The reflection of seminar in week 44

This week we did a deep research on how to identify theories. Theory is an abstract entity that aims to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world and, in some cases, to provide predictions of what will happen in the future and to give a basis for intervention and action. They are created by people and then turn to a sort of human beings’ belief.

However, I thought the conception miss one thing about how to use data to support theories. Thus, Our seminar group added important content to the Course Wiki. It is that the causality is the link between diagrams, variables, references, hypotheses and theory. When describing a theory, people also need to concentrate on causality between them. This point of theory will turn to one of my guide on description writing, which when writing essay about theory, I should not only display the number or fact or prediction, but reveal the cause of them to certify the theory’s correctness.

There is one topic that I am interested in. It is whether theory is a general rule or just suitable in specific area. I prefer the former one. In my opinion, theories may come from specific phenomena but are above them. It is the process of extracting homogeny among great deal of fact so that when similar problem happens, people can utilize theory to see it and solve it. Theory should be relatively stable. On the other hand, I admitted that theory has its scope of application, and the wider of this scope, the harder to define it. Theories should have changes according to different situation and time period.

Then we shared different people’s theory to each other. In our group, I learn about Multi-model method in mass media, Niche theory in media and another that I cannot remember. Among them, Niche theory attracted me very much. It originally used in biology that means that different creatures living in same place should partition recourses differently. It can also be utilized in media field. To win in the media market of one specific area, the media maker should own special characteristic of the product.

Reading theory I found named ”a post-human reading of the face-to-face” again, I felt it is a good theory paper. Firstly, it shows four facts about changes in lecture and class. Meanwhile, the author analyzed why and how the facts happened. Then, he abstracted characteristics of todays lecture and class. The next part is the meticulous of post-human theories. According to the theory, the author gave out reasonable prediction for future lecture and class patterns.