Theme 3: Reflections

This week our task was to select a journal (with a reasonably high Impact Factor) and an article in that journal, which we considered to be relevant to the media technology field. I therefore chose an article concerning effects Internet advertisement has on people (see the post below), which I considered to be interesting for different reasons; firstly, it is dealing with a subject that influence us both as media technology students and as Internet consumers; and secondly, it could also show what kind of impacts even short exposure from commercials has on the mind, and from there it isn’t hard to continue speculating what kind of power this provides to the mass media.

Our task during the seminar involved defining and discussing of what sort of theory our article consisted, using the five different kinds of theory we learnt of in Gregor’s article The Nature of Theory in Information Systems. I first defined my own article as explanatory, as I considered it to be an attempt to explain the world in a sense. But after the seminar I got a deeper insight in the different kinds of theories, and had to change my choice to the theory of the article as being predictive. The article I had chosen make use of quantitative methods in its research, and consequently get results in which they can compare and predict a connection between the two phenomena. However, because of the lack of more qualitative and investigating methods, they do not exactly explain why or how the connection is there. I can therefore exclude the explanatory part of the theory and define it as being mostly predictive.

The other task during the seminar was choosing a theory from our articles, after we defined what kind it was, and put it in the course’s “theory-wiki”. We chose the theory from my article, mainly because it was the easiest to define by using Gregor’s theory of theories. In conclusion the theory became something like: “Short exposure of advertisement at low-level attention could have long-term effects on the implicit memory”.

In general this seminar was very useful to me; it incited a much stronger grasp on theory, what theory is and what kind of theories can be used. I think it will be very useful later on, when I have to make my own contributions to science and research.