Theme 3: Research and Theory

The Journal

The Journal I have selected for Theme 3: Research and Theory is New Media and Society, which is an international journal that focus on global and local aspects of new media and social change, it also covers aspects on implications and impacts of media change but also relation between theory, policy and practice. A few topics that I can mention to get a clearer picture of what type of articles this journal publishes are related to digitalization, convergence, interactivity and virtuality.

The impact factor of this journal is 1.824.

The research paper

The research paper i’ve chosen is called Re: Search and is written by Mark Graham, Ralph Schroeder and Greg Taylor from the University of Oxford. Throughout the paper the authors touches the shell of links between information and power of social aspects in search behavior. The focus of the paper is Search, something they define as power of accessing and shape information. “Separating the relevant from the irrelevant and the knowable from the unknowable”. The main purpose of the paper is to compare four papers and the connection between information, knowledge and power. They focus on search engines because it contains the tremendous amount of content, to order, structure, filter, rank and make sense out of an enormous capacity of information that we are able to collect. They highlight the aspects of the significance that search engines have only existed for the last two decades because of the fact that powerful companies have made the possibility to access to information. Although, they also underline that those who design and control these search engines have an enormous amount of social power. Major search engines, such as Google, do have critics (users, academics etc) who are apprehensive regarding the power that is concentrated in the hands of these powerful players.

What is Theory? 
Sutton & Staw explains in the paper “What theory is not” a greater understanding on the topic of misunderstandings regarding what people should have in mind while writing a research paper. The most frequent mistakes that mostly occur are the “five elements”: Data, variables, references, diagrams and hypotheses. These are all important fundamentals in a paper – but should not be conceded for being theory. A primary key of what a theory is – something that explains WHY these elements bring the outcome to a certain result, and a logical system connecting a relationship between “elements”. Kaplan (1964) and Merton (1967) explain theory as an answer to queries of why – which could be considered as a brief explanation of the subject.

What type of theory in my selected paper? Benefits, limitations. 
According to Gregor there are five different types of theories that could exist in papers that covers information system research. These are defined as Analysis, Explanation, Prediction, Explanation and Prediction and Design and Action. The paper presented in this theme (re: search) has one major theory that could be defined as analysis. The reason why analysis is the one of five that fits the paper from Gregor’s taxonomy of theory types, is because it focused on analyzing and describing what power search engines today have. That these play a role as gatekeepers and have a power of providing information about human needs and behavior by comparing four different papers throughout the paper. 

References 
Sage Journals. 2013. New media society: http://nms.sagepub.com/  

Graham, M., Schroeder, R & Taylor, G., 2013,
Re: Search: http://nms.sagepub.com.focus.lib.kth.se/content/15/8/1366.full.pdf+html

Gregor, S., 2006. The Nature of Theory in Information Systems, 30(3), pp.611–642.
Sutton, R. & Staw, B.M., 2013. ASQ Forum What Theory is Not., 40(3), pp.371–384.