Text read :
Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs : How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions - Journal of computer-mediated communication - 4august2016
JCMC Two Year Impact Factor: 3.117
JCMC Five Year Impact Factor: 3.799
Gregor, S. (2006). The Nature of Theory in Information Systems.
Sutton, R. I. & Staw, B. M. (1995). What Theory is Not.
As mentionned above, i've been searching some article in a well famous journal called : The journal of computer-mediated communication. As the title relates, it is web-based on the correlation between the media and computer world and their use in the social world.
It explores various and many subjects such as : Political, Sociology, Psychology, Science, Education, Business and so on. Most of the time related to the media technology.
I've chosen the article called "Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs : How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions".
The title expressed a significant idea from nowadays. The misperceptions that we are victims in the internet and that we are not aware of. For most of us. This article had 2 goals in mind while writing it. To prove that exposure to ideological online news media contributes to political misperceptions. And at the same time exposes the 3 differents forms of how those misperceptions are created through media.
The paper starts on different definition over the words they are going to use in the paper so they start by claryfing the possible misperceptions about the misperceptions they are gonna talk about. Pretty clever. The study here is based on the election of 2012 in America where different surveys and analysis were made.
Those 3 forms of political misperceptions are described in logical order.
First, the lack of familiarity with the evidences. As an internaute, we do not have all the information (Hence the reason we are going on a news website) and this is the most made mistakes by a lot of people all over the internet. They do recommend to use others to fill the gap that seems unclear of unfit to the reality.
Then misunderstanding the evidence. Even though using this risky strategy such as ometting an important factor, a bit of twisting in the narration of the story, or add atypical element to the article can lead to important amend if discovered this is often use to controle the population from underneath. Through the last 2 years, the most missleading aspect of web-based news are the missleading title such as : Waow, Donald Trumps walks on a kid's face. The goal here is to promote the traffic on their website by attracting the attention of the internaute. And then the potential evidence or information inside will be neglected due to this title.
Finally, the last but not least form is the misperceptions despite knowing the evidence, the real fact.
Knowing the evidence is not the same as believing in.
For example, the global climat change linked to the presidential's programm. (republican) They started by tearing down the scientist community. Therefore the belief in this community decreased and the belief on what they were working decreased as well. And at the same time, while election are running in, people tend to believe what their party's is suggesting.
From what I read of this article was very interesting, because they did the opposite of what they were demonstrating in the article. We can see their profesionnalism to the different references they are using, studies and analysis and they always bring an evidence to support their claims. Well structured so we easily understand without any missperception whatsoever. And they even suggest that this study can be pushed further for more detailled vision of this global misperception of the political sphere.
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What is theory ? What is not ?
Let's start with what is not. Collecting information in an empirical way in itself is not theory. By that, raw data, variables, diagrams, etc can't be defined as theory.
Theory however is built on those. To explain an observation (through raw data) in a logical way, understand the relationships in a true timed order event.
The major theory in this paper describes the different form of the actions that uses web media onto the political world in order to manipulate the consumer's reading. The goal is to show the theory and exposes it in order to be aware of those and not be affected by them.
The benefits of this kind of theory : Theory of explanation (according to gregor) is the better understanding of a selected situation. You use those theories in some particular missinterpreted field, or not very well known to the people.
The limitation of such a theory is that it doesn't give any answers to contradict the problem they are explaining. Moreover, it can be searched more and therefore, there can be other problem that they didn't refer to. The more the time passes, the more information we can have, so it can become obsolete at one point. This is an explanation for this time now and won't be of any use in a few years as the system change pretty quickly.
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