Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (After)

For this weeks theme I didn't do much additional reading apart from the article about case studies and the two articles that I chose. I read up on a couple of methods that was in one of my articles. I guess I felt like this theme really built upon all of the previous themes and that the article on case studies was otherwise sufficient. It was nice to have a theme at the end of the course that tied all of the concepts of earlier themes together. I think that I have a clear understanding of what a case study means and how it should be implemented because of my previous understanding of the other themes about theory and method. It really tied together nicely.

The case study article that I chose made me a bit unsure of the boundaries between a study with extensive qualitative methods and a case study. I guess it kind of balances between them because of the fact that so much of the environment which they studied was constructed by the researchers. The approach did seem beneficial for them though and was good as a first study to be followed up by a study that results in a bit more theory.

It was interesting for me to choose an article that had methods I didn't quite know about which I did for the qualitative methods part of this theme. Understanding more about different methods is interesting and learning about discourse analysis and ethnography was helpful to grasp how case studies work. The thing that seems to me like the hardest part of a case study is how to choose which data to gather and how to process it afterwards. Understanding two additional methods made it easier to understand how more types of data can be gathered and analyzed. 

Theme 5: Design research (After)

This weeks theme made me think a lot more concrete about what to do and think about when you are about to conduct a study. I have been thinking a lot about what I should do for my master thesis and looked upon the articles for this theme with that perspective. The lecture by Haibo Li surprised me a bit by not talking so much about using prototypes as part of research but rather about stepping outside of the box to look at your problem in a new way. It made me more confident in an observation I made about the research by Sellnäs. What if she would have skipped including the haptical interface in her study abou group work? The haptical interfaces have already been studied themselves and putting her research in a future scope where these interfaces might be a lot more complex I think the research might just as well have been conducted with a "real" physical interface. She could have had an actual wooden box with wooden geometrical figures in it and if the blind student needed guiding the sighted student could just grab the actual figure that the blind student is holding on to to lead the way. I am not perfectly sure that this would be a good way to do it but thinking about what Haibo Li said about not making your experiments too complex makes me feel like there is at least something to it.

The idea that Haibo Li talked about, that sometimes you are trying to solve the wrong problem was also something I found interesting. I often feel like I am locked down by my presumptions when thinking about a problem and then after a while, sometimes a long time, I come upon something that changes my  perspective and suddenly the solution just appears. Oftentimes what happens then is that I exclude something from the problem or regard something to be less important. I've learned in a project course a few years back that it is a good approach to "kill your darlings" when coming up with a great solution to a problem. That means that you after you've worked on an idea that you think is great but is not really taking you all the way or progressing to slowly you completely abandon that idea and start again from scratch. I guess that what happens a lot of times when you do that is that you force yourself to look at a problem from a completely different angle and redefine the problem. Maybe trying to come up with different, contradictory, sets of definitions for a problem could be a good approach to more easily find these different solutions to a problem.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (Before)

Qualitative methods paper

"Living the VirtuReal: Negotiating Transgender Identity in Cyberspace", Marciano, Avi; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2014)

This paper is about how transgender individuals use the internet to extend their social network and/or the space within which they lead their lives. The author uses discourse analysis and virtual ethnography as analysis methods. I think this paper is interesting because of its emphasis on the implications of technology and I thought it would be interesting to read a paper with qualitative methods which I am not confident with.

The author studied content and commentary on a popular webpage and forum respectively. One of the foremost benefits of doing so is that the author could get information on what people say and think when they are acting within a natural context. The author won't affect the study "participants". However, there is no possibility of asking for clarification. Further, observing multiple instances of the same kind might prove hard. Specific questions might have to be abandoned or accepted to have unspecific answers based on a small representation of subjects. 

For me it was interesting to understand that even with methods that seem purely analytical at first, there is often an element of quantifying. Like the categorization in the discourse analysis method. I am starting to see that there is a relatively large grey zone where qualitative and quantitative meet or maybe overlap.

I think this paper could have been improved by making a survey or interview people to see more of how they potentially differ in personality between offline and online and to provide deeper understanding of some of the issues that come up. However that would be beyond the aim for this study. 

------------------

Case study paper

1. A case study is a broad range, often open ended study that involves several methods of gathering data. The study is conducted by choosing a few places where the topic of interest can be observed. The study may include experiments that are set up by the researchers but it might also just be the "natural" situation that is being observed in several ways by the researchers. It is good to chose different places that represents different categories or qualities of the topic of interest, each of these are one case. The gathering of data may be anything from structured to unstructured  or both and may change during the course of the study as new phenomena are observed. 

I chose the paper:

"Student experiences of virtual reality: A case study in learning special relativity", McGrath, Dominic and Wegener, Margaret and McIntyre, Timothy J. and Savage, Craig and Williamson, Michael; American Journal of Physics, 78, 862-868 (2010)

This paper is about using a visual software to help university students to understand special relativity phenomenon. The study is divided into two major cases, one at each of two universities, but is partially subdivided by the different categories of students that are taking the two similar courses (the setup of the courses differ a bit between universities).

This is one of the weaknesses that I observed. Since they basically only have to cases they cannot compare the impact on different styles of education. It would have been good with one or two more universities or other courses of similar content at the same university. However their results do not present complex theory but rather binary theory, basically if their visual software will or will not help students in their learning process. They do use the fact that they have different categories of students to help them to their conclusion. But stronger theory could possibly have been achieved with more cases.

They use multiple ways of gathering data like observation, questionnaires and interviews in a structured way with questions integrated into the laboratory task. They also compare results on the final exam between students who used their software and those who didn't. This combination is one of the strengths of this study I think, since they are able to verify the preliminary results from the laboratory sessions with the comparison of exam results. Some of the data is quantifiable and is therefor subject to statistical analysis which helps them further in building their theory.

They do very little to extend their theory by investigating reasons behind the fact that student seem to benefit from using their software. They retrieve some data that points to how the learning process continues for students who participate but no attempt is made to understand the mechanisms. Neither do they extend their theory by referencing to previous work that might explain why visualization, or some other part of their experimental setup, will help the students.

Theme 4: Quantitative research (After)

For this weeks theme I read the articles "Perceptual evaluation of violins: A quantitative analysis of preference judgments by experienced players" and "Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection". I also read about different qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches on the course web page and extensively on wikipedia.

I found the seminar of this week to be the most valuable part of this theme. It was a fun and good way to learn a lot more about how to relate to quantitative research. What I feel like is the most important lesson is that the research design down to the smallest detail is crucial for the results obtained. There are so many factors to consider when gathering data and the result is bound to be biased or useless if only a few factors are taken into account. It seems to me like it is a good idea not only to test your study in small scale before deploying it, as we were told in the seminar, but also to use some sort of focus group to come up with problems and ideas for conduct when designing your study. By discussing benefits, disadvantages, possibilities and limitations in group in the seminar we came up with a lot of ideas that I wouldn't have come up with on my own.

The article I chose had implemented a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods which came up in the articles and reflections for next weeks theme. I think this was another valuable lesson. When conducting a study based on qualitative methods adding a quantitative part will greatly help in discussing and clarifying the results.

Some issues regarding how to design a questionnaire also came up during the seminar. I have many times been irritated when answering questionnaires that do not give me the options I'd like to have or where answering is simply to tedious. I've thought that this is just a natural part of questionnaires in general and that designing these is at least as tedious as answering them. But I'm starting to think that it might be really interesting to design a questionnaire. They rely on so many psychological factors about stuff like how to create unambiguous questions, driving motivation for participants to answer and what questions to include. What is relevant, necessary and sufficient questions in a questionnaire?

Theme 5: Design research (Before)

Relating to the article by Haibo Li et. al

For a lot of the research in media technology I believe that there is an intended recipient, or user. In other fields the technology is not inherently user centered to the extent that is the case for media technologies. So when researching media technologies the best approach is often to retrieve qualitative data from relevant research participants. Usability, attitude, human perception and cognitive abilities are the key concepts of research in media technology I think. So research will have to take these into account to successfully gain new knowledge. A good approach to attaining the data for this kind of research will a lot of times be to present a prototype or concept idea that can be directly evaluated by participants in a study. The research can be designed to test a small part of an upcoming prototype or the whole prototype itself. The idea will however be to identify attitudes and constraints to further base the research on. The data collected when evaluating media technologies will, I think, always be connected to the concepts above mentioned. In a combination of observing, asking questions and collecting usage data from the participants a broad range of qualities can be investigated.

The main advantage of designing a prototype for research is probably that it makes it possible to test for multiple attributes at the same time and also to test in an environment that is similar to that of the intended use. Like for qualitative methods in general a prototype can give unpredicted or unintended information. It is hard to foresee all possible obstacles or constraints in a research so by using a prototype this unintended information may be valuable for adapting the research or for further research. It is a natural part of an iterative process but that might also be seen as a limitation to using prototypes as a method. When starting off a research in this fashion the iterative process must be embraced and every research step must be expected to incrementally work it's way toward the goal. Of course every step will provide valuable information but one cannot be sure that it is generalizable.

Relating to the articles by Eva-Lotta Sallnäs et. al

I found the conclusion that introducing audio to a haptical visual interface improves performance interesting, but not surprising. It seems quite natural that an interface that more closely replicates the "real world" will be easier to grasp. I wonder what kind of performance boost they would get by implementing actual 3d sound. It seem quite possible to do so I think. If the collaborating participants wear headsets they could talk to each other through those will still hearing 3d sound. They could even position the voice of the collaborator in the virtual audio space.

It was also interesting to see that visually impaired and sighted people effectively could collaborate. But it seems that the sighted people had little to gain from this group exercise. So I am wondering, which could be questions for the lecture, to what extent is the haptical interfaces relevant for group work? Are the results to be seen as implications for how to perform group work in general or only in the situation with a haptical interface?

The collaborative experimental setup will make it different from an individual setup in a few ways. First of all there are some technical and measurement constraints to this approach. Communication in the group, especially in this case, is important and thus participants cannot be hindered in their communication by for example headphones. Also they will be positioned at different places in the experiment scene which might affect the results. The gathering of data must take all participants into account and gathering data on the communication between them is essential to explain the result. Also, people may act differently in a group than individually which will have to be accounted for.

By combining qualitative and quantitative methods one will acquire a setup that will be able to show a correlation and provide the information needed to explain that correlation. The quantitative method will act as support when formulating the main theories which in turn are derived from the qualitative data. In the articles by Sallnäs et. al they used timing and event data to show correlations and then explained them using the information they gathered from interviews/comments and the observation of participants. To extend this it will also mean that as the research is conducted the qualitative methods will provide deeper understanding and the possibility of adapting the study, eg. follow up questions, and to identify new factors that are of interest. If the experimental design and the gathering of data is more extensive than to account only for the expected results than the new factors identified will also be able to be supported by quantitative data. So by combining subjective and objective methods a study with greater dynamic is achieved.

Theme 3: Research and theory (After)

For this theme I have read the articles assigned by the course, the article of my choice and general "stuff" on the webpage of the journal which I chose to write about. I based my understanding of the article I chose on my previous knowledge of the acoustical field, so no further reading was necessary.

What I have learned after this weeks theme is that theory seems to be everywhere and that theory in a scientific context is not just the theory which is proposed but also all the underlying theories on which it is built. When I was reading my article I was frantically looking for theories and with some struggle concluded what was their main theory. It was much harder than I thought to distinguish hypothesis from theory. Also, in my struggle I failed to recognize all the underlying theories at work in the article. Things that are taken for granted in the argumentation and the formation of their hypotheses. Acoustical theory, signal theory, theories regarding perception and regarding human evolution were some of the theories that I disregarded since it was not what they were emphasizing.

A thought occurred during the seminar that I think will help me to further understand theory and that will "keep it in the loop" in my mind. That theories are a natural part of language. Concepts are in a way theories of that which it conceptualize and so in that way we speak in theories.

In the process of trying to understand the essence of theory I made an attempt to define theory. I think it was quite helpful too in my learning process. I am by no means completely satisfied with this definition but I believe it at least provided me with a framework for thinking about theory.

My def: of theory;

Logically sound argumentation proving causality between events based on premises that are fairly assumed to be relevant and sufficient for the argument.

Theme 4: Quantitative research (Before)

Article of my choice:

Perceptual evaluation of violins: A quantitative analysis of preference judgments by experienced players

Saitis, Charalampos and Giordano, Bruno L. and Fritz, Claudia and Scavone, Gary P., The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132, 4002-4012 (2012), DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4765081

In this study they conducted a set of two experiments. Both where based on observing violin players in the process of evaluating different violins. In the first experiment the violin players were asked to freely play a set of violins and order them by preference. They repeated the ordering process multiple times and on multiple occasions. This way a lot of data could be gathered and then both individual consistency and agreement among participants could be analyzed. In addition a qualitative content analysis was performed. Participants where asked to describe what features they thought where important for their evaluation.

For the second experiment the features which were mentioned by most participants, plus some features common in the scientific literature on violins, were the only ones allowed for evaluation. Participants were asked to grade violins for each of the specified features. Again multiple trials were made.

The result of these experiments showed that violin players are very consistent in their own evaluation and that they agree on what features, or characteristics, are important in a violin, but that the perceptual evaluation differed among them so that no consistency could be achieved. 

I think that they nested the relatively qualitative procedure with their quantitative methods in a clever way. However the method in both experiments might be lacking by having no consistent way of playing the violins among all participants. A study before this one on what ways of playing gives greater agreement among participants, without losing overall individual consistency, might have been a better start. Letting the players play in whatever fashion they liked might have produced the inconclusive result of this study, since perceptual evaluation might differ with playing style. However, forcing a playing style or repertoire on the participants seems unnatural in the sense that preference of a violin likely is linked to the participants preferred way of playing.

A further investigation on the importance of each of the characteristics specified might also be interesting. It is possible that one or more characteristics can be broken down into a set of features and that agreement among participants could be acquired for one or more of these features.

Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection

The result that I found most interesting was that it seems like if you exercise (extensively) it is more beneficial to be stressed than to not be stressed for reducing the risk of getting URTI. My initial thought was that stress would be positively correlated with URTI and negatively correlated with physical activity, thereby reducing URTI with an increasing amount of exercise.

Perceived stress was said to have a small confounding effect on the risk of URTI. I guess however that this was analyzed in general, so with the people who reported high stress having higher incidence rate than low stress for low exercise and lower incidence rate than low stress for high exercise the effect overall is the same as for low stress. Then couldn't the main result be compromised by a psychological factor? People who are highly stressed and high intensity exercisers might be people who are less likely to report URTI, due to the fact that they are high performers who don't have time to listen to their bodies. This also correlates well with the fact that they ".. saw little effect of physical activity for URTI with systemic symptoms", since a fever would be hard to ignore for anyone.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

They give more precise and reproducible results. Designing the study is based on identifying factors which you can measure and then measure them many times. This can make the study easier to design but might also make it harder to conduct since gathering extensive data might take a lot of work and/or be costly. Quantitative methods also gives statistically more significant results, because of a greater number of observations, and the possibility of discarding a hypothesis if no correlation is found. If a correlation is found, however, explaining that correlation might prove harder than with a qualitative method since less information generally is available.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative methods have the major benefit of giving more depth in the answers to the questions asked. They may produce results that could not be predicted or give a greater nuance in the answer than expected. Since interpretation and reasoning are inherent in a qualitative study it will be colored by the observer in a way that may steer the results further from the truth than what would happen in a quantitative study. A qualitative study may be harder to reproduce and will generally give a statistical significance with less power, mainly due to less data and the complications of adjusting for confounding factors.

Theme 2: Critical media studies (After)

I read the texts by Benjamin and by Adorno & Horkheimer. I also read a little bit on marxist theory on wikipedia. The previous theme and the reading I did then had given me an idea of what dialectic means. To get me started on some of the concepts I read about them in the Oxford dictionary.

I thought the texts for this theme were harder to grasp than the ones from the first theme. I realize that at some level these texts had more familiar concepts but the way that they constructed their arguments and turned their approach without explicitly saying so made it more confusing. This resulted in me making some false assumptions on which I based part of my "before" blog post. So at the seminar I did not have as much to contribute with as on the previous seminar. However I found that really satisfying. I had to think a lot harder to put my thoughts together and definitely learned a lot more. I feel like I have a good understanding of the texts now. One thing that I had anticipated to be one of my conclusions after the seminar was that these kinds of text must be read in their context. Understanding what kind of world they are written in gives a lot more understanding to their argumentation. I think that is something important to remember when reading contemporary critique.

For me the biggest lesson of this theme was how power can show itself in media and how different perspectives may be opposing each other in what way they see this power and to whom the power belongs. The fact that there is power in media is something that would be hard to contest. So ways to analyze that power is really interesting. 

I believe that the critique that Adorno & Horkheimer set out on was a little bit premature but of course relevant at that time. I wonder what they would have thought of todays media landscape with the entrance of the internet. Maybe they would see the popular culture that they were criticizing as only peripheral. Or would they see it as the central power around which the internet community revolves? From their perspective maybe the internet would not be seen as it is seen by most of us, as a powerful tool of enlightenment, but rather a tool which replicates and enhances the ideals of the popular culture thereby giving it another level of depth to its mass deception. Or maybe they would also see it as a tool for enlightenment, but one that lacks, just as film in their view, the possibility to contribute to moral and ethical thinking.

Benjamin might have been happy to see that culture is not merely widely accessible but also produced by an ever growing number of people. More power has been put in the hands of the mass. But how would he explain that despite this change fascist ideals are growing in popularity and are gaining momentum on the political scene?

Maybe his answer would be, given his marxist perspective, that we are not producing culture for contemplation but that we are producing cultural products for consumption.

Theme 3: Research and theory (Before)

What theory is and what theory is not

Theory is the argumentation or the logical part of something which you are trying to prove. A causality or a link between two events may be shown to be likely, or very likely, by data or other observation. Then theory is the logical explanation to that event. Theory is not reference to the works of others, data in any form nor the hypothesis of a scientific work. Theory is the attempt to explain why something is happening and gives the possibility to at least to some extent predict what will happen under certain circumstances. The latter is especially true for strong theories. The results of a study constitute, in a broad sense, data and should therefore not be seen as theory. Instead, theory arguments about the connection between artifacts of that data and explains how and why they are connected.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)

I have chosen both to write a short description of the above journal. I have also chosen to write about an article published in that journal.

The JASA publishes a range of articles within the area of acoustics. Acoustics is a broad research area and therefore the articles published in JASA come from many different disciplines with acoustics in common. Acoustics are relevant for construction, different kinds of sonar (audio radar) and their applications, and transduction (the field of research concerned with detection and production of sound waves eg. microphones and speakers). Acoustics are also relevant for areas more closely connected to humans and human perception such as the acoustics of speech, psychology and physiology of hearing and music. The latter fields are of course of great relevance for media technology.

The article of my choice:

Suied et al. (2010): JASA 2010 Mar;127(3):EL105-10. doi: 10.1121/1.3310196. "Why are natural sounds detected faster than pips?"

Suied et al. investigate which of artificial and natural warning sounds give the shortest reaction time. The study is divided into two parts with the second part being a follow up investigation to further investigate the result of the first part. In the first experiment study subjects (12 people) responded to eight different warning sounds, four artificial sounds in the form of bursts of 1kHz beeps and four natural sounds of predator cats.

In the second experiment study subjects (12 other people) responded to the same natural sounds as in experiment 1 and to artificial versions of these sounds. The artificial versions were modified white noise (random amplitude noise ranging the full spectrum of human perception) with the temporal envelope (amplitude variation over time) of the four different kinds of animal sounds.

The result in the first experiment was that animal sounds had faster reaction times. The second experiment was conducted due to the result of the first experiment. The researchers wanted to test if the effect was due to acoustic properties of the animal sounds. The result of the second experiment was that there was almost no difference in reaction time between the artificial/modified sounds and the natural animal sounds, leaning towards slightly faster reaction time for the artificial/modified sounds.

The researchers' main theory is that the higher spectral content of the natural sounds will induce more neural reactions in our hearing apparatus and brain and therefore gives a shorter reaction time. Since the second experiment shows no difference in responses a "reflex" to predator sounds is more or less excluded, given that the artificial sounds of the second experiment do not sound like predator sounds. Very little is said to prove the neural theory further, and they do conclude that further investigation is necessary. My observation is that a control should have been done to test modified white noise against just white noise. 

The main theory would fall under "Theory for Explaining and Predicting", I would say. Although the researchers only make an attempt at explaining how the effect of neural reaction would work the theory is logically sound. As stated in the text by Sutton & Staw, a theory is not compromised by not proving every underlying process to it. The theory, though incomplete, also gives the possibility of prediction, not only for the exact same conditions but also for similar conditions. And the theory has testable propositions. However since further research can and should be done, and the underlying causality is not precisely explained, the theory is balancing between Type 3 (Predicting) and Type 4 (EP).

The benefits of using this theory is that further research can be done upon it without fully explaining the premises. The acoustical characteristics that gave a certain response can be subjected to variation to further specify what the important characteristics are. But since the underlying causes are not proven coming up with new experiments is harder. The theory is limited by assumptions of the acoustical characteristics. If the reason for the observed effect is not due to the "neural" explanation then further research might steer in the wrong direction.

Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (After)

Apart from reading the assigned literature I spent some time reading up on Kurt Gödels work on the subject of incommensurables, mainly wikipedia, and took some time to read about Bertrand Russels ideas on solipsism. My main question for the seminar was what Gödels incompleteness theorems implied for the acquirement of knowledge. My initial thought was that the theorems works best with a solipsist world view but my understanding of Kants transcendentalism has since improved and I am not really leaning towards anything at the moment. Reading the Plato dialogue and the Preface to Kants critique of pure reason was really interesting. I've spent time before thinking of these issues but have not read these texts. Kants transcendentalism is a great perspective of knowledge, yet quite hard to grasp. Before the seminar I had kind of grasped the idea, but it wasn't until the middle of the seminar that I felt more confident about the concepts. Both expressing my own thoughts and listening to what others had contemplated contributed a great deal to my understanding of Kants theory. 

I really enjoy thinking of these greater philosophical questions and I know that my new understanding of theory of knowledge will influence both my everyday and my scientific thinking. Above all I have learned that the way we interpret knowledge will influence the way we look at science and its discoveries. I am interested in human perception and I think that the way one looks upon knowledge can be quite important for setting the grounds, so to speak, for research in that area. I believe I will have that in mind when reading articles on perception and possibly when "designing" my master thesis.

In the seminar I tried to participate as much as possible since I find this topic really interesting and have a lot of thoughts to express. I believe that I contributed with some ideas that others had not thought of and could fill in where some of the ideas posted lacked or needed clarification by example. I hope that most people in the seminar understood my question regarding Gödel. I tried to explain his theorems and my thought of the connection between solipsism, Kant and Gödel. I also made some efforts to concretize and look upon these questions from a more technical or mathematical point of view which was really interesting for me since I hadn't gathered my thoughts on this before the seminar but rather found them during the seminar. I think and hope that others found that to contribute to their understanding of this topic.

Throughout this week I have learned to conceptualize and distinguish; knowledge, perception, truth, empiricism, transcendentalism; and some implications for different interpretation of these concepts. What is astounding to me is how important these concepts are for the understanding of science.

Theme 2: Critical media studies (Before)

1a.
Enlightenment in this context is the acquirement of knowledge which will bring the beholder towards the truth or to a deeper understanding of an objects relation to the world which surrounds it. Enlightenment means in other words to break free from disillusions of the world.

1b.
Dialectic is the art, or science, of investigating truth. The term is used differently by different philosophers and the field ranges from investigating whether objects hold absolute truth to the methods through which one might acquire truth.

1c&d.
Nominalism has its origin in the question whether an object can hold truth. Its answer is that no object will hold truth independently but that the features which we ascribe to objects are features of their own and not absolutely inherent within an object. These features are not reality themselves but abstractions of reality.

This approach is important in Adorno & Horkheimers text since it is the base of their argument. Nominalism means detaching oneself from illusions of the world and is, in their argument, the way towards enlightenment. The illusions which we've created to explain our world is what they call myth. That objects hold a quality similar to the "aura" which Benjamin describes and that this is a "myth". The myth is a division which estranges us from the world as it is. The myth upholds the concepts of religion and fate, incommensurables that stand in the way of enlightenment.

--------------------

2a.
What I think Benjamin means is that the Superstructure of communism implies that the power of production is more equally distributed among its societies citizens. The capitalist approach means emphasizing superstructure (the power comes from above) so that the substructures are controlled, or rather dominated. The emphasis from a marxist point of view is to let the substructures define the superstructure. That is the relations between people on a lower level will define the culture and political life of the marxist state. He suggests that theses of art of the proletariat, situated in the substructures, will inhibit the fascination of concepts related to that of the strong individual, inherent in fascism.

2b.
I believe it is Benjamins opinion that culture may enlighten the individual together with the mass, and therefore empower them to take action. The art of film especially may give the individual insight both to the reality of what is depicted as well as it's aesthetic and philosophical values, Benjamin seems to argue. The clarity with which film both separates and intertwines reality and myth is what is so powerful of this art. In contrast Adorno & Horkheimer argues that the blatant mass production of films that are created for the mere purpose of entertainment gives the individual no intellectual nor cultural insight but rather deceives him, withholding him from contemplation and, as a consequence, from knowledge and truth.

2c.
Benjamin defines naturally determined objects as those that are of a permanent nature. Historically determined is anything which is more open to interpretation and which will change over time since interpretation is a process which is dependent on the culture which the beholder is a part of. Knowledge, for example, may change the meaning of an object. What something symbolizes in one culture might symbolize or mean something different in another. An example of my own is that of the perception of tone quality in a musical context. What is now perceived as "joyful" notes (major scale) was once perceived as "sad" in many church hymns and probably in other contexts as well. Benjamin might have considered musical notes to be naturally determined but the distinction is hard to make.

2d.
In the knowledge of an object it might be presupposed that not everything can be known (only what we can perceive can be known) and to that effect when something holds the same appearance it might seem as it holds all the same qualities yet some qualities which may be hard to grasp, or perceive, may be part of that objects more important characteristics. So with the absence of ”aura”, deprived of the object in the mechanical process of reproduction, knowledge of that object will be lost. For objects of art the context in which they are in and by whom and in what way they are observed effects both the appearance and the possible diminishing or absence of aura. It is in the interpreters perception that the aura comes forth. Natural objects differ from those of art, Benjamin argues, since they hold "permanence and uniqueness" and may be observed in an untampered way ("seen by the unarmed eye"). Again, I believe this distinction will be hard to hold upon further investigation since the beholder will always perceive on the basis of previous experiences.

Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science (Before)

1. Kant
I'd like to start by making a really simplified versioned of what I would argue that Kant means when saying that we should try, the thought experiment, to let objects conform to our cognition. I would say that the nature of any object is that which we can apprehend. Meaning that the boundaries of our cognition is a defining structure for the object. The characteristics that an object may hold is therefore restricted to our cognition. This may in a way seem absurd, yet what is an object without the observer?

Kant says; ".. with this faculty we can never get beyond the boundaries of possible experience.."
So he recognizes this absurdity but goes on to say ".. our representation of things as they are given to us does not conform to these things as they are in themselves but rather that these objects as appearances conform to our way of representing.."

So to elaborate, the true nature of an object may not be attained. However we gain nothing from trying to understand that which we could never apprehend. The object is to be understood in the context that it is being observed by us, and any characteristic of it that is of any meaning to us is a characteristic that we may experience, some times of course with great difficulty.

2. Plato/Socrates
Again I'd like to start with a simple statement. The distinction of experiencing with or experiencing through our body is plainly that if we assume that we can experience "with" then that with which we are experiencing must be something absolute which is separated from our "soul", while as if we are experiencing "through" we may accept that what we observe will be effected by our previous experience.

They discuss the "wax" which gets imprinted with our experiences in addition to the more obvious senses as hearing and seeing. The way that these fall into the same category explains quite well what Socrates is arguing I think.
Our whole body acts like a filter through which all our sensations must go. But that filter is also part of the actual experience so that the filter will change in itself by every sensation and thus is ever changing. Thus knowledge could be seen as something that we do not reach but something that we move towards. And in that sense the connection to "Empiricism" is close, for with every sensation one will have an experience different from the last and so with repetitive stimuli coming from the same object we will change our "filter" to incrementally move towards knowledge of that object.

This is also the connection that I see between Socrates and Kant, namely that the understanding of an object is limited by our cognition, but as an important part of that our cognition will be altered by experience. Kant talks of mathematics as a science on a secure coarse on the basis that every object can have it's nature predicted before it has been observed. While Socrates will give critique even to the notion that what we can logically prove some things, since we can not be sure that our minds are not basing this logic on false presumptions. A premise for all science must be that the observations that we make have some element of truth in them, a derivative of the object which we are observing. However a point which neither is discussing is those objects that might not only be limited by the boundaries of our cognition but further limited by themselves. Objects that by their own nature does not contain truth nor absolute knowledge. I think of things that fall under Gödel’s incompleteness theory. Something that cannot be proven might not hold truth. Then knowledge, if to be generally defined and suitable for all objects, must be a collection of that which we can observe and never the absolute nature of that which we are observing.