Tuesday 17 May 2016

OK, so a word about that study from yesterday.

Firstly, the readers are still in the double digits, not triple digits. None of the people that were mentioned (and especially those not actually mentioned at all) have much to worry about in my opinion.

Secondly, a lot of these people who I took the raw data from, (in my twitter mining) were not mentioned in the blog.

I did not go out to say... 'How do I get these people back for blocking me,' or for supporting the EU. When I read it back it seemed very polite from my perspective. The interactions I had with people were when I had already decided I was curious about their motives. I have not sought conflict by going on the #remain or #strongerin hashtag, without that goal in mind!

Of those that are directly mentioned, I have not annotated the tweets with personal attacks or made great attempts to show them to be lies! I have only mentioned personal correlations.

Also, I do not have a huge amount of readers on this blog, which has never stopped me writing it! If this were to take off, more people were to read it and it were to become a big deal it would be quite a surprise to me.

A note on how I chose who I would look at:

The way I chose the case study (to use a professional term for a really very unprofessional and informal process). Is I searched the tweets, when I saw someone, that was it, they were one of the members. If someone came along and started talking to me on that level even if they were pro EU, I would not study their viewpoints, because that is self chosen.

I threw out any MP's etc. Because then that person has a financial and personal incentive to be pro EU that might take away from undestanding their motivations. If someone is pro EU because their getting checks in the post, or because their 'buddy' is, that won't show up in searching of their perspective. I was looking for people who are pro EU because they emotionally preferred to be so and had not had outside influence. As much as can be controlled for in such a haphazard study!

Another thing to note about them is that they are obviously all of the liberal left in my estimation. Apart from perhaps one.

There were people that were very nice and good mooded that I looked at and chatted with as well. However, those conversations did not involved the EU so much. I don't want to give the impression they were all aggressive and acerbic. Even one of those I disagreed with in the last post, had a nice manner about them and aside from the things I disagreed with seemed like he probably was a good guy in his private life.

The fact that there are not huge amounts of readers does influence me when writing these blogs. If I ever got to a place where my view was closely followed by more people, then I would very carefully watch what I said it having far more influence! If I expected the blog to be read by 700+ people I would obviously carefully balance my words with regard to the effect it was likely to have on others. But with the amount of people likely to read it I felt no need to. However, I still feel like I was relatively polite.

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