The Quagmire of Ideologies: An Ethnography of Kurdish Virtual Life-World on Facebook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using critical virtual ethnography, this article deals with the virtual life-world of Iranian Kurds on Facebook. We used a Constructivist grounded theory approach (as a data analysis method) to understand how Facebook is used as a space to reproduce Kurdish identity with semantic symbols and cultural patterns that are shared amongst Kurds. We argue that these common cultural patterns and meanings on Facebook have become ideological with the dominance of major ideologies that interpret ‘self’ and ‘other’ based on their particular interpretation of Kurdish identity and history. Any individual or group not fitting into this narrative is excluded from the Kurdish virtual society. As a major ideology, Kurdish nationalism assumes that the Kurds had a glorious ethnic history in the past, which was stolen by the ‘other’, paving the way for further oppressing the Kurds until the present. Different Kurdish ideologies on Facebook believe the ‘other’ must be destroyed to break this oppression chain. Each ideology interprets this ‘other’ differently. We show how Kurdish Facebook has become a virtual colonial land, a quagmire of ideologies, where subjects are colonised in different ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".