Theme 3: Research and Theory - Reflection

During the seminar we discussed a research paper that was focusing on a hoax about a fictional soccer player. The hoax started out by using blog postings that was made ”credible” by planting text into Wikipedia articles and forged Associated Press reports. The hoax continued on in comments on forums, to blog posts, and before the hoax was revealed articles were written about the fictional player in magazines such as The Times. The article was in some way about trying to conclude what makes online communication successful, which lead to us discussing the cooperative principle, which describes how people interact with each other.

During the seminar we discussed in the group what Gregor’s theory types it belonged to and came to the conclusion that it was explanatory. But after discussing it with the seminar leader it turned out to be more of explanatory and predictable. Discussing the theories was to me a very relevant part since I thought it was a bit difficult to choose what theory my paper belonged to. Critically reading a research paper that you have no experience in whatsoever was not exactly a walk in the park neither, but I think it’s getting easier the more you read and discuss them. That’s of course a very banal statement, but I think it clearly showed during the seminar. Another giving discussion was that in natural sciences it’s easier to refute a theory if a test of it disproves the theory, but in social sciences theories are usually more sweepingly used and therefore doesn’t necessarily have to be useless.

An interesting part was the connection between theory and belief what we had written about in earlier themes. That if enough people accept a theory or belief they approach a truth. It’s nice that the words and definitions in all themes are closely related to each other, from myth and statement of fact, to myths and enlightenment and theory.