To get a sense of what kind of stories would be thought of as “essential” for the community’s culture by Nerdfighters, I asked participants to identify the most important stories.
Although the question did not mention anything about newcomers, participants interpreted this question to mean what stories would a newcomer need to understand the community. In this sense, most participants agreed that newcomers would benefit from understanding who the Green brothers were, why they make videos, the format of the videos, the type of relationships they have with the Nerdfighter community and the many inside jokes they all share. The most frequently named story was the Origin story, followed by inside jokes.
The third most frequent response was actually about how no particular story was needed for a person to understand the culture. This was explained through several reasons: some people felt any story would be good enough to understand the community; others thought the community could be understood through a “feeling”; and others thought that the most essential stories should be personal choices, not a collective ones.
“I think, as long as you know that this is a community founded on the idea of doing good things for others, and having a good time while doing so, that’s all you really need to know.”
Still, other participants felt that the community could not be reduced to stories, that it was more about the shared values.
“I think less “stories” and more understanding the basic principles of Nerdfighteria.”
“Mainly just the aim to decrease World Suck. The rest can be picked up, but that one is essential.”
This series of posts explores the answers to the open-ended questions from the online survey of this research. Through content analysis, I extracted the most recurrent, frequent and extensive themes and topics participants discussed in their responses. The results are summarized in these posts.
See analysis by theme:
No comments:
Post a Comment