Archive for October 16th, 2012

Psychological Astronomy related to the web   no comments

Posted at 7:21 pm in Uncategorized

Originally I was going to learn about Psychology and Geography and see if I could combine these disciplines to the Arab Springs or the Dark web. At first it was going well and I learnt about psychology and developed my understanding about the subject as a ā€œscience that seeks to understand the behaviour and mental processes and, to apply that understanding in the service of human welfareā€ (Bernstein and Nash, 2002, p. 3). Within the textbooks I found there were a number of interesting sub topics that I thought could be related to my ideas. Specifically:

ā€œEngineering Psychologists who study and try to improve, the relationships between human beings and the computers and other machines they useā€ (Bernstein and Nash, 2002, p. 6).

However I thought that this was already specific enough for the study of web science and wouldnā€™t offer much scope to creatively combine relatively new disciplines. I was nevertheless occupied with the idea of cognition within Psychology, which ā€œemphasizes mechanisms through which people receive, store, retrieve, and otherwise process informationā€ (Bernstein and Nash, 2002, p. 17). Ā Carlson et al. (2007, p.7) elaborates on the idea of the cognitive psychologist: ā€œthe events that cause behaviour consist of functions of the human brain that occur in response to environmental eventsā€. This idea of behaviour being affected by the way that the human brain responds to information to do with the environment is particularly interesting. Furthermore, social cognition ā€œinvolves our perception and interpretation of information about our social environment and our behaviour I response to that environment.

Already my study of psychology has led towards an environmental concern and obviously there are obvious overlaps with the discipline of Geography. For example, ā€œhumanistic geographers were concerned with the meaning that a place conveyed o an individual or, as it has been called, ā€˜a sense of placeā€™ā€ (Bradford and Kent, 1993, p. 9). Thus I decided to drop Geography and choose Astronomy instead.

ā€œAstronomy is the only one of the sciences which gives man some knowledge of the entire visible universeā€ (Fath, 1955, p. 1) and is thus an interesting subject to combine with psychology. Since the Web is considered a virtual world which is invisible it is interesting to use an astronomical approach to explore the Web. Astronomers use light ā€œto understand what is happening in the rest of the universeā€ (Holliday, 1998, p.1). Astronomers use light and similarly, web users use code.

The dominant research approach in Astronomy is through observations. Since the internet cannot be seen directly this mode of approach is problematic. In the following weeks I will explore how the web can be seen as a psychological world by which astronomy can be used to see the ā€˜realā€™ effects of this world.

Written by Lawrence Green on October 16th, 2012