Quantitative Research - Pre-Reflections

The paper "The Media and Technology Usage and Attitudes Scale: An empirical investigation" is taken from the journal "Computers in Human Behavior" published on June 2013 which has an impact factor of 2.067.
This paper aims to draw media behavior and usage on a wide target range and taking in account a large scope of the the latest technology: smartphone usage, general social media usage, Internet searching, e-mailing, media sharing, text messaging, video gaming, online friendships, Facebook friendships, phone calling, and watching television.
From the title we can already observe the "empirical" nature of the investigation, based on 4 different quantitative methods:

1. Time measured in hours or minutes per day or per usage
2. Frequency measured in the number uses in a particular time period
3. Attitudinal Likert-type scales measured on a continuum from strongly agree to strongly disagree
4. Experience sampling, querying use at a particular prompted point in time.

It is appealing to measure the actual time of usage but in this research the authors noticed big differences in the self-reported time and the actual time measured by a monitoring software on observed subjects' computers.
From the methods used in this paper, I evinced that quantitative methods are useful and effective on a wide target range with many differences in gender, age, ethnic/cultural background, social and economical position but they are probably appropriate for some subjects while for some other qualitative methods or a mix of the two types is more adequate, for instance in psychology, anthropology and sociology.

As stated in paragraph 4 it has been difficult for authors to compare measurements across different studies due to the fact that each one uses its own methods, in this way this study was designed to fill the gap between these previous ones.
The greatest limitation in the paper was the narrow range of social status in the targeted population which was mostly gathered in Southern California urban areas.
Other problems regard the combination of samples from two different but similar research projects, the online survey methodology to collect data and the fact that data have being collected through university classroom restricting the participation to friends and family of those same students.

Regarding the paper "Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection"it is possible to assert that the results may give evidence in statistics in order to define whether our hypothesis were well-founded or not.
Moreover as I already mentioned for the previous paper quantitative methods allow "flatter result response" for wider targeted population with several differences and give suggestion for further studies observing the statistics.
Thus as already said quantitative methods better fit for certain subjects while need the support of qualitative ones for others in order to properly interpret the resulting data.

Qualitative methods on the other hand are useful when focusing on a stricter targeted audience and provide deeper understanding and insights on the causalities for a given answer while quantitative methods are mere numbers.

Thus qualitative methods' results are more likely to change quickly in time and on different targets, furthermore not very often is possible to perform them on a broad range of targeted individuals due to practice difficulties.

Research and Theory - Conclusions

The theme of this week was a bit more difficult to grasp than the previous ones, usually it is easier to deal with practical issues -which are the complete opposite of theory- and also the lack of a "theory of theory" makes the approach to this subject dependent on the document we are taking in account.

After the seminar I must say that I am fairly skeptical about the categories to describe different type of theory found in "The Nature of Theory in Information Systems" by S. Gregor or at least about their static and narrow scope.
During the discussion we noticed that in some cases it was difficult to draw boundaries between two different types depending on the point of view we analyze a paper from.
For instance a paper treating "trends of..." it is supposed to highlights how a certain phenomenon would develop giving insights for predictions, but this was not the case for some of the papers treated which mostly attempted to analyze or explain a subject without any suggestion for further developments.

Furthermore these categories and approaches better apply to a certain type of sciences than others, for example there are many different features between natural, formal and social sciences that made me notice a fallacious nature in this dissertation which seems to propose strict diagrams and schemes.

Sometimes drawing a theory is not enough to turn it in accepted belief, but it takes time and many assessments from the research environment to assume it as a convention, which in many cases, in particular for constantly changeling phenomena, could make it obsolete once it has been accepted and moreover a theory is nearly useless as long as nobody knows or uses it.

Theories are essential to gain the knowledge we have thus my concern is about how to turn the theory in act, often we theoretically know a subject in deep but we are hardly able to put it in practice.
For instance this is one of the biggest differences between the anglo-germanic and the latin european areas in academic approaches: none of them is overcoming the other, but I noticed the difference between the studies I attended in Italy and the way education is carried out here in Sweden.
I always noticed that in latin countries we are taught on several subjects going really in deep in explanation and understanding but then we are missing a substantial part in education to turn the "know" into the "know how", which is more prominent here instead.

Research and Theory - Pre-Reflections

In the essay "The Nature of Theory" Gregor defines what theory is in a theoretical way, I would say is a meta-theory hence "theory of theory".
First it is essential to remind the term "theory" derives from the greek theoria, namely "contemplation", "speculation", and it is conventionally related-opposed to the term "practice" from the greek praktike that is concerned with actions.
For a long time experience has been seen as the only source of knowledge, but then aside empiricism historically philosophers of science started defining theory as statements meant to rationally give explanations, predictions and evidence to a phenomenon, characterized by being universal and using a specific set of language, signs and symbols.
A good explanation comes from Habermas and Popper concept of the 3 worlds:

1. World 1 - Objective world of the material things
2. World 2 - Subjective world of mental states
3. World 3 - Abstract objectively existing world of mental man-made identities.

As abstract identity, theory belongs to World 3 and defines language, maths, general knowledge, science, art, ethics and institutions.
Among the features of theory there are generalization and abstraction, hence how specific it could be with the given case.
Furthermore theory is concerned with giving explanation and often the concept of causality is required to state the relation cause-effect between two phenomena which gives us the possibility to draw some predictions.
From the characteristics of theory we can assume as goals the analysis and description of the given phenomena, the explanation of how, why and on which circumstances it occurs, drawing some approximate predictions with a certain grade of probability and prescriptions in the case the theory describes methods or structures of artifacts.
Talking about the specific case of Information Systems Gregor states that some disciplines are "are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent, not with how things are but with how they might be" (H. Simon - The Sciences of the Artificial, 1996 ) .

On the other hand Sutton and Staw give their guidelines to define when theory lack this essential features with the text "What Theory is not", basically a "manual" defining 5 worthy features to avoid theory-less papers, addressed to researchers, authors, reviewers and editors.
In a paper they define as non-theory parts:

• References are simple acknowledgements to other theories to ensure the stream of arguments in case of lack of required knowledge.
• Data give evidence to processes but are based on experience, hence useful in confirming, revising or discrediting a theory, but rarely supply causal connections.
• Variables are essential to follow arguments and they require explanations on why and how are implied, but alone they do not constitute theory.
• Figures & Diagrams usually are the graphical valuable part of a research, they do not constitute theory unless they are meant to highlights the causal connections in the steps of an argument.
• Hypotheses & Predictions are essential to define the relationships between theory and data but do not provide logical arguments and so being no theory.

The journal "Journal of Adolescent Health" is an official publication of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) and it covers multidisciplinary issues concerned with adolescents well-being with particular importance to biological and behavioral sciences.
Published by Thomson Reuters, Journal of Adolescent Health has a 2012 Impact Factor of 2.966.
The article I have chosen is "New Media Technology and Youth: Trends in the Evolution of New Media" and is meant to underline the trends of the new media evolution (as the title explains) and on this purpose it has a really detailed and thorough analysis of the different phenomena we can observe from different point of view on this subject, furthermore each paragraph also highlights the causal relationships giving explanation on how, why, and on which contingencies these phenomena occur.
Media evolution in a really changeling and unpredictable subject hence even if it draws current trends on this subject, this text lacks of predictions, thus is meant to supply the reader useful insights to draw his/her own prediction, for the same reason we can not find any prescription theory (design & action).

Critical Media Studies - Conclusions

While reading Adorno and Horkheimer's essay I found in it a strong correlation with the Marxist dialectic expressed in the two concepts of "base" and "superstructure" that we finally proposed ad discussed during the seminar.
Marx defines as base all the features, roles and forces in the production process, such as relations employer-employee, work organizations and owning regulations, and as superstructure he lists the culture and art, the roles and hierarchies, the state and institutions, the rituals and religion of a society.
In his dialectical materialism Marx states that the superstructure is directly inferred from the base, according to this we need to analyze the procedural dynamics of the production process to utterly understand the superstructure, for they interact each other yet the dialectic between them is not completely of the type cause-effect thus the base prevails.
In this sense the point of their discourse find synthesis in the quote "Du bist was du isst", literally "you are what you eat" framed by L. Feuerbach -and mostly known for the song "Mein Teil" by the german band Rammstein- expressing the fact we are mind-shaped from the content we consume.

Furthermore I got involved in the dissertation about art, I do not fully agree with what A&H state about art in the mass production society even if from this reading arose many interesting reflections.
The authors' critique moves against the new media industry of the time, mainly addressed to Hollywood movies and recorded music, which prevents the spectator from a intimate contemplation of the work of art and whose products are not consumed "hic and nunc", literally "here and now", unlike what uses to happen in the theatre or in the concert hall where art is created around the audience, but imposing globally and forcedly the modalities and formalities of consumption.
Personally I find true the judgement against the mass media production but with some reserve on the distinction of what art is or is not in our society.
I believe, or at least I hope, undeniable stating there is some kind of art in the present -and probably in the future- media, but at the same time what I constantly notice is a gradual shift in defining what is conventionally beautiful towards simpler and more shallow aspects.*

This reflections lead me to feel that probably we urge to reflect on this dynamics the media use to set off, in order to preserve our integrity and awareness, the media want us to hear and not listen, to watch and not observe and eventually to talk and not express.
I must admit I always welcomed the speed, variety and amount of the sources of knowledge the technology supplies us because I would probably have not grown the person I am today without, thus at the same time I believe the countless number of inputs we have today risks to turn us just into weak minded targets for the impossibility to reflect on the content we unconditionally consume.



*These are some concepts we quickly discussed during the seminar but which I am really interested in, let me explain better.
I notice we are missing the feeling of what Kant defines as sublime hence the feeling of resigned astonishment when observing what is meant to be art or culture to the advantage of the shallow and linear beauty the mass media propose us.
It is for instance the contrast of feelings we can feel when listening to the "Prelude to Tristan und Isolde" of R. Wagner, my favourite classical piece for its elusive and ethereal shape which need to be contemplated, and the last top-chart "Wake me Up" by Avicii, that I find a sincerely catchy and compelling sing-along.

Critical media studies - Pre-Reflections

Talking about "enlightenment" Adorno and Horkmeier do not refer to the 18th and 17th century cultural movement, but rather they refer to any cultural attitude or ideology which aim is to install men as masters and which in that period found its maximum flourishing.

Enlightenment empowers men by conquering superstition and disenchanting the myth, it is the yearning for objective, the measurable and quantitative knowledge, hence "Power and knowledge are synonymous".The world if fully knowable by the tools of rationalism and empiricism, in this way enlightenment is meant to wholly dominate the nature and human beings, it is completely totalitarian and ruthless, it allows no transcendence and everything that does not own an imminent nature falls under the name on myth. 
Myth were all those knowledges before enlightenment, it comprehends magical aspects and lacks a linear relationship between signifier and signified.
The individual experience and symbols are essential in the mythic ritual which derives its power from fear, what men do not know, the intangible, thus it is the first attempt to explain nature in which we must "become" what we fear by fetishes and symbols in order to control it, throughout the mimetic process we merge together with the unknown.

Thereafter enlightenment is the way human beings have chosen to exploit and spread knowledge, aim that we know being performed by media since memory can walk way back.
What A&H identify as "old" media are those considered as "characteristic" in liberal industrial countries and among them are listed the cinema, radio, jazz and magazines.
These media are themselves spring of elder ones, for example the telegraph soon gave life to telephone, two devices and media which share the feature to liberally permit the participant to act as active subject.
The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles, information and communication are no longer cooperatively built by the two subjects but are unilaterally instilled from the board of broadcasters.
From thereafter the old media such as radio and films no longer needs to present themselves as art, any need which might escape the central control is repressed and the merging process is visible both in content and in the inner nature of the media, hence A&H identify as "new" media -for the time beings- the television, in which the trend towards insatiable uniformity is achieved by synthesizing radio and movies together.

A&H were writing this essay in Los Angeles, but with their minds they were in the Germany of WW2 and as men of their time and space they noticed and understood how the control of information and media can be turned into propaganda and become a powerful weapon.
Their pessimistic view on the subject get born from the time they were living but also on the dynamics they observed in what they call the "Culture Industry".
First generally designing something as "culture" we already assume a process of identification and classification which intimates an attempt to administrate it, "only what is industrialized and rigorously subsumed is fully adequate to this concept of culture".
When asking the rhetorical question "what do people want?" the shameless industry consciously lies since "it appeals on people as thinking subjects, whose subjectivity it seeks to annul".
The aesthetic material is helplessly doomed to impoverishment due to the fact that what people are listening, watching or reading is simply turning them into buyers of a final product owned by those whose economic position in society is strongest.
Throughout the mass media the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry, enlightenment eventually made up itself and managed to overshadow audience's mind, concept which is fully implied in this chapter's title: "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception".


I found this essay more than interesting because of the antithesis-synthesis of enlightenment and myth -which strongly reminds me the Nietzschean relationship between dionysian and apollonian- but mostly, it amused me for the insights and the further development of the concept of "deception" in the media changeling in particular related to the lately media we have and will see.

Theory of science - Conclusions

Inquisitiveness always led men to ask themselves what, why and how things are and interact each other and this is probably the reason why our race overwhelmed the others and must keep the balance in order not to overwhelm itself.
The character that embodies mens' curiosity is Ulysses, in particular in Dante Alighieri's Inferno representation, when he decided to discover what was ahead the Pillars of Hercules -the end of the known world at the time- and uttered the famous quote "Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.", but then the excessive thirst of knowledge led him and his crew to shipwreck.
Science is the word humans use to describe their quest for knowledge about the world surrounding us, but on this subject I feel essential to clarify the distinction between knowledge, wisdom and insight.
Knowledge is the information we acquire about facts, is the awareness of something being, mainly learned through researches, studies, observations and experiences.
Wisdom is the ability to use the knowledge in the right place and time in the entire plot of life, being able to discern whether our knowledge is true, right and applicable, in this way understand why is it so and what does it mean to us.
Insight is the deeper understanding of the great picture, grasping the essence and reason of things and draw the meaning to our life.Religion is meant to give people the world's insight, science can give men the knowledge about the facts and make them reach a greater wisdom through our most peculiar feature as human beings which is intelligence (from latin "intellego": inter (“between”) + legō (“collect; tie up”)).
Theory of Science is intended to formulate reliable processes to state laws and rules in order to provide knowledge about what surrounds us.
The typical empirical scientific method starts with the declaration of some hypotheses and deriving from them some predictions about the outcome of future experiments, then performing these experiments and prove their evidence.
This is mainly valid for science, namely to acquire knowledge about nature, hence what is out there, what can not be found in our mind.
The same processes is to be found for the knowledge of what is inner our being, this is performed by philosophy (namely "love for wisdom", from greek: philia ("to love") + sophia ("wisdom")) and such a way to find the truth also adopted several logic methods until it reached the shape of "science of knowledge" with the Logical Positivism and the Analytic Philosophy, of which one of the most prominent representative is Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell on analytical philosophy:
"Modern analytical empiricism [...] incorporates of mathematics and develops of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. [...] I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble." - A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 834.

Despite I share Russell's enthusiasm for the quest of knowledge on this analytic method I do not share his optimism about the possibility to achieve definite answers, in particular in the world we live now which must be very different from how it was in the beginning of the past century.I believe facts have no absolute validity hence truth differs from case to case, relatively and subjectively gaining value according to the present we are considering.

Nowadays we have countless tools to acquire knowledge, to collect information, but in my opinion we are in lack of tools to tide all these informations together to reach a greater wisdom, essential skill to flexibly judge and handle complex phenomenons as the ones we can increasingly observe raising.
The word "information" comes from latin "informatio(-nis)" in which means "to give your mind a shape" and I have the feeling this huge amount of information is shaping us into archive-machines until we do not develop more powerful skills to manage it.

I would like to end this intervention with a quote of T. S. Eliot “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”


*Since we missed the lectures on this week these are simple reflections on the argument having source in my previous education and in personal reasoning.

Theory of science - Pre-Reflection

The relation mind-body has always been exploited by philosophy, from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" which firstly highlighted the gap between what ideas and their representations are and how the holy truth is not always well accepted.

The true skepticism moved its first steps from René Descartes defining the distance between the "res cogitans" and "res extensa", hence what things actually are and what our perceptions of them are, casting a shadow on what we could know and by the quote "cogito, ergo sum" reducing this range exclusively to the "me as myself".

Russell's "sense-data" -our sensation of the physical objects surrounding us, collectively composing the matter- are more similar to Kant's "phenomenons" which are completely opposed to their antithesis "noumenons", hence those postulates that are directly knowable without the use of senses.

The most clarifying example in Russell's "Problems of Philosophy"is the one about a coin;

In our head a coin is round shaped, bronze coloured, it has a certain weight, but actually observing a real coin we might notice that it is more elliptical shaped unless we do not have it in a precise straight forward position and its colour may differ according on how the light hits its surface, and so on.

Likewise even the scientific empirical cartesian method is fallacious because results from an experiment are sense-data and so being they are proposed to be the common rule, the very likely truth, but still they are only "propositions".

In this way we are "proposing" in the common sense to use this sentence as naturally and logically true due to its fairly good evidence.

Once the threshold in the number of those who found this sentence true is overstepped, a proposition becomes a "statement of fact", hence it is conventionally assumed as truth.

In humans' mind the earth was flat until Colombo, Vespucci, Magellano and Caboto proved there was no edge with monsters and storms casting adventurers in the outer space.

Thus there are two different way to grasp the knowledge of things, or rather "by acquaintance" and "by description".

As we saw sense-data are a tool to acquire knowledge by acquaintance, empirically inferred by experience and completely independent from any knowledge of idea.

Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch sensations describe us the direct appearance of the physical object in front of us thus they are not giving us the concept of "physical object".

The knowledge of "physical object" has been acquired by description as the entity that rouse this set of sense-data when I am exposed to it, this knowledge is typically what we have been told and taught without any direct experience on it.

Knowledge by description is then further exploited defining the definite description, essentially referring to an object among others, for instance 'the man with the iron mask' gives us much more information than the sole 'a man' which is an ambiguous description.

But there must be other kinds of knowledge by acquaintance since if sense-data would be the only example, we could "only know what is now present to our senses: we could not know anything about the past--not even that there was a past--nor could we know any truths about our sense-data".

In the final analysis we can state there are two different extensions beyond sense-data, namely knowledge by memory and by introspection allowing us to be aware of a former experience and to be aware of our awareness.

The theory of truth virtually ensures the possibility for some facts to be completely true, supplies opportunity of infallibility.
The great question in this essay is in the end how discern between statements of facts, a conventional belief, and and a true belief?
In Russell's critique against traditional epistemology we can firstly notice he distances himself from the Aristotelian syllogism since even if the premisses and the conclusion are true the conclusion does not follow from the premisses;

For instance saying "all Greeks are men" and "Socrates was a man" we can invalidly conclude that "Socrates was a Greek".
Knowledge acquired by intuition and derivative processes does not give us a reliable belief, but thankfully premisses are not our only source of knowledge.

The main critique Russell move is against those philosophers who profess to be able to prove "a priori metaphysical thesis" such as religions, rationality of universe and so on.

The hope for finding reason to believe these thesis is in Russell's opinion vain basically and simply for the fact that assuming logically the existence or non-existence of such and such things could not success in a critical scrutiny.
Hegelian idealism gives us the hint that every part of a whole is fragmentary and subsistence free without any relation with the left over part.
Barring the absolute idea, all other lower ideas are somehow deficient in their description of reality, the full understanding of an object’s nature depends on its relation to another and the resulting vicious circle prevents us from the knowledge about the truth, unless we do not know every relation a thing establishes to every other thing in the universe.
Therefore truthful essence of things is a chimaera, it is relative and context dependent and so being fallacious in supplying a scientific truth, we still deal with beliefs and regardless their collectively agreement still they remain mere beliefs.

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