Research Process

To start with, at the beginning of the course I decided to follow the same direction from my previous cop projects and expand my knowledge within the social/technological context due to my interest on modern social issues. I found very intriguing and interesting the relationship between technological developments in modern society and how much impact is affecting technology on a daily basis to mankind. However, this time I wanted to solve the problem from an ethical and moral perspective.  My research process started by investigating and exploring the ethical theory from different sources ( Philosophers); Jean-Paul Sartre, Niccolo Machiavelli and Socrates. The three of them had been my starting point in which  I identified a potential subject for further development. In the technological aspect of my research, I explored themes such as public shaming, social media, freedom of speech and online behaviour. My intention was to examine how the moral and ethical values had been translated into the modern world through social media. In order to do so, I started to explore one branch of Philosophy (Existentialism), which due to its late appearance in history, I thought it will be more helpful and interesting to analyze social media from its point of view. 

Existentialism has a broad range of different concepts that can be used to study human behaviour in modern society, but due to its complexity and variety, I decided to just focus on Authenticity and Freedom within the existentialism context. These two concepts has shown me that modern society can be examined and based on an existentialist point of view. After the first month research, I decided to ditch Niccolo Machiavelli because his theories found on 'The Prince' were meant to be used and applied on politics and a more aristocrat audience rather than society and regular people, therefore, I decided that it was not the best theory to triangulate with a social and technological context. Although Machiavelli also explored some aspect of society, for this specific project and question its studies would not be accurate to analyse society due to his social class preferences as I wanted to explore a more standard social class rather than politicians and kings and queens. 

Group tutorials provided me a chance to share my project and research progression with my colleagues. According to the feedback, the content I wanted to explore it was interesting and engaging with the audience, because of its contemporary nature, people in the group could see connections with their own experiences in social media and therefore , I could get more personal and honest feedback about the topic. After a few sessions, the group and tutor provided me with a good amount of source materials and example of study cases that later on I would use on the progression of my project. 'So You've been publicly shamed' by Ron Jonson was one of the books that soon enough it would become one of the pillars of my projects, whereas I took and used some of the examples to help me create and build my study case section on my essay.