New Media Research Studio

Research Tools & Media Environments | NYU Media Culture & Communication | Spring 2008

Author Archive

McCain or Obama? Doesn’t matter

 

Through these four weeks of intervention, I have been seeing the increase of my popularity in the “In Search of the World’s Most Beautiful Woman” environment.   From using an elegant style picture to a sexy-oriented one and then back to elegance, I have been able to observe how these pictures with different orientations have a great impact on the number of votes. 

 

One of my achievements in this environment would be the development of fandom as well as the communications with my “fans.”  What surprised me most was the suggestion that my “fan” told me to keep low profile in order to avoid high exposure on the main page so that I would not become the focus from those downvoters.   

 

Their suggestions on how I can become more popular is the strategy that I should always switch my profile picture because everytime I switch a picture the judge will get to see it on the website.  And also it’s helpful to add more pictures.  But the requirement for these pictures, as I learned from one of my fans, is “the sexier the better.”  But as for my fans, most of them told me that they would love all of my pictures no matter how it looks like.  Sincerely, I think my “fans” are so easy to get satisfaction as long as I reply to their messages and then they will vote for me repeatedly every day.  What’s behind the interest of a fan is concluded in two things: one is pleasant visual appeal;  the other is mental support from each other.  Through interactions with my fans, I finally noticed that the reason I have gained so many votes partially is because some of them actually voted for me once every 10 minutes.  (Please see the record of a message from Danny)

 

 

I am also very surprised at the fact someone named Peter who voted for me told me that some contenstants noticed that he did not vote for her as much as he did for other contestants and became very frustrated.  And he was so discouraged by this issue with her, drawn from his message.  I think this guy is just so emotionally attached to this environment that he could be affected on everything going on around those friends he made from this website.  He told me that he’s a friend of all, but a fan of none.  I really want to question if there’s a real friendship going on in this superficial beauty pageant thing?  (Please see the record of his message)

 

 

In addition, I also attempted to see how a political perspective associated with my profile could affect my popularity by telling people that I am a Obama supporter.  As I observed, after writing “I support Obama” in my profile, my votes are still climbing day by day.  Then I tried to catch their attention by sending personal messages, ending up that those who replied to me all told me that they supported Obama too.  I doubt so but I think they may just tell me so because they know I am an Obama supporter.  If they never knew how I looked like, would they still tell me that they supported Obama too?  I don’t think so.  When this falls in a beauty pageant, a political issue becomes dependent on the appeal. 

 

In conclusion, in an online beauty pageant environment, this is how it works: If you are heavenly beauty, your fans could follow you by switching from a McCain supporter to an Obama support; if you do not have a pleasant appeal, nothing can be affected, still no friend and no fan. 

 

 

 

 

A Charity Event (Race) that You May Be Interested In

Dear All, 

I came across a volunteer/charity event for fundraising for women cancer patients that you might be interested in joining. It’s a race that will take place through Central Park on Saturday, May 3, where you can walk/run to help fundraising/donation. There’re different teams that you can join: different companies, different schools, etc.! This event is not only open for females, but for males as well!

 

 

“Do it for your mother, do it for your sister, do it for your girlfriend, do it for yourself!”

The race is 5K, and you can run or walk, we usually split into small groups depending on the pace you want to take. The race goes through Central Park and ends on the Upper Eastside where there is an expo, goodie bags, and all the free post-race food you can choke down! It’s the most fun you can have hung over on a Saturday morning in Manhattan!

This years run of events are:

May 3 RACE CALL TIME Times Square- 7:30AM

To register, you will need to go to: 

 

www.revlonrunwalk.com and select the New York City race date, followed by the option to register. ( I am not sure if we have to register in order to participate in this event or we can just come to the site and follow the crowd. )

47 Votes within 3 days!!

I’ve been very active this week for the intervention in “In Search of the World’s Most Beautiful Woman.” Last week, I stayed using an elegant-style picture to compete for “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman” and gained 26 votes after 7-day exposure as well as some positive comments. This week, from Friday, I switched my competition picture to the one with a pink colored swimming suit. Interesting enough, within 3 days, my votes record has grown from 26 to 73!! This definitely states the norm of this pageantry that sexiness still dominates the contest. Well, seems like that I was not successful in disrupting the sexy trend.

So far, I’ve received about 20 messages from my fans. I feel some of them are really sincere (though I don’t know about their purpose of acting so sincerely/honestly to me). There’s a monthly competition that selects a monthly winner (the qualification of candidates would be the one who have at least 100 votes). One of my fans told me to keep my votes below 99 for now because people would downvote me as I am getting more and more exposures on the website. The people who don’t like you can always give you downvotes and low rating; in my opinion, usually these people are contestants who envy other competitors that dominate the competition. This is really rude and ugly ….>_<

I also interacted with some contestants for research on why they want to join this pageant. From my observation, the percentage of getting replies from pageant girls is way too lower than from my male fans. I sent out around 10 messages to girls and only heard back from 2 of them. One of them told me that she wanted to win some money and the other told me that her sister thought she should really join this pageant. This proves that girls are barely attractive to girls.

Though this is a fact that sexiness still dominates this digital pageantry environment, I will still try to move forward with my intervention by returning to my elegant style to win the hearts of judges! Let’s see what will end up turning out for my next week’s intervention!

Break the Sexy-Trended Norm

My account in “In Search of the World’s Most Beautiful Woman” got approved last week.  In the past week, I uploaded a couple of pictures onto my profile and started to compete for this online beauty pageant.  I wanted to use different pictures to compete so that I could increase the chances of votes, but I later found out that it was not allowed.  While I am allowed to upload 20 -30 pictures to my account, I am only allowed to choose one picture for the contest. 

 

My intervention in this online beauty pageant platform would be to playing around switching my own pictures with different styles such as elegant, sporty and sexy ones, to observe which style attracts more amount of judges and therefore more votes.  I will also continue to interact with my fans to explore the culture of this platform (There’s a “fan club” feature on the site in your profortlio.  If somebody really likes you, he will request to join your fan club. And you can manage your own fan club.)

                

Since what I’ve realized so far is that the contestants with most votes all use half-naked/sexy pictures, I may want to more focus on shedding my elegance on this event to defeat other competitors.  My objective is to see if I can disrupt this sexy-trended norm of this site and win votes by avoiding showing half-naked pictures.  In addition, as Karina commented on my previous post that there would be a lot of psychological layers that can be analyzed during this competition, I would also like to interact with other contestants for research on why they want to join this pageant and how they feel about being selected as “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.”

Online Beauty Pageant

I switched to another topic for my Travelogue Three. As I remembered my female friend had asked me to vote for her online for a beauty contest a few years ago, I did some research on the idea of online beauty pageant competitions and happened to come across a major one named “In Search of The World’s Most Beautiful Woman” (www.insearchoftheworldsmostbeautifulwoman.com)

Definitely, the project of this website appeals to me with its georgeous beauty pageant contenstants on the front page; but what has attracted to me most is its “unprecedented” huge cash price: to offer a $1,000,000 USD cash prize to the winner of the World’s Most Beautiful Woman Pageant and an additional $1,000,000 USD to the charity of the winner’s choice. This is absolutely something that did not existed in any other beauty pageant in history. They also plan to create a reality television show that features the finalists from around the world.

To participate in this project, you can either sign in as a judge or as a contenstant for free. In order to have myself embeded in this program, I registered an account to compete for the online pageant to compare the pre-set rule for contestants with the actual rule to see how exactly they match each other. Also, I will be interacting with other judges and contestants to explore this digital beauty pageant culture environment.

If any of you has any thought on this topic, please feel free to provide some feedback. Thank you!

Hong Kong Personal & Taiwan Match

I registered user accounts on a HongKong and a Taiwan online dating website respectively a long time ago, but I haven’t checked it out for years. The Travelogue III reminds me of these websites which are worth exploring. So I recently become very active in HK Personals & Taiwan Match. For both websites, I uploaded the same pictures and the same personal description.

Through the research this week, I’ve found that users from Taiwan Match are more weird. some of them messaged me: “I haven’t seen you for a long time. How have you been? ” followed by a lot of laughing signs “hahaha” or whatever. I feel so strange: I’ve never seen or talked to these people; why they said they haven’t seen me for a long time?! We don’t even know each other! And I was so annoyed by their winking icons.

As for the Hong Kong Personals, the users are a little bit normal on this site. They asked me normal questions such as my hobbies and what I do for my spare time. Though these are not offensive questions, I ‘ve felt so annoyed because everybody asks me the same question and I had to repeat the same answer and finally I told them just “to read my profile.” Some of them, when doing self-introductory to me, simplied copied and pasted what they have had in their profile description. Do they say the same thing to every potential dating mate?? I ended up not responding to whoever lacks personality.

There’re a few more that I’ve observed as resources, but I have not yet figured out what direction I want to go around it though.

CutX

Dear All,

I installed CutX for the google-free week before and now have problem uninstalling it from my laptop…I took it to the NYU computer store and they didn’t know how to uninstall it either…The CutX is so annoying in my laptop…I have to click on Safari twice to open it….

Please help if you know!

Thanks a lot!

LinkedIn Vs. Facebook

I have hard time deciding what to write about in my next travel log too.  I may want to embed myself in both LinkedIn and Facebook, to explore the cultural differences in these two websites: how people behave differently, and how these websites function differently, and the class differences.  I believe they have huge differences in their target clients.  Just as a playful kid would barely use LinkedIn.

Patriotism, Justice, Self-identity, and Violence

Super Mario Brothers is definitely a classic video game that is worth looking into. As the first console original platform game, Super Mario Brothers develops its famour storyline in which the hero Mario, sometimes with the aid of his brothers Luigi, fights against evils who are subordinates of King Koopa in order to save Pricess Toadstool. In some sense, this game generates patriotism and a sense of justice by destroying evils and rescuing the honored; from an educational aspect, it is teaching teenager players to identify good and bad, hero/beauty/justice and evil. This also involves cultural capital in which cultural values/knowledge are being exchange/communicated while the game is played. With parents/friends participating on site, teenagers may have different educational experiences by learning how to cooperate with each other and determine different situations of different worlds.

Moreover, teenager players are able to develop a sense of self-identity while playing Super Mario Bros. By practicing different scenarios of the game, they will eventually recognize that henchmen/turtles are bad, mushroom/coins are good, and most importantly, they themselves are the “heroes”, being given a sense of recognition by Mushroom Kingdom. I believe it is important for teenagers to develop a sense of individuality, self-identity while they are growing into adulthood knowing distinction/uniqueness from other human beings and becoming self-driven.

While I give applause to many good qualities that Super Mario Brothers brings about, it cannot be denied that this game somehow generates violence and danger. As I mentioned in my previous report that I was so much into a battle that I completely pulled out the whole charger of the machine, I assume that some SuperMarioBrother-holic might embed themselves as “hero Mario” into their real life (like Nick commented “Stomp[ing] people’s heads so that coins would come out.”) Just imagine, it’s difficult to pull us out of the scenario once we are really into something. Back to real life, stomping turtles becomes campus shooting, knocking for coins becomes neighbor robbery, etc.

In conclusion, Super Mario Brothers communicates cultural capital to teenager players, while helping to make them identify themselves. Though some negative aspects cannot be ignored, I believe the benefits that Super Mario Brothers creates overweigh its side effect.

Let’s review this popular video game together.

Violence Vs. Naivety

Thanks a lot for loving one of my favorite games-Super Mario Brothers! I would say definitely it is really a great bonding time for family to play this game together.  From my personal experience, though I did play this game with my mother before, I still feel I was more concentrating on winning the game than communicating with her.  I remember I was once so much into the battle that I pulled out the machine charger completely from the output (I know it was embarrasing >_<).  Also, one thing I would criticize about Super Mario is that we are not allowed to play two characters (Mario and his brother) together–I believe we would have more fun having two characters cooperating to flight against the evils; instead, players have to take turn to play at different time. 

 Otherwise, the theme music has been awarded as the most recognizable video game music in the world.  Whenever I hear this music, it always brings me a great deal of memory.  The beat of music is fast and happy; though the characters are involved in some sort of violence,  the music somehow creates naive and joyful sensation.   Yet does the violence overweigh naivety?

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