then again, maybe statements in an interview doesn't differ that much from the autobiographies since the amount of truth to the story is still a responsibility from the interviewee/writer. In one way I think autobiographies might even be more reliable since many of them are critically reviewed by several people, not just the ones doing the research. Of course, as always, it depends on the case. You wrote that you didn't think that the conclusion part was that good, was it due to the narrative method that they used or was it because the ones writing the paper did a bad job drawing conclusion from the material?

Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research - Reflection

This theme's papers that I chose was definitely the most interesting ones that I've read during the whole course. The first one was a case study about how a couple of students make sense of Internet mediated communications versus the traditional, state controlled, TV-media. The other was a case study that had as a goal to analyze the role media affected Sarah Palin during the elections in the United States in 2008. This week I couldn't attend the first seminar due to being out of the country, but I read a bit about the seminar on other people's blogs and it seems that most of the time was put on interviews. It's quite a shame that I missed it since I learned some new stuff from one of my papers last week (which is written about in the previous post), and it would have been giving to hear other people's opinions about them. It would have been nice to discuss things such as self-identification, since it's a very interesting topic in my opinion, and after reading the paper a really important one as well. An example from the paper was that a person saw himself as a democrat, but as an outsider his opinions as a straightforward supporter of Putin one could argue that that's not really the case. I liked that this problem came to light in the research paper since it brings up the questions of subjectivity in research. Or just the problem of subjectivity in general when dividing people into groups based on opinions, which most of us seem to do whether it being deliberately or not to feel connected to other people.

As this is the last blog post I must say that I've learnt a lot during the course and I will probably keep this blog - even if hidden from others - to serve as kind of a reminder in the future when conducting some kind of research. Theory and Method for Media Technology as a subject is clearly much bigger and complex than I originally thought when the course started off, and there's a lot to take into account and reflect about so it's good to have something to come back to. Even though I probably have missed some information in my posts, it can still serve as a basis for theory and method.

Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

Making Sense of the News in a Hybrid Regime: How Young Russians Decode State TV and an Oppositional Blog –Florian Teopfl - Journal of Communication – 2.011

The first paper I chose is a case study using in-depth interviews of 20 students from leading universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There’s been an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi) authoritarian regimes. This study focuses on how citizens in Russia are making sense of political messages they encounter online in a more fragmented media environment than the traditional media typically offer. It’s and exploratory study that compares how young Russians make sense of a liberal-democratic blog entry and by contrast, a news broadcast from state-controlled TV.

The interviewees are classified into three groups of decoders: affirmative, oppositional and negotiating. Interviewees were presented with Russian news segments about an election, where affirmative decoders were the once who agreed with what was presented to them in the news, oppositional decoders were critics of the news content and the objectivity of the channel, and negotiated were kind of in the middle agreeing that the channel is a power source, not creating un-biased content being oppositional but adaptive.

I learned a couple of new terms like criterion sampling and maximum variation sampling, that is used when picking a group of people for interviews. In this paper maximum variation sampling was used to get individuals differing widely in terms of their political worldview, age, gender, and course of study. The interviewees differed a lot in sense of political stance from “no political view” to “liberal”, and if this sampling method wouldn’t have been applied, the results of the study could have been misrepresented. Another thing I learned is to be careful about self-identification when getting information in qualitative studies. For example, in this study a student could claim to be “democratic” but at the same time being straightforward supporters of Putin, since they understood the self-identification of the party as “democratic” literally. Other students who claimed to be “democratic” were clearly opposing Putin, so self-identification is a topic that has to be considered.

The study is using unstructured interviewing. For example interviewees were presented video content form both traditional Russian media, as well as liberal blogs with a video showing a leader of a liberal-democratic oppositional movement being arrested, and then got to voice their opinions in a free form until they had no more to say about it. Unstructured interviews may have some initial guiding questions or core concept to talk about, but there is no formal structured protocol. The interviewer is at liberty to move the conversation in any direction of interest, and is useful for exploring a topic broadly. It prioritizes validity and the depth of the interviewees’ answers, but falls short on reliability at the same time. Since each interview tends to be unique with no predetermined set of questions asked for all respondents, it’s more difficult to analyze the data, especially when synthesizing across respondents, which make it difficult to find patterns.           

The topic is mainly unexplored and I think that this study is important for future research in the area. However, the study is conducted only using 20 interviewees, they are all university students from only two universities which ignores other major and important citizens groups.

Media Coverage of Women in Politics: The Curious Case of Sarah Palin

Philo C. Wasburn and Mara H. Wasburn - Media, Culture & Society (1.092)

Comparing this research paper with “The Process of Building Theories from Case Study Research”, the paper has a good start off point defining what the purpose of the study is, comparing the usual media coverage in general for female politicians as well as this specific case of Sarah Palin. The study chose analyze media coverage of Sarah Palin with respect to her democratic opponent Joe Biden, using both Newsweek and Time magazine to represent the mainstream news coverage, which I think are viable sources for the specific topic at hand, avoiding random sampling. Since those magazines are parts of major media corporations that have several other news companies within their corporations, such as CNN, I think that the way Palin is portrayed is probably applicable to other news platforms as well. Moving on the paper does a good job in many other areas such as searching evidence for “why” behind relationships. For example why Palin got so much media coverage where usually female politicians in America doesn’t, and what effect that gave in this specific case. The study does a good job in comparing with both conflicting and similar literature, trying to explain causes and reasons in the case of Palin. 

Case Study

Case study refers to the collection and presentation of detailed information about a particular participant or small group. It's a form of qualitative descriptive research that draws conclusions only about the specific participant or group and only in that specific context. Case study researchers do not focus on the discovery of a generalizable truth, nor do they typically look for cause-effect relationships but instead emphasis is placed on exploration and description.

Theme 5: Design Research - Reflection

This week we changed from having the usual seminars to two lectures, both conducted by a researcher that was involved with last week’s research papers. Since during this course we have mainly thought for ourselves, read, and discussed in groups what we think is a theory and so on, it was great to finally having scholars telling us what their opinion on these subjects were, in a more concrete way. Ylva Fernaeus’ presentation was a bit more casual, inviting us to discussion, which kind of failed due to no one in the lecture hall talking, but it was a good lecture in the sense that it was directly applicable to the research paper. Ylva said that she wasn’t involved in the subject of physical programming and robots anymore, and when asked she didn’t know if any further research has been done in the area which I think is a pity since it’s an interesting new field of research. 

Haibo Li's lecture was more “general” than Ylva’s, not going through so much of his research paper, but more the process from idea to prototype in a 5-step model from a technological perspective. Each step was broken down and he gave several examples, which I enjoy since just stating facts is kind of boring no matter what the topic is. A completely new thing for me was the ANOVA-system, which is an important part in using statistics and then forming a “real” conclusion. To use the conclusion to really formulate what is relevant and what is redundant data from the research that has nothing to do with the original problem. I liked the last part that was about what happens after your idea is basically done, that is, how you should present your idea to businesses and so on. Just stating technical facts might lead to people thinking that you’re just a tech-nerd that has no sense of the market and demand for such a product, and vice versa if you go on a more traditional sales pitch, selling words more than a product/idea. Instead of this, you should kind of merge them into an entrepreneur approach, telling companies why your idea could help their company (and clients) by using it while backed up by technological facts, kind of baked in to a sales pitch.

An interesting part than I’ve never thought about myself, is what differs “fame” from “greatness” in problem solving. That if fame is all you want you should put about 90% of your time into solving (existing) problems, and 10 % to statement of problem, yielding a lot of research papers being published. But if you want greatness you should have it the other way around, putting 90 % into defining and re-defining the original problem, causes and possible solutions. This thought really got me evaluate my own typical process. Most of the time I just go for a “good-enough” problem to solve and then never return to re-stating the problem, putting most efforts to getting done with the solution. Even though much of the material from the lectures served more as a refresher of things that I’ve learned before, there is much that I will try to carry with me in the future. 

Theme 5: Design Research

Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming

Computer programming is focused on a relatively small group and the typical programming doesn’t interest a large part of the population. But if simpler programming, or at least manipulation of the ordinary use setting, can be put into a physical activity – for example programming with Lego – more people can get involved in it. The article is essentially about design exploration of physical languages for controlling and programming robotics. People tend wanting to give life to their technical gadgets, whether it’s putting a sticker on their computer or dressing up robotic consumer products and this is where actDresses come in. Theories of semiotics in comics and fashion are discussed to see if they can contribute to the controlling and programming of robotics. One example could be attaching bracelets with symbols representing program actions on a robot. An example is given where a bracelet with symbols containing program actions could be put on a robot.

I found the article very interesting and at times quite amusing, it’s not often you get to read about Barbie and Comics in an academic research paper. But I missed a practical example of their theory. Making a working prototype, just a very simple one, would have added a lot for me. The concept of actDress is very innovative and it will be exciting to see where this goes in the future.

Prototypes

The name prototype comes from the Greek prototypon, which essentially means “primitive form” and that is pretty much what a prototype is. A prototype is an early version or test version built to trial a new design and functions and usually does not have all the features that the final version will have, or at least not as advanced. Or they lack quality in interaction between user and the product or just having a worse material and so on. An evaluation of the test-data from users having tested the prototype can then point you in a whole other direction than you were heading for in the beginning, advice you to make small adjustments or just confirm them. In the “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball”-paper they used a prototype which looks nothing like their vision of the finished product, but it still got them good results in the sense of recalibrating variables such as the vibration strength. Prototypes can be very valuable in new research areas since they can be used as a start-of-point in further research, and even if they’re not great they will still have significant role in the start-up process of a field and show that the area is worth exploring.

Except from getting a general idea of the product, prototypes can also be used to verify if a concept or method has an actual potential of being used in the form of a proof of concept prototype. Or if a specific method or idea can prove to be feasible. Maybe some functions that seemed great at the drawing table will turn out to be totally neglected.

Theme 4: Quantitative Research - Reflection

For my part quantitative research began last week with the research paper Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of Super-participants. The paper was about “super-posters”: a small amount of people that contribute a lot in online forums etc. During their study they found that 0.4% of all members contributed to 47% of all posts (on moneysavingexpert.com). After having analyzed their collected data they could reject a popular opinion that super-posters often degrade other users and even trying to stop others from posting in the forums. Both of these phenomenon only consisted of a total of 3% and they found that super-posters generally have a positive role, answering questions and contribute to good and civilized discussions. However, I think that the amount of slander would be significantly higher if the study were executed on a forum like Flashback.

During the seminar we discussed the research paper “The effectiveness of Short Message Service for communication with concerns of privacy protection and conflict avoidance”. An example could be why people found it easier to be outspoken and truthful when communicating by SMS than face-to-face, like saying no to meeting up with a friend. They analyzed five variables: conflict avoidance, privacy protection, perceived ease of use, perceived effectiveness of SMS for communications, and subjective norm (influence of others towards one self’s behavior) to try to get a general conclusion of people’s attitude towards sending SMS. One thing I learned from this was the concept of “intervening variables”, in this case that the “conflict avoidance” and “privacy protection” variables contributed directly to the variable “perceived effectiveness”.

During the second seminar we played a game that was a bit like Boggle, but instead of trying to form words we were supposed to find for example advantages and disadvantages for qualitative and quantitative methods, and then in another round the same thing for online and traditional surveys. The game lead to some amusing – and at times pretty heated – discussions between the groups, and I think it’s good to discuss what you’ve learnt only using your memory, without looking everything up on the Internet every time you get a bit uncertain. I find this to be a problem pretty often, that when I’m in the middle of a story I realize that I’ve forgotten some significant parts of it and have to look them up on the Internet to get the story straight, which takes the edge out of the story and/or weakens the credibility of it.

Although I didn’t feel like a learned a lot of new things on any of this week’s seminars, I appreciated the part about surveys on the second seminar. One of the interesting (though pretty obvious if you think about it) parts was that you get a significantly higher completion rate if the survey gives something back to the one who’s filling it out. For example if your survey wants to find out the eating and exercise habits of a group of people, you could offer them a chart of their habits, what they should improve, and their BMI and so on in the end of the survey. Another thing that I appreciated in the survey part was, if possible, to avoid using terms like “bicycling” when trying to found out their daily exercise routines since “bicycling” has a wide spectrum in sense of exhaustion, since it can be everything from cycling in a walking pace to racing. In that survey they instead used statements like “as exhausting as sweeping the street” which most of us have a pretty similar picture of how much effort it takes. However, in my opinion this part wasn’t exactly ideal either since the most exhausting level was “doing work construction work” which in my opinion still is pretty abstract since it can be everything from working a jackhammer, to broom finishing the cement, to operating construction vehicles.

Even if it didn’t feel like I didn’t learn a lot at times, it’s still good to discuss topics to get another perspective from others and to keep you from getting a stagnated thought process and view on topics that aren’t carved in stone, which basically none are.