Shaking Ambridge to the Core - The Survey

Explanation

At the end of the first full week of January 2011 I became mildly irritated with people stating as fact, with no figures to back up their statements, what had been said in what proportions (in favour of and opposed to what) as a result of the broadcast episode on 2nd January 2011, and said by what type of person posting to the board.

What this did was make me go and collect the entire content of Discuss The Archers for the period from 7pm on 2nd January until the time at which I had said that I planned to do this, 7pm on 8th January, in order to establish just what had been going on, in this part of this message-board only, and only until a time at which my having foolishly stated my intention might possibly have biased any results I discovered.

What I did was to sort out all the posts made by each of the people who had posted during that week and divide them up into eight time-slots (9am on 3/1/11 was when the news about Vanessa Whitburn's unfortunate slip-up in a radio interview became common knowledge on the message-board, and I thought this might make enough difference to people's feelings to make them react in a different way; I think I was wrong, as it turns out, but it seemed a thing worth taking into account):

For each poster I then tried to find out whether s/he was a long-established resident of Discuss The Archers or a new arrival, and if a new arrival, whether s/he had come from other parts of the Archers board (The Bull and so on) or from other BBC boards, or seemed to be a new poster to the BBC altogether. The criterion I used to decide whether a long-term Archers board or BBC board poster would also count as a long-term DTA poster (a "regular") was whether or not s/he had posted to DTA more than three times in the three months before 2011. This led to three categories of poster: "Regulars", "Other Boards" and "New".

If there was no available posting history for an individual, I was not able to tell from the age of the user-number whether the individual had been a BBC poster to DTA, The Archers in general or the BBC in general; it was my good fortune that surprisingly few such individuals were not known to me as familiar names from DTA, and in the end only one person who posted during the time for which I was collecting data was impossible to classify by this system. That one is counted in the total, but not in any of the three categories, which is why there are one more N- and H- in period 4 than adding the category numbers would indicate.

I then read every post from each individual within each time-slot, and decided which of seven categories it fell into:

There was also the blank, 0, for the dates and times at which individuals had not posted anything at all.

A fair number of people signed in apparently just to tell Graham Seed that they would miss him and to wish him luck, commented adversely on the Nigel story and the storylines in General, and then made no further posts. This happened particularly in the third time-period, Monday 3rd at 7pm until Tuesday 4th at 7pm, and explains the spike in negative comment for the Nigel and General storylines.

In the "x" category I put all posts that were not about the storylines themselves: those which were only a message for Graham Seed wishing him well, for instance, came into that category, as did posts telling others to grow up, or explaining how the programme was made, or wishing that people would talk about something else.

I included as being opposed in general to the handling of the storylines overall, posts to "A Silent Protest" in its various incarnations, unless they were ones which went out of their way to rubbish the thread: this on the basis that nobody, surely, would go there and remain "silent" if not to register a protest, given the thread-titles.

I included as opposed to the Nigel storyline those people who in the "To Graham Seed" thread expressed their disgust at the manner of Nigel's death, or their disgust at the manner of Graham's departure or the way he had been told about its happening.

If someone had expressed both approval for and disapproval of the same storyline, or of the storylines in general as opposed to the two specifics, within the same time-slot, I accounted that as neutral; if all three specifics were neutral, I counted that person and that time-slot as neutral overall. If one or more of N, H and G had an expression of disapproval or approval, I did not count a neutral for that person in that time-slot in the categories that had not been counted in one direction or another.

In order to be counted as opposed to or in favour of one of the storylines a post needed to be specific in opposition or approval: as it might be:

• "The only thing wrong with the whole process was the hype" would be a G+
• "I can no longer listen to the Archers. This story line has stooped to the level of East Enders which I also choose not to follow" would be a G-
• "The fall out now, from Nigel's death will be very, very interesting" would be an N+
• "The ONLY way that this storyline is justified is if the actor himself wanted to leave - and even then it could have been handled in a better way" would be an N-
• "Relieved that Helen and Tony are reconciled - their stand-off was a bore" would be a H+
• "Utter rubbish. Last night's "oh I'm sorry about Nigel but I can't be sad because I've got HENRY" twaddle was bad enough but "how can I make it up to her" tonight beggars belief. It's the listeners who are being patronised" would be an H-
• "I had the same experience", "I can't help but reflect on the irony of Nigel being proud to descend from a noble house", "What time was the Today interview so I can LA?" would all be x

Typical entries might be:

[new]
1  0
2  0
3  G-
4  0
5  0
6  0
7  0
8  0

[came from other BBC boards]
1  G+ N+ H+
2  0
3  0
4  0
5  0
6  0
7  0
8  0

[regular]
1  G-
2  G- H- N-
3  G- N- H-
4  G-
5  x
6  G-
7  G- H- N-
8  G-

All figures refer to numbers of specific people, not to numbers of posts.

The Data

Data are given as both tables and graphs, for ease of visualisation. The graphs are used to highlight each category: for example, in the first graph, the feelings of regulars about The Archers in general are in bright red and green, shown as a proportion of the feelings of all posters in darker red and green.

The Archers in general

Regulars
Other boards
New posters

The Nigel storyline

Regulars
Other boards
New posters

The Helen storyline

Regulars
Other boards
New posters

Changelog

• 1 April 2011, 17:13: added clarification that figures are counts of posters, not posts.