THEME 2 - Comments - Critical Media Studies

Links to the comments I've made

1. On historically determined perception - Post-Seminar 
2. On nominalism and Enlightenment - Post-Seminar 
3. On aura - Post-Seminar 
4. On realism and nominalism - Post-Seminar
5. On natural objects' aura - Post-Seminar 
6. On opposition - Post-Seminar 
7. On political context and motives - Post-Seminar 
8. On the ups and downs of engineering in the Enlightenment - Post-Seminar
9. On suggestions - Post-Seminar
10. On historical context - Post-Seminar

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THEME 3 - Post-Posting - Research and Theory

Most people would agree human progress is highly dependent on our ability to bring up new theories. Science for example has made great progress during the Industrial Revolution thanks to the numerous discoveries that brought scientists to build new theories, to reinforce old ones, and to create innovative products based on these theories they proposed. 

In a world where paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn describes, have occurred more than once, what happens when we realize a natural phenomenon happening in contradiction with a commonly accepted theory? Does that mean we have to discard completely this theory? Build a new one based on our new observations? What actually makes a theory? 

This week, after reading the articles and explaining one based on what I had learnt, I believed I had grasped the most important notions of the "Research and Theory" theme, without really having had the opportunity to go deeper. The lecture and the seminar gave me this opportunity, and cleared up a few points I had misunderstood. 

To me, a theory was always "true", until someone proved it wasn't. In this sense, my concept of truth differed from the original meaning of the word "truth" - for there to be "truth", we have to be able to consider, as talked about in earlier themes, the world in "God's Point of View", which is factually impossible. Thus, I realized it was better not to use the word "true" or "wrong" to explain what I meant - rather, I'd say a theory is commonly accepted, until someone proposes another take, another contradiction, something that can change our view on that theory. 

Now, I wrote earlier in my Pre-Posting that "theory isn't to be reduced to references, data, lists of variables, diagrams or hypotheses - even if they are part of a system scientists often use for their research. What makes a theory is the added value to these ingredients : the recipe that causally links them in relation to a question it answers. In short, theory has to answer the question of "why", and in that sense further the understanding of the reader in that subject". My stand on this question didn't really change since last Friday, but I can add a few details to make it clearer. Very often, scientists issue a hypothesis: independently from where they got it (from observation, most likely), or how they're going to explain it (by causally linking data, references, etc.), a hypothesis is basically a statement that describes the relationship between entities. Theory has to explain this relationship, to answer the question of why this phenomenon occurs. For example, in Newton's case, a hypothesis would be "if I let go of this pencil, I think it's going to fall.", while his theory explains the relationship between the object we're letting go of and the center of the earth, based on a causal reflexion built on previous theories and data. 

It's also important to realize that we're always working within a specific framework, a specific context. We can then formulate our current paradigms based on previous theories we've commonly accepted… That is, until our whole scientific community has to undergo another paradigm shift. 

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THEME 4 - Pre-Posting - Quantitative Research

 The effect of Twitter on college students engagement and grades (R. Junco, G. Heiberger, E. Loken)

Social media use in an educational background has long been known to be beneficial for both students and teachers, however very little empirical evidence is available to back up said presumption. Junco, Heiberger and Loken's paper provide an experimental quantitative study to determine the impact of Twitter use on the engagement an grades of a sample of american college students.

In this paper's case, the observable phenomenon that was quantified using scientific methods was the impact of Twitter use on engagement and grades improvement: by using 19 selected psychometric properties from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), an established instrument that was developed to measure engagement in school, the authors measure engagement qualitatively while assessing differences in engagement and grades by using a quantitative mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models with class sections nested within treatment groups. They also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. 

The authors also calculated the Cronbach's alpha to their studies (0.75 for the pre-test and 0.81 for the post-test) to estimate the reliability of the psychometric test results administered to the students, and compared it to two other studies similar to theirs to further back their study up: this shows their paper is reliable and the use of the quantitative methods gives an empirical take on this very common assumption that social media in school gets the students more engaged and helps them improve their grades. I also think they could have done with a bigger sample. 

While the measure of engagement and the impact of twitter on it and on grades is backed up by significant data and established quantitative methods, I'm not sure about the content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges, on which they base a number of assumptions and conclusions related to the benefits in terms of skills Twitter gives student, because they don't get into details about the adopted quantitative method… 

 Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality : The body shapes the way we play (K. Kilteni, I. Bergstrom, M. Slater)

Immersive Virtual Reality is a subject that more and more people are becoming interested in, because they can envision its very important role in the future of many actual fields - be it video gaming or information sharing. Now in this paper, immersive virtual reality is used in a very different angle, as a means of demonstrating how the body can shape the way we play. Indeed, by enabling study participants to play drums in an immersive virtual reality where they had different avatar bodies, the authors underline that the way we perceive our bodies could impact our drumming technique. 

The research is based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods : the quantitative methods were used to analyze the data collected through various sensors in a way that could be useful to the study, while the quantitative methods served to assess participants' personalities, as a background control that said personalities didn't impact on the drumming performance. I believe this mix is really efficient in making the study that much more reliable : quantitative methods use is compatible with data collection because it's, as data is, undeniable and objective. With the numbers and the scientific process applied to them, the results that come out are both satisfactory and reliable (if the data-collection is sufficiently spread on various samples), while qualititative method use is relevant in the case of personality analysis, because it's very often based on a questionnaire leveraged with a Likert scale: questions are much more adapted to personality assessment than any other data collection and process could ever be, because how are you supposed to effectively assess someone's character/personality based on nervous signals and numbers? In this sense, quantitative methods and qualitative methods each have their own specificities and ups/downs, that make each of them more relevant for a certain type of research and theory foundation. 

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THEME 2 - Post-Posting - Critical Media Studies

B. Post-posting 

Nominalism can be dangerous, especially because it's contributing to the inability to hear the yet unheard.

When discovering the first chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I didn't think of investigating the cultural and historical background in which this text was born. What a mistake it was.
Thankfully, on monday's lecture, we took the time to paint the whole picture, and I realized then how it sometimes can change your understanding of an essay. 

Escaping from an at-war Germany, to a country they believed represented freedom and culture, Adorno and Horkheimer soon became disillusioned : in a society ruled by consumption and social order, they realized the Enlightenment, or so they decided to call it, wasn't a way towards freedom, far from it actually. 
By trying to demistify the world, mankind focused on observable repetitive phenomena they previously explained by Myths and superstition, to escape their fear of the unknown. But this only served as a bait to distance themselves from Nature, make them appear as rulers of Nature, when actually they couldn't even intervene in those patterns because they, themselves, were products of Nature - made of molecules, and particules... In this sense, they're "programmed" by Nature for everything : there's no free will whatsoever, and everything is just a result of mimesis. Again, by participating in this natural chain of reaction, mankind's fate intertwined again with Myth, after having so desperately tried to free themselves from it with the Enlightenment. 

But what really is the point behind Adorno and Horkheimer's essay ? Why the interest in the Enlightenment? 

To understand that, we have to explain more precisely the concept of Nominalism, inherently the most central argument of the Enlightement: In contrast with Realism, which believes in a conceptual and unbiased world ("God's point of view", like in Theme 1) and is related to analytic judgement, Nominalism focuses on a world as perceived through experience. In a nominalist point of view, each object is unique, with its own set of particularities and characteristics, and is tied to the concept it exemplifies only by a single fragile thread. To link this with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the outside world would be the world in Realism, made of "pure" concepts, where such a thing as a "perfect chair" would exist, while the world in the mirror would be the world of flawed copies. For a nominalist person, the outside world doesn't make sense, concepts and abstract ideas do not exist : unity is the one thing ruling the world. In that sense, all deity and mystical figures are out of the question, and because of that, Nominalism is the core concept in the Enlightenment.  

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, this is the one thing that's most dangerous in the Enlightement: indeed, Nominalism states the obvious facts. It's built on observation, just like the Enlightenment - and leads us to just reproduce a mirror of what already exists... In this sense, no real change could be possible. Take Fascism for example: from a fascist point of view, there is such a thing as natural hierarchical order, where some people are born to be masters whereas others are born to be slaves. If we address this view with Nominalism, you'd see this pattern, reproduce it, repeat what's already done. There's no escaping, since concepts like universal human rights wouldn't exist. You'd be unable to hear the yet unheard. 

By condemning Nominalism and the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer are denouncing both Fascism and the ever developping consumer's society in the USA, where people fest on culture as if it were a way to freedom, while they argue it's nothing but another way to chain people down. Indeed, culture in mass media tended to reflect the way the world was built - as in the Enlightenment and Nominalism. By depicting the world, with ordinary people doing ordinary work, mass culture was responsible for making people repeat the same gesture over and over again, and did nothing else than just show the social situation as it was then. It didn't give us conditions to change it, rather, it even glorified the situation, according to Adorno and Horkheimer ! 

Movies portray life as it is now, a mimesis reaction again, instead of picturing something we can strive towards. 

In that sense, Adorno and Horkheimer's take on mass media diverges from Benjamin's own point of view. Indeed, based on Cubism, the new media culture had, according to Benjamin, revolutionary potentials: by changing our way to view the world with fragmentation, it could change our role in the society as well ! Movies depicted ordinary people, and every worker had the right to claim he could be in a movies: by doing so, Benjamin argued that mass culture media gave dignity to ordinary folks. 
Nonetheless, they all agreed on how dangerous the use of Art in Fascism was, given that it beautified politics using Art. 

After the seminar and the lecture, my understanding of the texts shifted a bit, and I'm glad we had so many opportunities to get a clearer view of difficult points by sharing our opinions with others and seeing what they themselves felt about the issue. 

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THEME 1 - Comments - Theory of knowledge and theory of science

Links to the comments I've made 

1. On cognition shaping objects : Pre-Seminar
2. On perception, and the table of categories : Post-Seminar
3. On synthetic/analytic judgement and the table of categories : Post-Seminar
4. On the similarity/difference between Kant and Plato's stands, and conceptualization : Post-Seminar
5. On the "world in itself" and synthetic/analytic judgement : Post-Seminar
6. On learning, and self-reflexion : Post-Seminar
7. On deductive and inductive reasoning : Post-Seminar
8. On metaphysics and Kant's critique : Post-Seminar
9. On the particularities of seminars, and why it helps : Post-Seminar
10. On experience and perception : Post-Seminar

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THEME 3 - Pre-Posting - Research and Theory

Learning, Media and Technology (Taylor & Francis Group, IF 1.26)

Previously known as Journal of Education Television (1975 - 1995), then Journal of Educational Media (1996-2004), before eventually settling for Learning, Media and Technology (2005-current), this international peer-reviewed journal focuses on the benefits and drawbacks that technological progress can have on education. Aiming at stimulating debate on how innovation influences educational theory, Learning, Media and Technology publishes papers related to the use for educational purposes of digital broadcasting, internet and online resources, as well as innovative new digital formats. 

Digital Storytelling : A Powerful Technology Tool For the 21st Century Classroom (Bernard R. Robin)

As the title suggests, this article focuses on Digital Storytelling, used as an educational tool. 

With the rise of new technology in every aspect of our life, classrooms have started to adapt themselves to an innovative digital trend, and as this slowly spreads across the world, the author suggests we take a moment to investigate the theoretical framework behind it all.

Robin proceeds to describe digital storytelling, its history, and to what extent its use in classrooms can be beneficial for education and teachers. Contradictory to his statement, the U.S. Department of Education (2007) reported to Congress that they found "no significant differences in student achievement between the classrooms that used the technology products and classrooms that did not". Based on this, and the benefits he previously described, Robin highlights the need for a new, more solid, theoretical framework for digital storytelling as a learning tool, an enhanced and more developed version of the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) model.

The article's motives are undeniably relevant to our current educational situation: in a way, the main issue raised by this article can't be contested, as the core of the debate with new technologies as a learning tool doesn't lie in its efficiency, but rather in the methods applied to its use in classrooms. The author takes a direct and honest approach to the problem : progressing with linearity, the argument is clearly exposed to the reader - after having described the main concept (digital storytelling, definition and history), he shows the opposition between what happens (U.S. department of education's report) and what should happen (the benefits of digital storytelling in classrooms) to bring the reader to his conclusion : the need for a new framework, that he suggests a model for. All along, he backs his argument up by solid and relevant articles and resources, that he sometimes illustrates to make his point clearer for the reader. 

Although the author proves his point already by describing the different kinds of digital storytelling and the causal logic that links them to being an efficient learning tool, without having to back his argument up with data, I find the article could have done with more scientific content on showing the benefits of digital storytelling - studies conducted in classrooms for example, that the author hints at in the last paragraph ("how educators might conduct future research studies that can demonstrate the benefits of multimedia in general and digital storytelling in particular"). 

The Nature of Theory in Information Systems (S. Gregor) && What Theory is Not (R. I. Sutton & B. M. Staw)

Gregor and Sutton's articles both contribute in making the concept of theory clearer. Basically, contrary to popular belief, theory isn't to be reduced to references, data, lists of variables, diagrams or hypotheses - even if they are part of a system scientists often use for their research. What makes a theory is the added value to these ingredients : the recipe that causally links them in relation to a question it answers. In short, theory has to answer the question of "why", and in that sense further the understanding of the reader in that subject. 

In the particular case of the article I chose, Robin opted for a method lying in between the Prediction theory type and the Explanation and Prediction theory type to approach the issue he points out. A major part of his analysis consists in explaining the main concept - "what is, how, why, when, where and what will be" - of digital storytelling as a learning tool, based on previous studies and self-reflexion. It's not entirely an EP theory, because the causal explanations highlighted are sometimes hypotheses not completely backed up by enough data/references; but at the same time it's not just a prediction theory because it offers that much more in terms of added value - the justificatory causal explanations are there, they're just not complete. Then, he proposes the beginning of a solution, in compliance with the Design and Action theory type, for improvements and adaptation of the TPCK model for digital storytelling in classrooms. 
The combination of these models makes the article stronger in my opinion, because it's very solid content-wise, and the added value is undeniable as well.

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THEME 1 - Post-Posting - Theory of knowledge and theory of science

"Let us assume that our faculties of knowledge do not conform to the objects, but the objects do conform to our faculties of knowledge." 

What does Kant mean by faculties of knowledge? And how do objects conform to them? 

To wholly grasp the Kantian argument, we have to go back to what happened on Monday's lecture. Still a little confused, even after writing my pre-posting and reflecting for a whole week on Kant's writing, I attended the lecture with a clouded mind. 

After being reintroduced to the concepts of analytic and synthetic judgements; with examples that made it easier for us to understand ("All bodies have extension"), and a clarification on what Kant calls his Table of Categories or his forms of intuition, I think I was able to further my understanding on his stand towards metaphysics, while reformulating a question I raised quite awkwardly in my previous blog post : Rather than saying "Can there be knowledge without experience?", the big question seems to go a little more like this… 

How is it possible to generate synthetic knowledge about the world, a priori?

Following this question, Kant opens a whole new chapter of philosophy for mankind to reflect on: gone is the seemingly self-evident conception of knowledge that we had before where we thought we acquired understanding just by opening up to the "world in itself", which, by the way, doesn't make sense according to Kant. Indeed, it refers to "God's point of view", as if there were a way of analyzing the universe from an entirely unbiased observer, without the analysis being tainted by any presupposition, and thus enabling the acquisition of pure knowledge. The problem is that humans are bodily localized, with a perspective, a bias making it impossible to elevate ourselves and our thoughts, forming boundaries that can't be transcended. In this sense, talking about the "world in itself" grounds us in an incoherent conception of knowledge and of the world, that Kant is trying to get rid of. 

Post-Kantian knowledge theory is based on presupposition, where a posteriori knowledge is structured by a priori knowledge, with Kant's Table of Categories.

One logical question that follows this argument is wether or not our knowledge of these twelve categories was based on a posteriori knowledge. During the seminars, we discussed this issue in a four-person group, after which we talked about it with the rest of the class: while this question sure wasn't Kant's point (he was more after how knowledge was structured rather than how to come up with the structure), the fact that the categories he exposed were somehow very basic categories in the sense that it didn't encompass concepts very difficult to grasp (high-level categories such as race, social group…) was pointed out. We don't have to learn these concepts as a cultural fact, or linked to any linguistic approach: the notion of space and time comes inherently to each person, wether or not it is instilled by the current means of transportation or technological environment. It comes naturally, and transcend cultural fact. These categories are a priori, in relation to what they make possible.  

The lecture combined with the seminar made Kant's argument appear that much clearer to me, and after a week of wondering or pondering, I was finally able to read Kant's preface again without having doubts  on whether or not my understanding of the text was correct. 

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THEME 2 - Pre-Posting - Critical Media Studies

Dialectic of Enlightenment (T. W. Adorno & M. Horkheimer)

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer are building a new theory on Enlightenment and focusing on its rise from the previously magic-and-myth dominated world of beliefs.

By "Enlightenment", Adorno and Horkheimer address the process during which humans transition from a fantastic and magical understanding - or so they believe - of Nature, to a knowledge and hard scientific facts based viewpoint on the world. 

Not to be confused with the Age of Reason, Enlightenment is deeply rooted in the human will of dominating nature, of freeing ourselves from the ancient mythical thinking that was supposed to help us get rid of our fear of the unknown, eventually just succeeding in replacing it with a newfound fear of deities we've, ironically enough, created ourselves. 

Indeed, from the beginning of times, humans have been at the mercy of Nature and its whimsical temper changes: not knowing what to expect, fearing another upcoming storm or famine, that was the world humans had to evolve in… And to tame this fear of the unknown, of how the world actually works, was created a new way to explain the world: Myth, and fantastic stories about magic entities that ruled the world, that we had to please in order for them to treat us mortals kindly. 

Of course, apart from reassuring our nervous minds, that did little for mankind… And here comes Enlightenment, with its rational explanations and scientific facts, as a means for humans to dominate Nature finally, and to get rid once and for all of this ancient fear. However, is Enlightenment a way to freedom, a way for us humans to finally come at peace with nature and the world, as suggested by many? It could have been, if only Enlightenment wasn't so black-and-white, right-or-wrong, so factually exact that it itself stood in the way between humans and nature. This flaw is undeniably related to the concept of nominalism, which rejects everything that can't be encompassed by unity: by submitting to this law, abstract concepts such as deities are of course out of the question; but what about meaning? Can we really grasp even just a tiny bit of human life if we just follow nominalism and its principles? 

By its domination, even qualified by Adorno and Horkheimer as "totalitarian", Enlightenment failed to free mankind, and even served to alienate it further with social division, to objectify it with a newfound working motto, and eventually, plunging again in a world of myths… Only this time it's modern myths we're faced with. 

In this sense, this dialectic link between Myth and Enlightenment, where one emerges from the other only to eventually merge with it again, is a fundamental argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment, serving as a way to resolve the issue of Enlightenment with a dialectical method and logical reasoning, and opening up to a harsh critic of the Culture History, in slight contrast with W. Benjamin's point of view. 

The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity (W. Benjamin)

Walter Benjamin adresses in The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity the changes occurring in Art as a result of scientific progress: is Art losing meaning as its access becomes easier and easier, or is it on the contrary rising to new potentials thanks to newfound techniques and freedom? 

In the very beginning of the essay, Benjamin analyzes cultural production from a Marxist perspective, so as to reflect on the effects capitalism could have on culture by its never ending production process: "Superstructure" describes the system which controls the production, our capitalist economy and system, whereas "substructure" is used for the reproduction itself, in this case, our culture and art. 

According to Benjamin, culture can have reactionary or revolutionary potentials: in a fascist context, culture is reduced to propaganda, where attempts have been made to beautify politics, wars, and all sorts of horrors; while the cinematographic art, because it wakes the masses from their inactive slumber and carries them along in the action, has revolutionary potentials. With its newfound accessibility, art can free the masses from fascism and alienation, and thus, be revolutionary. In this sense, Benjamin's take on culture contrasts with Adorno and Horkheimer's point of view: while the latter agree that these new artistic forms can free themselves from political and mythical domination, they make a point to condemn the objectification and idolization of culture made possible by its accessibility to the masses, enabling an easier manipulation of mankind through a deceptive cultural escape. 

Benjamin discusses the mode of human sense perception and how it can not only be naturally determined, but also highly dependent on historical circumstances: he illustrates this claim with the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed as a result of great shifts of population, and enabling a new kind of perception. 

The concept of "aura" is fundamental in this essay: by reproducing Art, aura is created and taken away at the same time. Indeed, when threatening an object's uniqueness, this object's authenticity is created, and thus its presence, in this time and place - its aura. At the same time, because it's reproduced and in another time, another place, another meaning, it loses its aura. It's a difficult concept to grasp, but inherently we all can understand it with Benjamin's analogy with nature.  

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THEME 1 - Pre-Posting - Theory of knowledge and theory of science

Critique of Pure Reason (I. Kant) 

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?

Is metaphysics a science? 

To answer this question, a deeper understanding of what defines science is needed. In the preface to the second edition of his "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant delves into the fields of logics, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics to show us what makes mathematics and physics worthy of being called a science, as opposed to logics, science's "outer courtyard" where reason has only to do with itself, devoid of any object at all; or metaphysics, where reason is presented with objects, but with no intuition or experience as mathematics or physics would be. Indeed, based on the presupposition that the understanding subject acquires knowledge only by passively submitting itself to experience, with no added value whatsoever from its own reason, metaphysics seems like an pointless and endless "battlefield": in its very definition, metaphysics relies on the belief that there is knowledge without experience. Here comes the big question: can there actually be knowledge without experience?

Indeed, Kant is establishing the ground for a new theory of knowledge: in this preface, he distinguishes between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. The former is exactly what metaphysics is based on: pure knowledge, preceding any experience, that lives in the understanding subject's reason. To try to solve the issue with metaphysics, Kant suggests we shift our viewpoint in regards to both forms of knowledge : before, we believed a posteriori knowledge came wholly from the world surrounding us, without even considering, or needing, an a priori knowledge. Now, similarly to what happened with the isosceles triangle, or Copernicus' revolution… What happens if we open our eyes to the possibility of an a priori knowledge that influences greatly the a posteriori knowledge, in that it shapes the considered object itself ? 

Theaetetus (Plato)  

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"?

In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus discuss the meaning of knowledge : through three definitions offered by Theaetetus, we come closer to where Socrates wants to lead us. 

The "Knowledge is perception" definition misses the idea of human cognition, implying there's nothing more to knowledge than what our organs sense: Thankfully Socrates reminds Theaetetus that organs are but a means for the sensory world and our cognition to meet. Based on our senses, our reason can build knowledge. In that sense, Socrates calls out to the notion of empiricism, where knowledge is built on experience. 

What about Kant's a priori knowledge then? Perhaps this could counter Socrate's looming conclusion that truth can't be found in a world where knowledge is built through experimenting the objects of the world, objects that are changing indefinitely… 

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