What is 9Gag?
For our project, we will discover Facebook posts on “9 gag”, which is a prevalent and yet comical online community in which users would alter popular culture or everyday news into memes and puns by using "user-generated content" or other social media sites. "9 gag" was founded in 2008 by Ray Chan and the company is based in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. Their aim was to give people the power to make the world happier.
As a community that was depended on anecdotes, it certainly achieved success and attracted by people around the world as it reached over 29.9 million Facebook "likes" as well as 6.6 million on Twitter by March 2016. P.S. Also Check out their official website if you're interested! |
Why chose Facebook as a medium for analysis?
Methodology
For our primary data, we collected interactions on the site by analyzing five popular posts which are filtered in relation to our research questions. In the 5 posts we have selected, we analyzed top best 20-30 comments that are of high relevance to our analysis, and all of them include pictures or otherwise called memes that are only a few sentences long in length as to avoid confusion and language complexity in analysis.
Throughout this process, five posts and top comments have been analyzed with application to certain context and ideology in the "9 gag" discourse. As shown on the left, we have identified certain patterns in comments for building up the research questions as well. Other than that, we have interviewed with one member, who participated in the 9gag community; and test our analysis according to the findings above. As for our secondary data, we made use of a few academic journals to support our findings. |
Research Questions
1. What are the common and different characteristics among these five posts, and why?
2. What is the relationship between comments in these posts, and why?
2. What is the relationship between comments in these posts, and why?