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| 1st step: Follow the white rabbit to find Wonderland... |
In the first Lecture of the course the proper way in finding high quality journals and articles was approached, specially referring to the use of the Web of Knowledge and Google Academic tool.
The “impact factor” (IF) of a publication – a way to measure the quality of a publication by the average number of citations it has – was also explained and suggested to be evaluated in the searches performed on a research.
The first task of the theme 1 was to select both a research journal and a research paper for media technology with impact factor 1.0 or above.
The journal I chose was the “Social Science Computer Review”, which has an IF of 1.075 (link). The journal is interdisciplinary and covers mainly research applications of computing, as well as the impacts of information technology in society.
The article I selected was “The Impacts of Emoticons on Message Interpretation in Computer-Mediated Communication” and it was cited 49 times in the Web of Knowledge, which characterizes it as high quality. Considering the content the main question is to determine the effects of three common emoticons on message interpretations and 7 hypothesis were draw in the experiment. The main concepts are well structured as well as the relationship between them. The background information is logical, relevant and it is possible to see the progression of ideas. The only problem was that the work was published in 2001, and focusing on the use of emails, which nowadays in my opinion are not a media in which emoticons are mostly used. It would be interesting to check if the results would be the same in different channels as well. The research method used was an experiment to assess affective and attitude interpretations of emoticons. The data presentation was comprehensive and the results discussion very rich. While rreading the description of the research it occurred to me some of the same implications the author describes, like the impact of not having someone from the personal network sending the message and also the familiarity of the responder with the use of emoticons. Besides the discussion aspects, I think the author should also have written a conclusion of the study.
The second task of the theme 1 was to read the book “The Problems of Philosophy” from Bertrand Russell and reflect on some concepts that the author presents.
In my opinion the book reading was intense not only because it questions the reader about so many different aspects of the same thing but also makes you confront your own beliefs when exposing strong and eloquent arguments.
During some passages the book reminded me a lot of two movies, The Truman Show and Matrix, especially considering the existence of matter “There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us.”
Concepts to keep in mind:
1. sense-data: the things that are immediately known in sensation such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardness, roughnesses and so on. Related to physical objects.
Why is this notion is important? Lead us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence not dependent on perceiving them.
sensation: the experience of being immediately aware of this things.
2. proposition: it is a statement for consideration, based in logic.
- a priori: two and two are four;
- a priori (ethics) may also be elicited by experience: happiness is more desirable than misery;
- empirical generalizations: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.
statement of fact: based in experiences; can be verified by experiments.
Propositions and statement of facts are based on the truth. Other verbal kinds of expression are based in each person's perception of reality and it can be true or false.
3. definite description: unique, nothing else has. “The so-and-so”, the nature of our knowledge concerning objects in cases where we know that there is an object answering to a definite description though we are not acquainted with any such object.
4. theory of knowledge (epistemology):
How can we know what is true and what is false? There can be no doubt that some of our beliefs are erroneous.
One cannot be totally skeptical, otherwise no logical argument can be advanced. Example of religion, you need to have a start point of beliefs.
