Pre-Thesis Week 2: Topic to Research Questions

Through the excercises on the last week’s class, I turned my interested topics into research statements and questions, which would focus on specific and precise topic to research on for design.

After the class, I started with finishing the mindmap of eight questions around the interested topic, then some descriptions or answers towards the questions. Finally, to find connections within the clusters of these descriptions.

As the below pirctures show, I am interested in verbal aphasia, autistic, and social media. Around the three topics, I asked questions about history, composition, categories, and 5W1H(who, what, when, where, how, why). At first, I define Verbal Aphasia as a depressed metal state and difficulty in expressing ideas and feelings exactly under the impact of social media and Internet words. Similarly, about autistic, I mean how young people in China like to use this word related to certain disease to decribe their frustrated and depressed feelings confronted with setbacks. To answer the question: how people from different culture and country descirbe this feeling?, I searched on the Internet, and found that it’s just the combination of isolated, loneliness and loss of confidence. What then interested me is that, why the young would like to use these serious words, and the process which people overuse these popular words combining complex feelings that results in language assimilation within one culture, but misunderstanding among cultures. For example, if a young person in China, say that they are autistic to an older adult or a foreigner, they might think of the disease of austism, and worry a lot. Moreover, pressure might be a vital reason causing this phenomenon, which might related to social media. Therefore, my first-version research question is that: Individual isolated state in the digital social media.

Then I reviewed the “Commercial Aviation” example in class and the book, the Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, after which I refined my research question into: New form of communicating caused individual isolated state in the digital social media era, (though in an open language environment).

Last Friday, through the one-on-one meeting with professor Ahmed, my research direction is further clarified. I should further confirm one social media platform, the group that I focus, their age, how certain group use the platform and some cases. My next step is to read social science research and news articles about social media’s negative effects.