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Thinspiration Inspired by K-pop: A Comparison of K-pop Related Thinspiration Imagery and Texts to Regular Thinspiration Content on Tumblr

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Well-Being in the Information Society: When the Mind Breaks (WIS 2022)

Abstract

The use of social media platforms can be related to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating habits. In online communities, users share common interests and discuss it. One trend has emerged around the hashtag Thinspiration, which refers to content that shall inspire consumers to be or become thin. One derivate is the K-pop Thinspiration. The research aim in information science is to explore how K-pop Thinspiration is different from the regular Thinspiration content on Tumblr. Therefore, images and texts of the posts are automatically analyzed by means of the calculation of colorfulness and emotional measures of the images, as well as a sentiment analysis and readability score calculation of the texts. In addition, a qualitative content analysis of 153 K-pop related Thinspiration posts is performed. Results show that the K-pop Thinspiration posts are closer to the ones of the control data set, than to regular Thinspiration posts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.allkpop.com/article/2018/09/8-K-pop-idol-diets-that-will-shock-you.

  2. 2.

    Tumblr's Community Guidelines: https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/community.

  3. 3.

    NEDA: What are eating disorders? URL: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/what-are-eating-disorders.

  4. 4.

    According to this website: https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/music/g38505052/best-K-pop-bands/.

  5. 5.

    Link to the Tumblr API: https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2.

  6. 6.

    https://displaypurposes.com/hashtags/hashtag/tumblr.

  7. 7.

    VADER on Pypi.org: https://pypi.org/project/vader-sentiment/.

  8. 8.

    FRES score as part of the textstat package on Pypi.org: https://pypi.org/project/textstat/.

  9. 9.

    Referring to the post's image.

  10. 10.

    A Korean rapper.

  11. 11.

    Another Korean rapper.

  12. 12.

    Referring to the post's animated image where a K-pop idol drops the spoon into the soup and putting it back on the table without eating.

  13. 13.

    Korean singer.

  14. 14.

    Colloquial: Not gonna lie.

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Correspondence to Linda Achilles .

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Achilles, L., Mandl, T., Womser-Hacker, C. (2022). Thinspiration Inspired by K-pop: A Comparison of K-pop Related Thinspiration Imagery and Texts to Regular Thinspiration Content on Tumblr. In: Li, H., Ghorbanian Zolbin, M., Krimmer, R., Kärkkäinen, J., Li, C., Suomi, R. (eds) Well-Being in the Information Society: When the Mind Breaks. WIS 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1626. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14832-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14832-3_5

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