I have put together a snippet of what kind of data I will be gathering for my Tiger King research paper. Taking a closer look at this selection of data will give me a sense of what questions I should be asking going forward.
The following data contains samples of data collected from the first 10 tweets from an advance search on Twitter for #FreeJoeExotic starting from March 22, 2020 to March 23, 2020 and starting from March 24, 2020 to March 25, 2020. As you will see, there are some tweet from March 21 that showed up in the search. This may be a fault in the system, or perhaps the tweets showed up because they had engagement during the selected time. The reason isn’t relevant to the findings however, I wanted to make note of this to let my audience know that this was not a continuity error; these are the organic results from the search.
First glance at the data, the majority of people are either ‘Praising Joe Exotic’ or ‘Ranging about Carole Baskin’. I foresee that these tweet will be my biggest categories. Tweets that don’t dive into the hype like most will be coded as ‘Neutral’. There is one tweet thus far that specifically relates to animal rights issues. Surprisingly, this selection of data doesn’t contain any tweets that are against Joe Exotic. However, I do expect this to be another category while I continue collecting data.
Expected Code Categories
Praising Joe Exotic
Includes advocating for Joe Exotic, his release from prison, his brand i.e. G.W. Zoo, music, politics, etc.
Raging against Carole Baskin
Includes negative connotative about Carole Baskin.
Neutral
Includes neither full praising or raging.
Advocating for Animal Rights
Includes commentary regarding advocacy for animal rights issues i.e. references to the tigers wellbeing.
As I said before, this is only a sample of the data I will continue to collect and code by categories. In the process I expect more categories to reveal themselves. I will then use a quantitative method to find which categories are most popular, analyze their relationship to each other and pull all of this information to reveal what this all mean in the grand scheme of things.
I am particularly interested to reveal why society is so supportive of this demonstration of complete chaos. Especially during these panic-filled times, it is quite interesting that we see people admiring a man who is in prison for murder for hire. The magnitude of Tiger King’s virility doesn’t make much sense but neither does the toilet paper shortage. I am hypothesizing that the consumption of absolute chaos dilutes the current state of chaos people are existing in. The wild rampage of praising and raging about Tiger King across social media seems to be a means for connecting through social distancing.
Tiger King features several characters who walk the line between morality and legality, all of which cross the lines of both sides… and this is what people love about it. What does it say about society that this is the type of content that has viral spreadability? The entertainment industry is desensitizing us to unmoral stories and social media is intensifying it’s glorification. Did Netflix intentionally release a ‘limited series’ on Murder, Mayhem and Madness to diverge people from the larger issue at hand? Are people just bandwagoning the praise of Joe Exotic? Probably. Should we be concerned about this? Probably. Has the series had a positive or negative effect on society? Trends in the data collection should reveal the answers to some of these questions. We shall see…
DIGITAL CATHARSIS 