October 13th

Today's theory lecture was about research ethics, as well as how/why research is done. These were the notes I took during the session:

• Usually will only require about a sentence of writing, as long as no data collected from individuals/organistions.
• Important for institutions
• Can be either Low, Medium or High risk
• Low risk is pretty straight forward.
• Medium may not be allowed.
• High risk will not be approved under any circumstances

Why/what to Research:

• Should aim to challenge established knowledge.
• Try to find new angles to your chosen topic.

The research ethics was interesting to learn about, but I don't think they'll be that important to me. This is because it is unlikely I will be doing interviews or surveys. At most I will only have to write one or two sentences about it.

We then continued developing our research question with a short form we have seen several times before. This is what I wrote:

- I am studying Virtual Reality (VR) and related concepts of Simulation, simulacrum and hyperreality.

- In order to find out the way they attempt to imitate life. How are these concepts applied to the real world and what are their potential future impacts. I could study existing media and literature which tackles this topic. 

- In order to help the reader understand the way these concepts differ/overlap. With the advent of Virtual Reality headsets, we are just now starting to see how these are impacting different sectors of our society, especially with META and their current developments. 

- Research question:

Virtual imitation or simulation: the highest form of flattery, or a dead end disaster?

Because of limited time, I just wrote down what was at the top of my head, and this is what I came up with. Although I intend to redo and further develop most of what I wrote, I was fairly satisfied with my research question, as it had a nice ring to it and served as an interesting play on words of the "imitation is the highest form of flattery". However, Dionysia's main criticism of this title was that it was too direct and did not leave enough space for in-depth discussion, which was a valid point.