THE WIENER TAKES IT ALL
Put a man with an outstanding voice in an evening gown
to perform a Bond-like song on stage of Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), and you
get all sorts of mixed reactions from the audience. Add a beard like a tangle
of dry brush and you get a controversy of a kind. Say this artist passionately supports
LGBT community and the whole bearded persona is a “statement of tolerance and
provocative at the same time”, and you get an international criticism and a
massive political resonance. Oh, and choose a song with breathtaking lyrics and
music, that will get stuck in your head, making you sing it in the shower every
morning.This year
Austria managed to do all of it and win the competition. Austrian drag-queen,
Conchita Wurst, is an excellent example of how to make a manly beard a
continent-wide trend and annoy anti-gay politicians and activists all over
Europe. Beardy lady stole thousands of hearts and made fans around the world
knitting beards to express their support.
And it’s not
surprising, that since the participation announcement back in November, the
news about Frau Wurst spread like wildfire and Austrian Eurovision music video “Rise
like a phoenix” went viral in a matter of days (you can watch the video here).
How
did that happen? The power of the Internet and, in particular, Social Media. During
the ESC Semi-Final 2 and the Grand Final, Twitter and Facebook exploded with
#Austria and #ConchitaWurst. Hundreds of online communities worldwide were
built to promote and support Frau Wurst. Armenia, Italy, Poland, Russia,
Romania, Turkey, Spain, France, Greece and even in Mexico and Argentina! And a
massive support online from LGBT communities, including STOP Homophobia and WOH247,
promoting tolerance and mutual respect.
The message
behind the bearded drag queen is unity and acceptance. "I really dream of
a world where you don't have to talk about your sexuality, where you are from…”,
says Frau Wurst. And her performance and victory is a giant leap forward for
all LGBT people.
But there is
always a fly in the ointment. And here Social Media played a huge role as well.
Hate pages on Facebook, spreading awful and discriminating comments, tons of
negativity towards the artist (to be fair, most of those became quiet already
after seeing Conchita at Semi-Finals and stating that the song is actually
pretty good and the performance was great). And not to mention some nasty
politicians unsuccessfully trying to cancel the broadcast of Eurovision because
of “the Queen of Austria”.
According to
the Eurovision Song Contest rules, Austria will host the next song competition
in 2015. Will it spark more controversy? Or will Europe become more tolerant of
LGBT people and less prejudicial? We’ll see.
For more
in-depth research on questions about social media activity, international
community building, online LGBT support, and political and social controversy
of Conchita Wurst, please, see the full report.
(Be prepared
to see a lot of facial hair. The likelihood of getting used to see a woman with
a beard is pretty high.)
P.S.: as you can tell, this blog post doesn't follow the exact guidelines and is not a research executive summary or extract. Yes, we did read the instructions, but decided to be as controversial, as our subject of research (Frau Conchita Wurst) and break the rules. Enjoy!
Lots of love, Team Austria.
P.S.: as you can tell, this blog post doesn't follow the exact guidelines and is not a research executive summary or extract. Yes, we did read the instructions, but decided to be as controversial, as our subject of research (Frau Conchita Wurst) and break the rules. Enjoy!
Lots of love, Team Austria.
Really thorough work everyone! Little bit problems with the report layout, making it difficult to follow the texts and graphics, but still readable. Some of the graphics, for instance "Table 1. Wordle settings" are not, at least for me, relevant for the topic/report.
ReplyDeleteIt's great you noticed to research the negative "promotion"(?) too. I think in this case it really was relevant issue, since there seemed to be some "no votes for Conchita" -type messages at least in Twitter during the competition. Some more thorough analysis on that would be interesting, but would probably be a topic for much larger research.
Anne, thank you for your comment. Just to defend myself a bit about the Table 1.
DeletePlease check this post:
http://eva-some2014.blogspot.fi/2014/04/team-project-2-research-on-social-media.html
Point 5. Analyse what happened and write the research report with your team. The research report is structured like this:
...how we did it
The table 1 explains how the Wordle pics were made. It might be not relevant to report, but it is relevant to instructions.
Nice job! You really had a good and interesting subject to follow, and I can see you got really into it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you concentrated a lot on the social effect of this performance. You had a lot of data gathered and a lot of graphics. Maybe for me it would've been more interesting to hear more how you analyzed this data, than the actual data. But anyways, good job! It's obvious you all really worked with this subject together.
Thank you for your great work Team Austria! Your final report really shows that you have made an effort for this task. It’s well-written, easy to read and it flows nicely. Even though it was very long, I wasn't really bored while reading it because the content was so interesting. The headings and subheadings helped in making the structure easy to follow.
ReplyDeleteYour report is supported nicely by numbers and statistics. There is also a lot of pictures that liven up the report. I also like the fact that you put captions under your images to clarify their meaning. The Wordle-usage in the end was a nice touch and the observations regarding the changes in vocabulary during different times of the contest was interesting. I also liked the diagrams you produced. It’s always nicer to see graphical representations of data. Sometimes it felt like there could have been some deeper analysis on the reasons behind the figures and stats, but in many places there were indeed evidence of excellent analytic thinking.
It was great that you also used VK in your analysis. That shows that your understanding of social media goes beyond the obvious platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which I appreciate. The hate-aspect was also an interesting read and felt relevant especially since your artist was a slightly controversial figure.
My only small criticism is that the sources could have been presented a bit more accurately (are all the sources you used included?) and referenced in the text so that readers could fact check instantly. Oh yes and I did spot a few typos like the following: “There are people who support the artist, and there those, of course, who doesn’t.”
To sum up I really enjoyed reading your final report. It was well made and relevant and full of thoughtful details. Good job!
Here is the peer feedback from each member of Team Ireland:
ReplyDeleteAudrey:
A lot of information on the folder, lots of statistics, analysing article, deep research on social networks. The fact that the representative of this country was controversial and won the competition should have been an opportunity to find a lot of information, which also can be difficult to make it simple and understandable in the final report.
You chose to answer less questions than most of the team, which is a good point from my point of vue.
Good english spoken, lots of figures to justify what you say. Maybe a bit too long but anyway really good job!
Satu:
+ Charts & Photos were very nice and gave a lot of information in visual form. The usage of photos made the report a lot of interesting.
+ A lot of effort was put in this report, it really shows!
+ It seems that tam has gone really deep while doing the research
- For me the report was too long.
- Word frequency photos were nice, but made me think if there were too much of them. In my opinion, less would have been better.
Heidi:
-The report was easy to read, and the blog post also was nicer when it wasn’t fully “sticking to the rules”
-The pictures and some of the figures were quite bad quality, so I wasn’t able to see what they actually contained
-There was very good analysis, but it was missing from some parts. Overall very good, though!
-Showing the words that were used in tweets was very nice!
-I was missing references, I think in such a long research report those should be added inside the text
-The future research questions were really good. They seemed like something the next teams would gladly want to research about!
Sami:
- The blog post was very well written, leading the reader to the subject via humor and information
- As a newspaper journalist (and after working 9 days straight, last days being 10-hour work shifts) I found the report to be way too busy. Too much photos and text packed together. Needs more air to my eye. But this criticism has a little to do with the content
- And the content was quite thorough, very much data harvested from social media
- The future questions are a nice catch for the next year’s participants
Juho:
A very well written report, but the first thing i noticed was the length of it. But then again you went into the details or your findings very well and kept it interesting, which got me intrigued through the whole report. The layout of the report was kind of messy in my opinion. Leaving a few photos out of it, could have made it a bit more neat. But overall very nice work. I especially liked the part where you looked into the fan communities in Russia. No mentioning the petitions of removing Conchita from the competition was surprising.