ABSTRACT
The film Onslaught produced in 2007 for the Dove beauty products company and directed by Tim Piper is meant to show the pressures on young girls and women to fit an artificial body ideal, the pressure to be "perfect" no matter the cost paid. This chapter focuses on demonstrating the application of sequential analysis method to study the dynamics of an online discussion. Content analysis can be used for analyzing the content of a discussion: what is it at stake, what arguments are articulated, the concepts that emerge, even how the individuals may be experiencing their own active participation. The continued use of the sequential analysis method could be instrumental in analyzing comments exchange in other YouTube videos or in different social media platforms, where threaded virtual interactions are thriving. Sequential analysis can be used as a building block to the development of a methodological research toolkit for understanding virtual social interactions.
