Internet Bashing is a form of harsh, hostile attacks on persons or products that often occur among groups of Internet users. In February 2010, I completed my master’s thesis at the University of Augsburg, Germany, which explored its social dynamics. The study sought to uncover the roots behind Internet Bashing – the origin of the phenomenon itself, who the so called Internet Bashers are and what motives drive them to write these things.

Case: In order to uncover the roots behind Internet Bashing, the study focused on a prominent and up-to-date single case: the case of the movie director Uwe Boll, chair of Boll AG, a German company focused on producing and distributing films for an international market. Since his international breakthrough with the film “House of the Dead” in year 2003, film critics have been less than enthusiastic about the prolific filmmaker’s output. The Internet community has latched onto the name “Uwe Boll” and equated it with everything that is wrong with cinema, which in turn made him one of the most antagonized directors among film fans worldwide. It is by far the biggest and most intense case of Internet Bashing one can find today. Based on the high amount of diverse opinions expressed about Uwe Boll in social media on the Internet, it is an ideal case to start with. Weiterlesen »

My master’s thesis on Internet Bashing employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. Phase two of the three phases of the research surveyed a sample of n=155 users of the video sharing website YouTube. Quantitative data from this phase was used to contrast qualitative data from a semi-structured expert interview with Uwe Boll, chairman of Boll AG, and from an archival analysis of n=734 comment pages on YouTube. As the last question of the survey, I implemented an open question: “Is there one last thing you would like to say to the person conducting this survey?” In this blog post, I reply to comments the participants submitted when answering this question. Weiterlesen »

My master’s thesis “Us Against You – Internet Bashing as the group dynamic of public invective targeting the movie director Uwe Boll on the video sharing website YouTube” is finally finished. I evaluated 119 publications since October 2007 and since November 2009, I spent 9 to 12 hours a day on working the thesis. Over the course of three months, I interpreted 15 pages of interview transcript, surveyed 155 participants and analysed 734 documents. This amounted to a study of 98 pages containing 259.000 characters. An additional 58 pages of front pages, indexes and appendices brought the total amount to 166 pages.

This work surpasses anything I have published so far. While I feel pretty confident about the quality of the text, I am curious about the feedback from my examiners at the University of Augsburg. I will post key findings of the study no later than February 22nd, 2010.

Image: sxc.hu | Jean Scheijen

Internet Bashing is a form of harsh, hostile attacks on persons or products that often occur among groups of Internet users. Within the scope of a master thesis, Jan-Mathis Schnurr explores its social dynamics. He is a graduate research assistant at the Institute for Media and Educational Technology, University of Augsburg, Germany. The study seeks to uncover the roots behind Internet Bashing – the origin of the phenomenon itself, who the so called Internet Bashers are and what motives drive them to write these things. Weiterlesen »