My Story with the Research World

It began on 2013. I was in my second year of Social Science BA course, at Federal University of Paraná and had to compose my first anthropological essay for a chair on Ethnographic Method.

At that time it was in trend on Brazilian Facebook a kind of page called “Spotted” were people sent anonymous flirts to others.

Example of a spotted. The text says “thanks spotted! Thanks to you I didn’t die as a virgin!”

I decided to observe how the online interaction reflected on real life relationships, by doing an ethnography of the nightclubs on fridays. Simultaneously I made an ethnography of the facebook page.

I became a moderator, applied an online survey to understand how many people were really involved with the whole thing and interviewed the creator to understand what were his motivations to start the webpage and how were the methods used to maintain his name anonymous — a secret to the page’s success at that time.

After all this analysis, that took almost four weeks, I wrote the essay relating everything that I have seen and wrote on my field journal with the sociological concept of love, sex, personas and frontage (as in Erving Goffman theory).

I have never forgotten this project not just because it was my first research ever, but because it was an online research in a time where this was a real taboo in Brazilian academic scenes. At the same time that deciding to approach this subject was great for my career as a UX Researcher nowadays, it felt really challenging for my status as a Social Science BA student at that time.

“It’s been a long time since our lips met. Different drifts lead both to different paths. Strange bars and homes, We are two sinners without a destination. The inflammations of life have driven us further away still, and as much as I want to go back in time and change the past, I would just one piece of advice to give myself — it’s worth the effort. To err is human, to remain without you is death. Do you still smile when you see butterflies?”

You can access the essay, in Portuguese, here.