Ethnography Results – Week 8

This week only brought one interesting story, but it is a good closer for this study and ties into one of the points I’d like to bring up in the report for this study.

Commenting and Posting
Nothing to note here.

The Atheism Category
While I have written about people explaining how they became atheists on reddit, this situation is slightly different.  It is mainly different because of how young the person is who spoke out to the atheism followers.  He is only 14.

He explained that he came from a Christian family and the only other atheist he knew in his entire family was his uncle.  Unfortunately, his uncle was constantly chastised by his grandparents for this and this didn’t exactly create a welcoming environment for him when he decided to change his beliefs.  When he started doubting his beliefs and their validity, he began to read Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick quite a bit.  They ended up helping him to come to terms with becoming an atheist and breaking off from his upbringing.  However, he realized that he couldn’t go to his grandparents or his parents for that matter to talk about the changes he was going through.  He also said the entire area he was in was heavily Christian so he didn’t feel like any of his friends could help him in this matter either.  But that’s when he remembered about the atheism subreddit.  He wrapped up his post by saying that he found a home with the atheism community there and he no longer felt alone in dealing with his issues.  He praised reddit and its members for being so friendly and helpful in his time of need.

The last part he mentioned about reddit being a helpful community is actually on of the main points I got out of this entire study.  There are not many places I can think of where someone could seek help like this guy did and actually receive it without any smarmy comments or people just looking to rip into one another.  This is not always the case in places like other forums and such, but I think anyone would be hard pressed in finding a virtual community as community-like as a real community in a neighborhood as reddit is with its users.  This is of course just based on my experience with the atheism category users, but it just feels like an entirely different crowd on reddit.

Wrap-up
Overall, this has been a very entertaining and informative study.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to get out of this study at first.  I knew reddit was new and foreign so it would be interesting in that regard.  But I had no idea the kind of perspective I would gain from it over the course of these 8 weeks.  I must say that I am thoroughly impressed with the community atmosphere in the atheism subreddit.  Never once did I see someone call out for help and peace of mind and not have someone answer their call.  As a side note for myself, I also saw the main issues fueling the hostility between Christians and atheists.  I had seen some of this before, but hearing some of the testimonials opened my eyes even more than they were before.  I really enjoyed everything I got out of this study and all of the knowledge I gained from it.