Final Reflection

(For list of comments, see previous post)

We have now reached the end of this Theory and Method course. It has been a wild ride, filled to the brim with discussions and analyzes of varying depth, which has provided us with some new knowledge and an opportunity to question old belief. Without further ado, let me present to you the final blogpost with my thoughts of the course and different ways of doing research. For the sake of simplicity, let us start at the beginning and end at the end.

The first week we were thrown head first into the complex world of philosophy, where we got to read texts by Immanuel Kant and Plato. This was widely considered quite heavy and unexpected, an opinion I share. However, after discussing the subject it soon became clear that the main concept was how we as humans perceive the world, and that everybody thinks differently, which is an important aspect to think of in any type of human oriented research. Additionally, we also learned about different ways to gain knowledge, by assuming things from your own experience or to take it one step further and think “outside the box” and not only see things as they are. Both ways are in my opinion important methods, as some research requires a more practical approach and provides knowledge through actual experience, while others require an entire new approach separated from earlier belief in order to advance. As has been mentioned time and time again during the course, there really is no truth and no “right” way of doing things, the trick is to be open minded and use what works best for the research in question.

The discussions about perception and knowledge continued for the second week, as we discovered Benjamin and the philosophical duo Adorno and Horkheimer, who debated about enlightenment. The argument was that enlightenment could help advancing research and knowledge, since it went against earlier supernatural and superstitious belief that often ruled people through fear. However, it could also serve as a hindrance to new discoveries, since it tends to lean towards a posteriori knowledge, that is to perceive things through your own experience. As mentioned before, the danger is to only view objects and people as they are, and not what they can become. Once again, it is a question of balance, whereas the first step of achieving it is to be aware that the different sides exist. It is easy to interpret enlightenment as something to strive towards, especially as a future engineer who has previously learned that science and facts are the most trustworthy. Although I still trust science more than other statements, it is definitely worth looking at them to learn about other perspectives. I have noticed that there really is so much psychology involved in everything we do, not just on a personal level, but also in literally every field of work. This is a particularly huge aspect of our field of Media Technology, as media has a wide spread influence of people’s everyday life.

Another thing that was brought up here was the importance of history, which also requires a sort of balance. On one hand, looking back at historical events and how perception of art and media has changed with the tides of time helps us create the future (unfortunately not always free from the mistakes of the past), but sticking to old traditions could also have the opposite effect. As Copernicus demonstrated when going against earlier belief that every stellar body orbited around Earth, and instead proposed a new theory that it is in fact the sun that is the center of our galaxy. Or the scientists at Uppsala University that overlooked all the scientific articles stating that a certain substance was impossible to create, and created it anyways.

Speaking of scientific articles, the rest of the weeks were spent reading various papers that used different researching methods. Here we discussed the term “theory”, which is often misunderstood as a synonym to “hypothesis”, a mistake that I have made many times before. In reality, I would say that theory is the core of the research, since it helps to understand and answer a question of which the article is based on. As previously mentioned, it is important to note that a theory is not cut in stone, and that one should not be afraid to question both your own and others theories that came before. One of the benefits of reading several different researching articles were that we learned different ways of writing a paper of scientific measure, which is definitely useful for future endeavours. However, by criticizing them we also discovered that basically all researches have their flaws, which ties well together with what we learned in the beginning of the course. Even full fledged researchers and scientists have yet things to learn, as knowledge is ever expanding.

Finally, we also talked quite a lot about different researching methods, such as qualitative, quantitative and case studies. An interesting discussion we had was about which method we preferred, where the conclusion was that quantitative methods were more prevalent among technical scientists and researchers, while qualitative methods were more common in social studies. I still stand by my opinion that it is best to combine the methods, as they do complement each other. Where data is non-sufficient, another method can fill in the gaps. One could of course argue that it would count as several researches instead of one, but it could still constitute one article.

I would like to finish this reflection by adding my thoughts about the structure of the course and the importance of discussing things with others in order to gain knowledge. It really became apparent when the seminar was skipped for one week, and how difficult it became to reflect after that. One does not know all, but everybody knows something so to speak, and that is something to remember when doing research of any kind. And with that I end this final blogpost, thank you for reading!