Research Journal
I chose the journal New Media & Society. This is a
journal mainly active in the fields of communication, media and cultural
research. Also in some cases it publishes studies about geography, economics,
sociology, political & information studies and finally humanities. It is
important to highlight that the researches published in this journal, are
conducted with theories and methods of high quality; with both qualitative and
quantitative methods.
The 2011 impact factor of the
journal is 1.394.
Research Paper
The article
that I have chosen is from the same journal and its title is “I tweet honestly, I tweet
passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience” written by Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd. [Article’s
impact factor is 8.0].
In this
research paper, authors are trying to investigate how Twitter users imagine the
people they are talking to through this social network (their audiences) and
what kind of strategies they use to steer them.
The authors conducted their research with the
use of qualitative methods. In order to examine how Twitter users imagine their
audiences, they were based on past literature and open-type interviews. They
started their interviews by posting their questions directly to their own followers’
(on Twitter) walls, but also they send them as @reply to the Twitter users
whose posts are shown in the public timeline. The questions were formed in a
way that they could approach different kinds of users so that the researchers
would gain a diversity of users’ views.
Russell’s Book
A) People, usually think
that defining a simple common object like a table is a simple process. Though, Russel
through his arguments proves that this is not as simple as it looks. The objects’ characteristics like color, shape, smoothness are differing
among the people who see the object and their points of view. For example if a
person A sees a chair during the day he will say that the chair is brown but if
a person B sees the same chair during the night he will say that its color is
black. Thus, Russel is using the name of 'sense-data' for the things that we can
immediately identify through our sensations. Things like these are colors,
sounds, smells, roughness, etc. So, we can say that what we think that our
senses tell us is not the truth about an object, but the truth about this
object’s “sense-data”.
B) “Proposition is a unique fact
that we know about an object through knowledge by description”. This means that we all can know
facts about certain objects without having personal experience (acquaintance)
but we have to base our propositions entirely on facts that we are acquainted
with.
Facts are our personal experiences, what we
know about an object through acquaintance.
A statement of fact is a total of statements
about a particular object that leads us to a belief which has to be true. For
the belief to be true, it has to correspond to the fact, otherwise it is a
false one.
C) According to Russell, all knowledge is based on
the knowledge by acquaintance. Unlike
sense-data, all the other information about an object does not contain knowledge.
These information are known to us by description knowledge, which is the one
concerning objects in the cases where we know that there is an object matching
to a certain description. Furthermore, this knowledge has to be valid and for
that reason must have the form “the so-and-so” (definite form).
D) Russell believed that philosophical
knowledge is not essentially different from the scientific knowledge. The results
obtained by philosophy might not differ in a great extent from these obtained
by science. But their basic difference is the criticism. Also, he supported that as we cannot prove
Hegel’s beliefs, that “the universe as a whole forms a single harmonious system”,
and so we are unable to prove the non-existence of space and time and matter
etc.
Katerina, it is a great thing that you've chosen this article, even if you do not use Twitter :)
SvaraRaderaNow, when you started, what do you thing the most complicated about Twitter?
Usually researchers talk about its shortness and the too intense usage of hyperlinks.
As you know, we had to create Twitter accounts for the course Social Media Technologies, so i actually have an account now!! In the beginning i was quite worried if i will manage to understand the whole idea, but after exploring it for a while i understood that like most of the social media, it is very user friendly. I even did my first "tweets"!!
SvaraRaderaI think your article sound interesting but I think it’s odd that the authors says that it’s ”difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversations”, especially when the paper is about Twitter. First, Twitter isn’t developed for unclear contexts because of the limitation of the characters (based on SMS). Second because tweets are asynchronous, which face-to-face aren’t. According to this, I don’t think it’s fair to compare how to handle multiplicity on Twitter and face-to-face conversations. But as I said, this paper sounds interesting.
SvaraRadera