Pre Theme 3

I have selected a paper from “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication”. The journal is an open access online journal with its first publication dating back to June 1995. The journal is interdisciplinary and publish papers focused on “social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies”.

How to be a gamer! Exploring personal and social indicators of gamer identity

by Frederik De Grove, Cédric Courtois, Jan Van Looy

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12114/

The paper covers a study performed on 100 high school students who all play digital games in some form. The aim is to find personal and social factors that hold significance when identifying one self or others as gamers. The age group was selected because the authors conclude that “proportionally they represent the group of people who play the most digital games”. The method used in the study is an online survey followed up with two segments of face-to-face interviews where the student answer questions related to indicators such as age, play frequency, gender etc. The result is presented numerically with a mean value. The authors conclude that their study using indicators partly gathered from previous research could be the first to show the relative impact of said indicators and how important they are related to a gamer identity.

I believe the aim of the paper is a good one and very relevant to media technology since understanding the user is one of the important factors in creating something successful, and the gaming industry with games, hardware and social media is growing rapidly.

I do however have some objections to the choice of only focusing on high school students. The first of two reasons the authors give for choosing this group is that the statistics in their references state that “Incidence of gaming by age and gender” in average in Europe shows a peak in the youngest age group and a downward slope can be seen from there. The authors second reason for choosing the younger group is the difference between early and late adolecence that can be found within it. While I agree that this aspect is interesting, I believe the study could benefit a lot from including a group of older subjects to compare the importance of the indicators between age groups. Worth to note is that the average gamer of today is in his (yes statistically he is a male) early thirties, and 49% of all gamers in Europe covered in the study they reference is over 35 years old. With this in mind, the youngest group could in fact be an outlier that identifies more with the gamer identity, and after a certain age when the individual has matured the result could normalize. We don't get to know this from the paper but I instead got the impression that it gradually decrease over time.

While this paper could be a good reference for future studies to follow, I think it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions from the age group used alone, since it's not representative of the population as a whole.

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

I would say first and foremost theory is not the same as a hypothesis, which is something I know that many, including myself have gotten wrong many times. The latter is just a statement that is a proposed explanation of a problem that you can test with experiments. Theory is neither data that could be the result of the earlier mentioned experiment. But with your hypothesis that you test with experiments, you can get data that you analyze and can use as a foundation for logical reasoning. From that you can form a theory that could be a general explanation or prediction of a phenomenon.

The theory of a paper is not to be confused with referencing theories of other older papers since yours has to progress the knowledge of the field, or you would simply be redoing someone elses work.

2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

I had a hard time identifying the papers theory, since most of the preface is citations of other researchers theories. I do however believe that the main theory of my selected paper can be formulated as: Social context and personal consumption of the medium are linked to self-cathegorized gamer identity.

The theory is in my opinion identified as predictive. The authors do predict that different indicators might hold different significance since they chose to present their data in in a way that could easilly be meassured with eachother. They do however not dig deeper into explaining these differences and because of this I believe prediction is the best fit.

3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The benefit of the papers theory is that it manages to apply theories from other fields to gamer identity that so far is a relatively unresearched area, and might be used for further research. Unfortunately, the lack of explanation to why the indicators have different significance is not covered in the study and left me feeling like something was missing.

Post Theme 1 reflection.

To be perfectly honest, I had a really hard time understanding Kant when I read the preface to Critique of Pure Reason. Being totally uninitiated in the field of philosophy combined with a heavy text proved challenging to say the least. I tried to form some sort of understanding but never got to the point where I felt like I actually knew what I was writing about.

Plato's text was actually relatively pleasant to read, even though it was a lot of text. It gave me an introduction and some understanding about dialectics, and I could see some value in the method by looking at something from different angles and not accepting your first answer that might fit the question as correct.

I did however start reading way too late and never gave myself the time to reflect, nor the chance to re-read the passages I didn't understand. This can be seen in my pre-theme reflection that I rightfully got some critique on. I agree with it, and now over a week later I'm really not satisfied with that performance.

The lecture brought me some clarity, and I started to understand the “school book version” of Kant and his trancendental idealism. However, while I noted during the whole lecture and tried to understand what was being said, I'm still not totally sure how I would analyze a substance myself using Kant's cathegories and forms of intuition.

During the seminar our small group spent a lot of time discussing how we understood the lecture of the theme, and we asked ourselves the question related to the lecture “If I look at a cup at a table, turn arround and look back. Is it the same cup?”, we agreed on yes, because that is how we perceive the world through our faculties of knowledge.

Unfortunately for everyone, we were the biggest seminar group during week 1, due to me being part of the problem by being a temp. This lead to only about half of the groups had time to raise their questions before the whole class. Never the less, some interesting discussions came up related to Kant's statements “Perception without conception is blind” and “Conception without perception is empty”.

To round this off I learned my lesson and started with my preparation for theme 2 earlier, and I hope that it can be seen in my pre-reflection. There are still things I don't understand in that regard, but I feel like I was better prepared this time arround.

Dialectic of enlightenment

Adomo and Horkheimer is already in the first scentence saying that the goal of enlightenment is to “liberate human beings from fear and installing them as masters”. As I understand it, enlightenment is to see things for what they truly are, without letting our view of it be tainted by preconceptions caused by e.g. myths. Myths have and still fill an important role for humanity. We feel powerless before a question we can not answer or truly understand. Giving the unknown an explanation, be it that thunder is caused by Thor riding his wagon or that the reason we are suffering in life is to test our character before the better after life. Accepting these myths brings us comfort, a false sense of controlling the unknown. I see an enlightened person as someone who with the help of reason can understand and explain nature as it is, without having to rely on myth.

Dialectic is an argumentation form where the participants are searching for the truth rather than convincing others that their point of view is correct like in debates and similar. One form of dialectic is demonstrated in Plato's text for theme 1, where Socrates and Teaeteus engage in an argument to find out if Theaeteus answer to the question “What is knowledge?” is true. They keep presenting their points of view to see under which conditions the theory might or might not work. In the end however, it ends up being falsified.

Nominalism as I understand it tells us that abstract man-made words, cathegories and concepts does not exist in reality, but only in language and thought. An example was brought up during the theme 1 lecture where the teacher said that according to Kant, the table has the attribute grey according to the way we percieve the world. Nominalism would say that “grey” is just an empty word , since it lacks a specific definition and can be understood in different ways. With this in mind, nominalism is a very important concept in the text since I think it connects to enlightenment by the fact that you want to stay away from abstraction or myths, and look at the world as it is.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity”

According to Karl Marx, the substructure is the actual economy with the workers, equipment and production, while the superstructure can be seen as society in a larger scale, that defines how we view art, politics, laws and similar. He also say that the superstructure is much slower to adapt than the substructure, which I understand as it being hard to predict how a change in the economy will will impact society. With this in mind, I think it's valid to analyze cultural production through Marx's perspective since culture sets trends and ideal, be it political or the concept of beauty.

In my opinion Benjamin does believe that culture have revolutionary potential. He states that film will lack any real revolutionary merit as long as money controls the industry. He does however see the potential in film to show “revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property”. A way to transport information to the public in an available format. Adomo and Horkheimer however have a more sceptical view on the matter where they believe that anyone stepping out of the circle of what I like to call “accepted culture” will fade away and never get a chance to make his or her message heard.

From my understanding of Benjamin, I agree that our sense perception is determined both naturally and historically. A naturally determined perception would be putting your hand on a hot stove. I percieve the stove as hot because warmer than my body temperature. Historically determined perception however is to me described very well by the quote “History is written by the victors”. Our view of the world is changed by a historical event. An extreme example of this would be Nazi Germany. While they advanced they found many followers all over Europe, including Sweden. I believe our perception of other humans would be vastly different today should Hitler have succeeded. At the same token, Germans of today knows as much as anyone else that what the nazis did was wrong, from our historically determined perception.

The aura of an art object is the uniqueness or authenticity of it. You can feel the aura of a painting in the strokes of the painter, how his result could have been affected by his mood while painting and similar. To reproduce the painting would  be to wither the aura by allowing multiple copies of the same work of art exist, which denies it its uniqueness. I understand Benjamin's description of aura for natural objects as the feeling you get when you behold it. Imagine standing at the base of Mt Everest, gazing at it's massive size and you feel like you are shrinking in relation. This is feeling the aura of a natural object.

Pre Theme 1

 1.In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

Kant argues in the preface of “Critique of Pure Reason” that “Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects.”. This means that when studying an object, we draw conclusions from what we see when examining it to progress our research and establish some property as a priori, an assumed fact that further research can build upon without having to repeat what has already been done. Kant has objections to this method, since not everything is what it seem, which is covered below.

From my understanding, Kant is telling us with “... assume that objects must conform to our cognition. “ that we instead should formulate a hypothesis and perform experiments to see if the object behaves as expected in conditions set by the us.

Kant takes Copernicus as an example to reinforce his point. Our perception of the world at the time was geocentric and Copernicus could not get his research to add up. But by questioning this accepted fact and continued his research with the hypothesis that the solar system is heliocentric, the pieces of the puzzle started to fall in place.

In my opinion, this matches pretty well with how I have learned to perform experiments in school. You don't do it expecting to find an absolute truth, you do it to test a hypothesis to see if the outcome is as expected to draw conclusions or just outright falsify it.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

Socrates argues with Theaetetus regarding his claim that knowledge is perception, in my opinion mainly because while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, truth is not. By stating that your look through your eyes rather than with them, Socrates want to make a point that while two persons can look at the same object, they will register and associate it differently depending on their previous experiences.

This actually connects back to Kant and not letting our cognition conform to objects. The eye can be fooled like in the example with all our favorite black/blue dress.

The information will be subjective, and as examplified in the text a tall man might look short to one person, while the second person might feel cold while the first is sweating. To me it became obvious that Socrates arguments against empiricism when he brought out the argument that if if true knowledge is decided by sensory input, it would mean that more than one version of truth would exist.