Notes from Dissertation Writing: Sport communities on Australian social network
My dissertation needs a lot of editing. Luckily, I have two highly educated parents. These parents are also exceptionally nice. I’ve basically roped them into editing my dissertation. They’ve heard about my fandom analysis for about 12 years now. The topic isn’t completely foreign to them. Babbling.
Anyway, they are editing my dissertation and an issue has come up: Where do I explain how specific sport social media communities function? And how do I do this? They’ve made the argument that a lot of this content feels irrelevant and offtopic. It would best be addressed as a separate chapter, after my lit review or my methodology. They think it would be a good idea to talk about world rank, Australian website rank and New Zealand website rank. They think I should talk in general about who uses them, why they use them, how people can interact and form community on these sites. If this is done, I don’t need to be as repetitive with this content inside my chapter. At the same time, I will also help people who are not familiar with various social networks and websites gain familiarity with them: Not everyone in the Australian sport marketing/history/sociology space has the same knowledge expertise that I have and this chapter would bridge that.
On one level, yeah, doing that makes sense. On another level? No. That sort of analysis is often at the heart of my research. This is the existing community and this is how it responds to controversy. Removing that information from inside chapters takes away a lot of the context. I’m also leery to do it because in the chapter, the fact that I’m doing qualitative, contextual analysis can kind of be hidden. I don’t need all the citations for it. If I pull it out, I would likely need to improve the citing of these observations and do a separate qualitative methodology. Again, I’m not sure how to go about doing that. I can kind of tell you how Australia’s sport Facebook community functions but it isn’t universal and it changes when Facebook changes settings. (Except the Wests Tigers don’t behave like the Canberra Raiders who don’t behave like Anna Meares fans who don’t behave like the GWS Giants.) E-Bay’s community of people listing merchandise I haven’t quite figured out yet as I don’t have the data for it. Wikipedia is probably the most consistent but how it functions and its demographics are part of the results. If LiveJournal has a major privacy controversy, it could lead to an exodus of users. This might impact the chapters 9, 10, 11 but the change predates chapters 4, 5, 6. Hence, it makes sense to me to put this information inside the chapter.
There are good arguments both ways. I can see where my parents are coming from. I just am not sure I agree with them. To me, given the different nature of the communities, the explanations need to take place inside chapters. It also feels like the summaries I’d be doing for these sites are part of the conclusions I am ultimately drawing.
