In Which I Actually Made My Survey
All right guys, this is the long-awaited survey for my Master's Paper. You don't have to be in any particular fandom to participate. I'm just looking for connections between web services and the two fandoms that are my starting points are BSG and Sherlock.
I AM A SURVEY! TAKE MEEEE!!
Also: this looks really complicated and intricate and scary. It's not, I promise! The questions are all highly repetitive and very simple. Just pick which services you use to post your own stuff, look at other people's stuff, and the ones you use to link to your stuff on other websites.
This is verbatim from my Master's Paper proposal, so apologies for the academic language:
Social networks are an increasingly important part of our everyday lives. We rely on them to keep in contact with our friends, organize our social events and activities, and to facilitate discussion across the globe. While there are frequently studies of the communities that exist within the boundaries of a particular service, website, or social network, there is a much larger picture when considering communities of people that span multiple platforms.
Participants in media fandom are an especially good internet community in which to study interconnectivity because of the shared interest of those participants and their seeming irreverence for the boundaries of social networks and websites. Because of this shared interest, the topic of the content posted across various social networking platforms remains largely the same--however the different platforms cater to different types of media and different forms of sharing. Investigating the ways that a fandom community uses these platforms in interconnected ways will help us better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Studying fandoms also exposes the ways that users have devised to engage in an internet environment that thrives on sharing information across social networking boundaries and utilizing the strengths of individual platforms for sharing different types of fandom-related creative endeavors.
There are frequently studies of community formation and cohesiveness that focus on singular social media platforms--especially in regards to internet fandom. Studies of LiveJournal (Hellekson), Facebook, MySpace (Booth, "Rereading Fandom"), and even individual TV show wikis (Booth, "Narractivity") have been conducted to attempt to better understand the mechanics of group identity and the generation of specialized group knowledge. However, all of these studies end at the boundaries of a particular website, ignoring the interactions that occur amongst the same groups of people but on different social networking platforms. My intent is to study two groups of people across multiple platforms. The first group will be the 2003 Battlestar Galactica (BSG) fan fiction community and how their community activities on LiveJournal spread across Tumblr and Twitter. Because BSG has been off-air for nearly two years, it is also relevant to investigate a group of media fans whose fandom is currently ongoing. The second group in this study will be the Tumblr community centered around BBC's Sherlock--a modern re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories--and the way they circumvent social networking boundaries in order to share information across platforms, build community, and engage in an on-going dialog with the show's creators and each other.
The largest component of this paper is a month long data collection exercise across Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Twitter in which I categorize each post and log information such as fandom, type of post, type of content, and links between services. This portion of the study ends February 29th.
I AM A SURVEY! TAKE MEEEE!!
Also: this looks really complicated and intricate and scary. It's not, I promise! The questions are all highly repetitive and very simple. Just pick which services you use to post your own stuff, look at other people's stuff, and the ones you use to link to your stuff on other websites.
This is verbatim from my Master's Paper proposal, so apologies for the academic language:
Social networks are an increasingly important part of our everyday lives. We rely on them to keep in contact with our friends, organize our social events and activities, and to facilitate discussion across the globe. While there are frequently studies of the communities that exist within the boundaries of a particular service, website, or social network, there is a much larger picture when considering communities of people that span multiple platforms.
Participants in media fandom are an especially good internet community in which to study interconnectivity because of the shared interest of those participants and their seeming irreverence for the boundaries of social networks and websites. Because of this shared interest, the topic of the content posted across various social networking platforms remains largely the same--however the different platforms cater to different types of media and different forms of sharing. Investigating the ways that a fandom community uses these platforms in interconnected ways will help us better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Studying fandoms also exposes the ways that users have devised to engage in an internet environment that thrives on sharing information across social networking boundaries and utilizing the strengths of individual platforms for sharing different types of fandom-related creative endeavors.
There are frequently studies of community formation and cohesiveness that focus on singular social media platforms--especially in regards to internet fandom. Studies of LiveJournal (Hellekson), Facebook, MySpace (Booth, "Rereading Fandom"), and even individual TV show wikis (Booth, "Narractivity") have been conducted to attempt to better understand the mechanics of group identity and the generation of specialized group knowledge. However, all of these studies end at the boundaries of a particular website, ignoring the interactions that occur amongst the same groups of people but on different social networking platforms. My intent is to study two groups of people across multiple platforms. The first group will be the 2003 Battlestar Galactica (BSG) fan fiction community and how their community activities on LiveJournal spread across Tumblr and Twitter. Because BSG has been off-air for nearly two years, it is also relevant to investigate a group of media fans whose fandom is currently ongoing. The second group in this study will be the Tumblr community centered around BBC's Sherlock--a modern re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories--and the way they circumvent social networking boundaries in order to share information across platforms, build community, and engage in an on-going dialog with the show's creators and each other.
The largest component of this paper is a month long data collection exercise across Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Twitter in which I categorize each post and log information such as fandom, type of post, type of content, and links between services. This portion of the study ends February 29th.