Friday, February 9, 2007

Studying Youtube Flamers

I was waiting for the part 1 of the latest episode of Bleach to load when I scrolled down to the comments portion. I have copied the relevant posts out, in chronological order for easier reading, instead of the usual reverse order on Youtube...:

WillBlaze718 (6 hours ago)
That was great. Thanks for the upload. When is Ichigo going to learn how to be a Vizard? When is team Ichigo going to get another member? The girl who does martial arts must have some special ability.

oddomar (6 hours ago)
you obviously haven't read the manga retard.


At this point an evil thought presented itself to me. Whoop oddomar's ass and observe the reaction(s). Very quickly that thought developed into what I'm telling you guys about now. I shall engage myself in ethnography and make a study out of Youtube flamers.

Now here is the hard part: planning the study. Cos I seriously have no idea how I should go about it. For now, I'm thinking of monitoring several scenarios:

- One where I am a passive observer, where other users are trying to screw each other.
- One where I pose as a flamer and attempt to start a flame war.
- One where, like the above example, I will reply to the flaming comment and again attempt to start a war.
- One where I attempt to post a comment most likely to be attacked by flamers.

I would like to invite anyone out there, anyone at all, even if you are not part of the class for which this blog was set up for, to assist me in this. And to my classmates and especially Kevin, if you can find the time to help out, I really would appreciate it if you could lend your support in any way you see fit - helping in the research design, passing me Youtube links which may help in my study, etc.etc. If by any chance my US counterparts from Buffalo are reading, you're more than welcome to help out too! I'm sure the findings should be quite interesting.

One thing I can't decide on is the number of videos to observe per scenario. I was thinking 5, but it would take some time to sufficiently gain data from 20 video pages' comments. And Youtube doesn't have RSS to track, though I haven't yet satisfied myself that there aren't other ways to track the videos, other than my present method of sending a shortcut for each video I'm interested in monitoring.

So go on! Spread this link and message to your friends! Comment and suggest how to make this study work.

Just don't flame. :)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Btw im oddomar , www.youtube.com/oddomar and my website www.hosternaut.com holla back biotch.

Renhao said...

It's funny how you attempt to correct my usage of 'ethnography' when you made 1 spelling mistake, 5 punctuation mistakes, and another 5 grammar mistakes. Or is that the way you're taught in whichever nameless country you're from? Don't even name it you'll most likely shame the hell outta them. Oh I will judge, oddomar. I judge people who give people unnecessary racist shit when we all just want to have a jolly good time. Filipino? Do you even bother to read my profile? My other posts? I'm from Singapore. Do you know where that is? You need me to help you with reading a map? Cos it's not in the heart of China you ignorant little fuck. Go get your English right before you try to insult me again.

Anonymous said...

very entertaining who is ichigo and why do you wanna bleach him in a team?