Final Blogpost: Theory about Everything and Nothing

Looking back at the last two months the course Theory and Method for Media Technology was a very suitable one to start my masters in media management. Starting with the very basics what knowledge is and how we can gain knowledge  I became very critical and started to question everything. During the course this attitude helped me a lot and was the foundation for many interesting and eye opening discussions about critical media studies, theory in general and research methods. After dealing with every single theme I finally see the connection between all these topics and why the basics about what knowledge is and how we create knowledge are so important. The discussions about what theory is and what it is not were very familiar to me because I learned a lot about that in my bachelor. I also have heard a lot about different research methods before, but anyway I got to know some new input and I was able to repeat and to strengthen my knowledge in this area.

To prepare for the lectures for some themes I needed to look up additional sources to complete my understanding of some aspects. Especially the first theme took me quite a while to get all the concepts right and I needed the lecture and the seminar to finally feel certain about them. Therefore I must mention that I really liked the format of the course with it s different possibilities to learn. I feel like I really understood everything we dealt with and having the lectures and the seminars helped me to process with the new knowledge. The group discussions were the most important part for me to broaden my previous knowledge about the topics. 

Some of the topics, like the main discussion about knowledge, the whole theme about critical media studies, the problem solving strategy from Haibo Li and case studies,  seamed more important to me and were also newer to me. Beginning with the very first theme were we talked about what knowledge is and how we create knowledge I learned a lot about important it is to keep in mind that everything we know is based on something somebody said some time ago. There is no one definition about knowledge, because it is so multifarious. It always depends on the perspective you look on something and your at that time situation also affects you. A good way to describe that is Socrates statement about seeing and hearing "through" our eyes and ears and not "with" them. It says that we experience and perceive information through our eyes and ears. Previous experiences and knowledge form your perspective on something and it is very important to keep that in mind when reading something new. I also liked the expression knowledge is what somebody has said once, which shows how subjective our overall knowledge can be when we do not question it. Another important approach is that knowledge is structured according to time and space, which says that objects need to be defined and structured and not only described. The concept of a priori and a posteriori was very hard to grasp for me but examples like E.T. showing up on the earth for the first time, pointing on something and using a different word for it than we would have used helped me to understand it better.

The second theme about critical media studies was the most eye opening topic for me. Keeping the historical background of an author in mind while reading his or hers text is super important and I did not really got that before. When you know in which situation different authors wrote different texts about a pretty similar topic it is essential to think about their situation to read between the lines. When reading two texts from Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer the concepts of Nominalism and Realism appeared. Nominalism says that there is no such thing as a universal concept and the only thing objects have in common is their name. An example for that is that just because somebody is a woman does not mean that she has long hair. The allegory of Plato's cave can be used to describe the concept of Realism. It is an allegory that imagines some individuals caught in a cave. Everything they have ever experienced are the shadows of passing things, like horses, projected on the inside of the cave. These projections have become their reality because they have never experienced a world outside their cave. Although there is an existing world outside the cave it is not part of their reality.

Another important topic that was discussed during the course was problem solving. When discussing the process of how to come up with an idea, to filter and validate it and in the end communicate it the term problem came up. A problem in research differs between the real problem of a situation. The given example about a teacher and a student in the woods running away from a hungry bear which is obviously faster than them, made very clear which kind of problem is discussed. The real problem of the example is not that the bear is running faster than the teacher and the student. The question in this case is not who can run faster, but who can outrun the other one. One of the two needs to run faster than the other to keep the bear from eating both. This example points out the importance of defining a problem and not just follow the first thoughts that come up about a solution.  By taking this example and adapting it to research it shows how one should not get stuck in his or her first thoughts that come to our mind about a problem. Ninety percent of the time should be used to find and define the real problem and only ten percent of the time should be spent on finding a solution for it.

In summary I can say that the course was very good structured and all the themes had a deep connection to each other, although it did not seem so in the beginning. In my opinion the combination of philosophical questions with reminders of research methods and theory provides a good foundation for all following courses in my master program.