Trendy Avatars and Their Hair

2015 ◽  
pp. 288-307
Author(s):  
Sara Steffes Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Virtual World ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
High Status ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Presentation Methods ◽  
Online Methods ◽  
Consumer Marketing

This case study uses multiple qualitative methods to examine cultural meanings of virtual goods in a virtual world or Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) with consumer marketing promotions. Through participant observation, avatar hair emerged as a key virtual good. Symbolic displays in social interaction showed different meanings and uses for types of hair available to users, including high-status rare hair, and versions aligned with marketing promotions and real-world brands. Study of online artifacts examined user-generated content, such as user forums and machinima. The long interview method subsequently was employed to gather insight from users. Findings demonstrate how different data from these online methods provide rich meanings for avatar hair related to symbolic interactionism and self-presentation. Methods explore co-production among users, platform, and marketing efforts. Cultural meanings, user self-displays, and corporate influences related to avatar hair are presented. Avatar hair emerged as a status artifact that often revealed levels of social skills or wealth in this virtual culture, at times connected with marketing promotions relevant outside of the virtual world. Methodological implications are explored for avatar-based participation, artifacts from social networking and other technologies, and ethical approaches.

Trendy Avatars and Their Hair

2015 ◽  
pp. 446-465
Author(s):  
Sara Steffes Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Virtual World ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
High Status ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Presentation Methods ◽  
Online Methods ◽  
Consumer Marketing

This case study uses multiple qualitative methods to examine cultural meanings of virtual goods in a virtual world or Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) with consumer marketing promotions. Through participant observation, avatar hair emerged as a key virtual good. Symbolic displays in social interaction showed different meanings and uses for types of hair available to users, including high-status rare hair, and versions aligned with marketing promotions and real-world brands. Study of online artifacts examined user-generated content, such as user forums and machinima. The long interview method subsequently was employed to gather insight from users. Findings demonstrate how different data from these online methods provide rich meanings for avatar hair related to symbolic interactionism and self-presentation. Methods explore co-production among users, platform, and marketing efforts. Cultural meanings, user self-displays, and corporate influences related to avatar hair are presented. Avatar hair emerged as a status artifact that often revealed levels of social skills or wealth in this virtual culture, at times connected with marketing promotions relevant outside of the virtual world. Methodological implications are explored for avatar-based participation, artifacts from social networking and other technologies, and ethical approaches.

scholarly journals Online self-presentation of Malaysian women: a Facebook case study of university students

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Meriem Narimane Noumeur
Keyword(s):  
Virtual World ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Online Presence ◽  
Convenience Sampling ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sampling Survey ◽  
The Way ◽  
Malaysian Women

Social networking websites play an important role in our lives. These websites provide several services that allow users to enjoy their time in cyberspace by providing them space to represent their personalities in the virtual world. Using Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, this study aims to identify the way Malaysian women represent themselves, by depicting and managing their virtual identities through Facebook while exploring the way they construct their identities and realize their online presence. A convenience sampling survey was used to collect data through Facebook. A total of 133 female students from a Malaysian university were involved in the study on their self-representations (online and offline); highlighting the way they presented their identities online and suggesting whether their offline influenced the virtual identities. It also explored the relationship between offline and online self-representation among the students. The findings showed a changing self-representation of the Malaysian women based on their utilization of the different Facebook services. The concept of “I” and “you” on the front and backstage is invoked as a theoretical form to understand how representation is made among the close and distant others. The findings showed a significant effect of the offline feelings on the Online self-representation and revealed a strong relationship between the offline and online presence. It indicated the difficulty of separation between virtual and real identity.

scholarly journals The Presentation of Self and Identity Construction in Virtual World: A Case Study of Avakin Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Lisa Vangohol Jande ◽  
Noor Aireen Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Point Of Interest ◽  
3D Virtual World

Identity in the virtual world has become a point of interest for researchers. The virtual world has become a place where people go to interact and in turn create an identity for themselves.  This study sets out to investigate identity construction in a 3D Virtual world game using Avakin Life as a case study. Going with Goffman’s theory of self-presentation, this study aims to understand why identities are created in the virtual world and how this identity is created. The process to achieving this is carried out through a review of previous literature on virtual world identity construction and an ethnographic research carried out in Avakin Life using observation and semi-structured interviews as a method for data collection. The data is analysed thematically, and the findings show that participants use the virtual world to create an extension of themselves while they achieve this creation by duplicating a piece of themselves through the use of their Avatars. This study therefore helps to add to the existing knowledge on identity and identity construction in the virtual world.

Film Marketing: the Case of the New Horizons Association

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Marcin Ptasznik
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Study Participant ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Changing Environment ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Marketing Actions

Approaches to marketing actions in culture are exhibiting rising significance in the modern dynamically changing environment. This paper is focused on the identification of possible applications of marketing in the sphere of culture, with particular reference to the film industry, field of operations of the New Horizons Association. The author’s research was based on a literature study, participant observation, and an online questionnaire, enabling creation of a case study on the New Horizons Association. Empiri-cal research allowed for exploration of the perception of marketing actions of this organization, as well as identifying possible directions for its development. Changes in the needs of modern consumers are related to ongoing virtualization and globalization of culture, and allow for academic discussion about the future of innovative cultural institutions and audio-visual ventures, including within the context of the current global coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

scholarly journals Online collaboration and identity work in a brony fandom: Constructing a dialogic space in a fan translation project

2021 ◽  
pp. 204275302098892
Author(s):  
Liudmila Shafirova ◽  
Kristiina Kumpulainen
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Collaborative Writing ◽  
Online Collaboration ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Ethnographic Case Study ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Affinity Groups ◽  
My Little Pony ◽  
Dialogic Space

Online collaboration has become a regular practice for many Internet users, reflecting the emergence of new participatory cultures in the virtual world. However, little is yet known about the processes and conditions for online collaboration in informally formed writing spaces and how these create opportunities for participants’ identity work. This ethnographic case study explores how four young adults, fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (bronies), negotiated a dialogic space for their online collaboration on a fan translation project and how this created opportunities for their identity work. After a year of participant observation, we collected interviews, ethnographic diaries and participants’ chats, which were analysed with qualitative content and discourse analysis methods. The findings showed how the Etherpad online writing platform used by the participants facilitated the construction of dialogic space through the visualization of a shared artefact and adjustable features. It was in this dialogic space where the participants negotiated their expert identities which furthered their discussions about writing, translating and technological innovations. The study advances present-day knowledge about online collaboration in affinity groups, engendering the construction of a dialogic space for collaborative writing and participants’ identity work.

scholarly journals Forging Political Cadres for Re-Peasantization: Escuela de Acción Campesina (Spain)

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 4061
Author(s):  
David Gallar-Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Training Process ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Participatory Workshop ◽  
Global North ◽  
Training Schools ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology ◽  
La Via Campesina

Bolstering the political formation of agrarian organizations has become a priority for La Vía Campesina and the Food Sovereignty Movement. This paper addresses the Spanish case study of the Escuela de Acción Campesina (EAC)—(Peasant Action School), which is a tool for political formation in the Global North in which the philosophical and pedagogical principles of the “peasant pedagogies” of the Training Schools proposed by La Vía Campesina are put into practice within an agrarian organization in Spain and in alliance with the rest of the Spanish Food Sovereignty Movement. The study was carried out over the course of the 10 years of activist research, spanning the entire process for the construction and development of the EAC. Employing an ethnographic methodology, information was collected through participant observation, ethnographic interviews, a participatory workshop, and reviews of internal documents. The paper presents the context in which the EAC arose, its pedagogical dynamics, the structure and the ideological contents implemented for the training of new cadres, and how there are three key areas in the training process: (1) the strengthening of collective union and peasant identity, (2) training in the “peasant” ideological proposal, and (3) the integration of students as new cadres into the organizations’ structures. It is concluded that the EAC is a useful tool in the ideological re-peasantization process of these organizations.

scholarly journals Manufacturing Pre-Decisions: A Comparative Analysis of Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Reviews in Brazil and Portugal

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Fan Rocha ◽  
Tomás B. Ramos ◽  
Alberto Fonseca
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Case Study Methodology ◽  
Environmental Impact Statements ◽  
Multiple Case ◽  
Study Methodology ◽  
Environment Agency ◽  
Review Reports

The review of environmental impact statements (EIS), despite its relevance to impact assessment effectiveness, has received scarce scholarly attention. Few studies have gone beyond the realm of regulatory evaluations to understand the managerial meanders of the review process. This study evaluated the responsibilities, procedures, information inputs, and scope of EIS reviews within two environmental authorities: APA (Portuguese Environment Agency), in Portugal, and SEMAD (State Secretariat for Environment and Sustainable Development), in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Based on a qualitative multiple-case study methodology informed by participant observation, unstructured interviews, and content analysis of 12 EIS review reports, the study provided what is arguably one of the most detailed characterizations of EIS review to date. While following similar institutional arrangements and broad procedural steps, the EIS review has important differences in APA and SEMAD. Overall, the Portuguese agency was found to have a more structured, participative, interdisciplinary, detailed, and grounded review, thus meeting some of the good practices often cited in the literature. The EIS review reports prepared by APA reviewers were also found to provide a profoundly more complete and transparent account of the review process. The details of the review process revealed in the article can affect perceptions around the legitimacy and reliability of reviewers’ recommendations.

Cultural Meaning for Women Composers: Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead in the German Enlightenment

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Head
Keyword(s):  
Women Composers ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Financial Loss ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
German Enlightenment

This article explores the cultural meanings of female musical authorship in the late German Enlightenment through a case study of Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes, a composer, keyboardist, and opera singer. With Minna's death in 1788 at the age of twenty-three, her father, the playwright Johann Christian Brandes, and her close friend and teacher Johann Friedrich Höönicke prepared two memorials to her memory, a biography and a collection of her music, the latter titled Musikalische Nachlass von Minna Brandes (Hamburg, 1788). These memorials situated her authorship in the contexts of pedagogy and education, the composition of occasional works for the home, and the solace offered by music amidst bereavement and illness. The principal discourse was of death itself. Minna's memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the beautiful female dead in which the female corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Death turned Minna from composer into a passive, aestheticized object of male authorship. These discursive contexts contained Minna's activities as a composer within a framework of bourgeois femininity. Both Minna's father and her teacher were at pains to stress that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. However, such representations of Minna were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian's later memoirs in which his daughter's turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct. Minna's reported profligacy during her final illness may have stimulated the posthumous publication of her music, which was possibly a form of fund raising for her multiply bereaved father, a corrective to his emotional and financial loss. The healthy list of 518 subscribers indicates that youthful female death was marketable as a topos occasioning the pleasures of melancholy.

scholarly journals The Computer-Assisted Web Interview Method as Used in the National Study of ICT Use in Primary Healthcare in Poland – Reflections on a Case Study

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Sowa ◽  
Bartosz Pędziński ◽  
Michalina Krzyżak ◽  
Dominik Maślach ◽  
Sylwia Wójcik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Healthcare ◽  
National Study ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Web Surveys ◽  
Technical Aspects ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Ict Use ◽  
Aforementioned Study

Abstract The development and widespread use of ICT in society are reflected by the way research is designed and conducted. The Computer Assisted Web Interview method is becoming more attractive and is a frequently used method in health sciences. The National Study of ICT Use in Primary Healthcare in Poland was conducted using this method. The aim of this paper is to present the major advantages and disadvantages of web surveys. Technical aspects of methodology and important stages of the aforementioned study, as well as key elements for its procedure, are mentioned. The authors also provide reflections based on their analysis of this national study, conducted between January and April 2014.

Scenarios of style: An exploration of subcultural research as embodied practice in Los Angeles’s vintage Jamaican music scene

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina L. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Research Setting ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Fashion Studies ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article sets forth a performance studies framework for subcultural research: scenarios of style. This embodied epistemology brings together Diana Taylor’s scenario paradigm with interdisciplinary perspectives on style to provide a means for researchers to explore the ways in which style is constitutive of subcultural life. Twenty-five years of involvement in Los Angeles’s vintage Jamaican music scene and four years of fieldwork – comprised of participant observation, oral history interviews and archival research – undergird my theorization. To communicate individual agency and subcultural traditions of style, this article explores a single case study situated within my larger research setting. Because scenarios of style supports embodied, situated understandings of knowledge and is contextually adaptable, this article posits its broader relevancy for fashion studies research.

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