Preliminary results 2

Update in the voting procedure in the experiment

Sunday the 31/5 evening:

Clothes question. Business, causal or dressed up for Monday at work. The more fancy dressed alternative wins with 18 votes over the causal (14), while the business version only gets 5 votes. There is a clear gender bias in the votes – men prefer elegant, feminine clothes (dresses?). I think I need to make a gender analysis later on.

Sunday the 31/5 evening:

Exercise question: Twitter sends me out exercising again Monday morning with 9 votes against 8. (Saturday evening, Sunday morning and Monday morning)

Monday morning 1/6, 09:25 and evening around 17:00:

Weight question. It is time to step this up and give some twitter some real influence. I ask how much weight I should lose.  The turnout is worse than ever before (4, 3, 4 votes for the highest, middle and lowest option). Also, I get several protests. About weight as a measure, about the purpose of losing weight, about the possibility to lose weight. People are not happy and some refuse to answer. Instead of doing a second round straight away, I decided to wait until the evening when more people are online and redo the whole hour.

Now I carefully point out that weightloss is unproblematic for me and that the reason is purely aesthetic.  It doesn’t make people more comfortable. The vote ends with (6, 9, 6 votes for the highest, middle and lowest option). Again there seems to be a gender difference where men prefer the lower weight.

Just how controversial and difficult people think it is to tell a woman what she should weigh became obvious at the next question.

Monday evening 1/6:

Dating question. An overwhelming majority (26 votes) vote for a more free course of action as compared to a more conservative behaviour (8 votes).  It is apparently much less taboo to have public opinions of people’s sex-life than about their weight!

Monday evening 1/6:

Clothes question.  How I dress is apparently something twitter really likes to vote on. This time they went for one of the two causal options (17 votes) while the other casual got 12 votes and the dress got 14 votes.

On Monday I started to feel really self-conscious and uncomfortable. More so about the dating-question than about the weight-question, but the controversy and the low participation in the weight-matter was making me uncertain. I decided to not give any details about my private life other than those absolutely necessary for making the next vote. While this might be a narcissistic project, it certainly doesn’t have to be an exhibitionistic one.

I have also had a lot of thoughts about the power of agenda-holder in democracy. I am determining the questions and the alternative and I feel that I have the power over my life. In order for democracy to be effective, it needs to influence both the questions and the alternative given.  Unless this is taken into account, different forms of direct democracy are doomed to be toothless.