Pre theme 3

Short description of the journal and what kind of research it publishes.

The article I selected was published in the web-based journal “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication” (JCMC). JCMS has an impact factor of 2.019. JCMS is one of the oldest web-based journals that focus on Internet studies. It is a broadly interdisciplinary since it topics varies within social science research on computer-mediated communication via the Internet, the World Wide Web and wireless technologies.

Write a short summary of the paper and provide a critical examination.

I read the article “The Emergence of a Freedom of Information Movement: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, and Iceland” by Jessica L. Beyer (2013). The article tries to explain how the concept “freedom of information” is not just a phenomena that appears online, but instead that it’s only created online and that it has the possibility to influence all types of democracies.

Beyer begins with describing how the idea of freedom of information was born in groups like WikiLeaks, the International Pirate Party and Anonymous. These organizations/communities then mobilized mainly young people around the world so much that a huge social movement, with the ability to influence nations. For example when the Swedish Branch of the Pirate Party got seats in the 2010 European Parliament election. The core values for this movement are that “communication in any form should not be restricted” (Beyer 2013).

Beyer’s conclusions are drawn from different empirical findings, like studying the creation and history of Wikileaks and Anonymous. Also she studies election results and Anonymous methods of recruiting new members, in order to gain knowledge of how the broader public thinks about this movement. The theory the article provides is of the explanation (Gregor 2005) type, but it’s lacking of generalization that makes the theory weak. Even tough here empirical findings are well elaborated and described, the weak feeling of the theory also comes because of the lack of prediction (Gregor 2005). This results that the whole article feels like a long stretch of facts from references, without any big conclusions drawn.

Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

Gregor (2006) describes the core of theory as ”abstraction and generalization about phenomenon, interactions, and causation”.  So it’s important to understand that theory has some level of generalization, knowledge of an individual fact is not theory. Theory has four primary goals; analysis and description, explanation, prediction and prescription (Gregor 2006). This means that theory should describe why the certain phenomena is of interest, it should provide an explanation of how, when and why things happens, it should state what will happen in the future if certain preconditions hold and it should give a description of the methods and/or structure used when creating it.

You can create theory by explaining why for example data has a certain pattern, why events has certain results or by creating new predictions by combining previous theories. Meanwhile the data in it self, the references to other theories or the empirical pattern is not theory.  

Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

As I mentioned above the main theory in this article is of the type explanation (Gregor 2006). Beyer describes what and how WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party and Anonymous have done and describes the causalities, for example how their actions resulted in a huge social movement.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The benefits of the explanation theory type are that it provides a greater understanding or insights by others to the phenomena of interest. This theory type invites others to understand an alternative view on how the world could be looked upon to. It’s limitations is that often is the conclusions drawn under a given number of circumstances, which makes it hard to generalize any of them.

References:
Beyer, Jessica L (2013). Online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12050/abstract