Friday, 11 March 2016

Blog 3

What is the refined research question that you are setting out to answer? (Please be specific in your research topic)

My research topic is ‘How do Hong Kong golden forum construct an online identity for local teenager?’

How does this develop themes and debates explored within the lectures of this module? (Please put down the revised short introduction to your project based on the one in blog 2. Remember that the introduction should include the purpose of your research project, significance and key concept(s) that may be useful for your analysis.)

With the development of social media, online community has become a social aggregation and imagined community. People always discuss the social expectations and share their opinion on the cyberspace. Some new and special communication style is developed on the online community. They think they are community even though they do not understand each other. They find their own online identity from imagined community. Therefore, the purpose of my research is study about how the online community constructs an online identity for local teenager and I am going to focus on the popular online community in Hong Kong, Golden Forum. Most of the teenagers always use this forum. There is some unusual communication such as the users call other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. The forum as the imagined community, they can find the similar interest and opinion from the forum.


What critical methodologies are you going to use? How are you going to produce the evidence you’ll need to answer your research question?

I am going to do the qualitative research, in-depth interviews with 5-8 users from the Golden Forum. The basic questions are ‘Why would you want to become the member of the forum?’ ‘What is your feeling and opinion about Golden forum?’ ‘Do you have any profound thing/event when you are using the forum? And what is it?’ ‘Do you think you find your online identity from the forum?’. According to the answer of interviewees, I will ask other relevant questions during the interview.
Moreover, I will find out some special event/discussion of Golden Forum as the example to explain my research question. Those examples can show they construct their online identity from the forum. (Source: evchk.wikia.com. This website records the most event of the Golden forum.)


Now you should have some references in mind. If so, please put down a short reference list at the end of this blog so that you have a better plan of what articles that you are go to read for the project.

Vanasco, J. (2007). Online identities and social mapping: II Online Identity Theory – Meta-identities and identity facts.

P. Seargeant, C. Tagg. (2014). The language of social media: Identity and community on the internet. Springer.

Anderson, B. (Eds).(1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York, NY.

Turkle, S. (2011). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Siu, P. (2014, October 31). How social media shapes occupy: Web forum HKGolden.com takes off. South China Morning Post.


What physical resources (e.g. camera) will this primary research require?

Yes. Mobile phone for voice recording.

Where and when exactly is this primary research going to take place?
(NB for health and safety reasons, we need to know the EXACT locations at which this research will take place and the EXACT times that you’ll be working there)

Interview time: 16-22 March.  

Which key persons (e.g. family members, trustworthy friends, business owners, etc.) have agreed to help and support you in carrying out this research?

No

Self-assessment of risk:
Is this research exercise likely to expose you to any health and safety risks or any risk to property? (If the answer is yes, please specify the risks)
(NB these might include: exposure to theft by using a camera in a public place; journeying into an unknown area of town; entering into people’s homes; carrying out ethnographies in places in which excessive alcohol consumption or drug use takes place; etc.)

No


Name: Tam Yi Ki

1 comment:

  1. Dear Yi-ki, The proposal is clear enough. Pretty nice! Please start doing the interviews. In the meantime, please read the article for the topic "imagined communities". This is something that you need to reference for the theoretical framework. Critical concepts need to be applied in your final work.

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