Hello world!

[Last modified: October, 9 2024 02:51 AM]

Topic and background information

During my undergraduate study in journalism and communication, I have discovered that in today’s digital world, some of the advertisements and digital marketing strategies are still creating stereotypes and stigmatizations to women and LGBTQ+ groups. For the LGBTQ+ groups, some countries or regions may remove their representations based on censorship. Therefore, missing representation is also another problem going on in todays’ digital world.

I have also noticed that more women and LGBTQ+ groups today have stand out to say no to such misrepresentation. For example, I can frequently see people discuss and show negative attitudes to the misogynistic advertisements on one of the most popular Chinese social media. Recently more social movements on women rights, queer rights, and body sizes appeared on mainstream media such as Twitter and Instagram. I can feel that women and queer groups are requesting more respect and more accuracy ways to represent themselves.

Therefore, this project will try to explore on women and queer people’s satisfaction on the digital images that others created for them and how they would like to be represented. In addition, what cause the misrepresentation or missing representation.

 

Research question

1. How satisfied are women and LGBTQ+ group people to the current digital images that others created to represent them?
2. How do women and LGBTQ+ groups would like to be represented in digital world?
3. What has cause misrepresentation and missing representation on women and LGBTQ+ groups?

For research questions, I do have questions.

The first one is can I do multi questions for the dissertation?

The second one, I am wondering if I should specify a particular group (either women or LGBTQ+ group, if it is LGBTQ+, which group?), a particular country, and a particular media to keep my research focus and go deep in one thing? And from last seminar I have also learnt that different countries may have different cultural and political background, which may affect the research direction and result, that is why I would like to specify everything.

 

Methods

I am thinking about online ethnography on the group I am going to research on, to observe their discussion on the particular app.

I am also thinking about sending out questionnaire or do focus group research to ask people from group about their feeling about the digital images, how it may impact their lives (making friends, building relationships, personal safety; for LGBTQ+ group may add questions such as if digital images will affect them on coming out, the way they define themselves, homophobia, doing gender).

 

Ethics

1. The privacy of people’s information, people may not want to tell everyone their identities, or under some cultures, it is not safe for people to disclosure their identities.
2. Asking the impact of lives may have potential risks on recalling people’s bad memory or traumas, therefore, some risk assessment or question should be reviewed to keep it unharmful.
3. Please comment more about the potential ethic problems I did not mention here, thank you so much.

 

Potential findings

For the first two questions, I do not have idea about people’s thoughts now, but for the third one, I can say a bit based on my previous observation when doing internship (may count as ethnography?)

To find out if this issue is as severe as the academic essays have stated, I did two internships in Chinese advertising agencies. I have discovered that the clients (brands) we serve only want to maximize their commercial values, therefore, most of them were thinking which marketing strategies will maximize the money I can make. Human right problems are not even in the conversation.

From my colleagues and my perspectives, our workloads are quite big, we also need to extend the working hour to complete the work. Besides, we, as agencies, were working to satisfy our clients’ need, therefore, even sometimes I tried to mention can we put some feminism or LGBTQ+ elements in the strategies, my mentors will say “the clients would not want to see it so let’s do not waste the time on these topics.” It is sad but the huge workload and clients’ attitudes will keep the human right ideas away from current production process of marketing strategies.

However, my observation only limited to four mentors and their opinions, therefore, biases may appear. And this is also something I would like to ask, how can I keep my ethnography more objective and not full of personal opinions?