Liminality and Communitas in Social Media: The Case of Twitter Jana Herwig, M.A. Dept. of Theatre, Film & Media Studies University of Vienna Email: [email protected] Twitter: @digiom Blog: digiom.wordpress.com
Nov 01, 2014
Liminality and Communitas
in Social Media: The Case
of TwitterJana Herwig, M.A.
Dept. of Theatre, Film & Media Studies
University of ViennaEmail: [email protected]
Twitter: @digiom Blog: digiom.wordpress.com
Hum?
TendovaginitisMicrolearningConferenceInnsbruck
Holiday
My Twittering according to Tweetstats.com
Rite of Passage (Turner):
1 - Subject is stripped of its social status
2 - Liminality: Subject goes through a transitional phase
marked by chaos, anti-structure and egalitarian
relations between initiands (communitas)
3 - Reintegration with an
elevated status
0 friends 0 followers 0 updates
Detachment from Social Status
Chaos and anti-structure
Levelling of hierarchies
pic by @mimimixer
InterfacesAnalysis of the symbols
that shape liminoid experience
UsersChronological close
reading of individual timelines
Social Media Services ‘Early adopters’ vs ‘mainstream
users’
Symbols of inclusion/exclusionLog-in
Sign-up
Sign-up?(how cynical…)
Optional anonymity:
No real name check… yet
(Project Verified Accounts)
Creation of liminoid subject
Why anonymity (rather: lack of notoriety) matters
Communitas is volatile: With real names and ‘meat space’
relationships, social structures and hierarchies are
re-injected into Twitter.
How did it feel when your boss (colleague, high school mate, mother ...) started following you on Twitter?
(email me: [email protected])
Example 1: With its more than 2 million followers,the account @oprah receives several replies in an hour, but has replied just six times in its first seven months – just once to a non-celebrity.
Example 2: Although the informal ‘Du’ is
typically used between German-speaking Twitter users, the account of Austrian TV-anchor @ArminWolf is mostly addressed with the formal ‘Sie’.
Anonymity structures competition between Social Media platforms
Facebook: Oppressed. Accounts with ‘fake’ names are
suspended
4chan Random board /b/: Enforced. Derogatory terms for users w/ names
Twitter: Optional Anonymity;Nuanced negotiation of
Anonymity/notorietyIncentives to give up anonymity
Sample 1: signed-up Oct’06 - Mar‘07
94% (15 out of 16)went on a hiatus of
≥ 28 days, 75% (12) did so
in first 2 monthsSample 2: signed-up Mar’09 - Jul‘09
9% (1 out of 11) stopped updating
for ≥ 28 days(max. time on
Twitter: 6 months)
User A
User B
User D
User G
User K
User L
The used visualization tool tweetstats.com starts with the first update; User L wrote the first update 600 days after signing-up.
User O (‘Lead User’)
Video with all activity patterns in sample 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhPdQaZ_Wu4
What do people write about when they first use or when they return to Twitter?
View on Twitter as a web technology
“Testing this twitter Flex interface”
“wondering if there’s a way to push Adium / Facebook updates to
Twitter automatically”
“Just twitting from my DOS console”
“Trying to figure out the twitter api”
View on Twitter as part of a mobile gadget culture
“Loving my Touch. Mobilicious.”
“Got a nokia e61i now... Getting connected to everything mobile”
“Google Latitude... Cool... http://is.gd/ijOV”
Sample 1: signed-up Oct’06 - Mar‘07
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● 12.5% women
(2 of 16 active users, randomly identified)Sample 1: signed-up Oct’06 -
Mar‘07
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● 91% women
(10 of 11 active users, randomly identified)
View on Twitter as a social sphere
“thinking about next season as a Happy Hammer - prompted by a fellow fan now following me.”
“@xxx You are not the only one in the UK that is glad to see AmberMac back on here, Shame
Net@Nite is no longer recorded live though ”
Twitter as a liminal challenge
“Testing this gadget”“Testing twitter”
“back”“ASDf”
“mic check, 1-2”
“i totally forgot about twitter, i suck”
“trying to remember how to use twitter”
Early Twitter as asocial medium
In their very first update, 87.5% (14 out of 16) reported what they were
doing. (one reported what he was going to do, another
posted a sequence of arbitrary characters).
Study by Mischaud 2007: 41.5% reported what they were doing(Content analysis of 5767 tweets from 60 users)
The social dimension
Are users aware of the presence of others?
(User L’s sixth update, posted on day 745 on Twitter, responding to someone
with a similar nickname)
The @-response as indicator
After having posted their first @-response, 75% of users in the ‘early adopter’ sample did not experience another hiatus.
The 1st @-responseEarly adopters: within 21 to 745
days (average: 411, median: 404)
It was contained in update no.3 to 302 (average: no. 68, median
34)
Mainstream users achieved this within1 to 25 days (average: 8, median: 4)
It was contained in update no.1 to 64 (average: no. 14, median: 6)
Types of Social mechanisms
Default social mechanisms:Built into the system, could be triggered automatically, e.g. @-
response.
Emergent social mechanisms:Result of collective experiment
with social-semantic opportunities of a text field,
e.g. retweeting, hashtags (may be turned into default ones)
Appropriation of # and RT
Hashtags:EA 292 - 957 d (average 697, median 708.5)MS 1 - 143 days (average 45, median 31)
Retweeting:EA 405 - 947 days (average 701, median 705)MS 1 - 94 days (average 39, median 34,5)
(N.B. These mechanisms had presumably not yet emerged when sample 1 signed up)
Creation of a Liminal Subject < First steps on Twitter
Communitas as anti-structural community >
< Forms of community that become possible (and are also precarious) on
Role of Liminality within society >< Social Media as space for social
innovation
Social Media exist at the interface of technology, individual practice &
society.
Questions or Feedback?Send an email to jana.herwig@univie.
ac.at or, preferably, post a comment on my blog. You can also download the draft paper (with data, comment
and annotations) from there:http://digiom.wordpress.
com/2009/10/05/coming-to-grips-with-twitter-200607-vs-2009
Short link: http://wp.me/peBnE-u4
Longer version of this presentation (optimized for lack of audio) is on
slideshare, username anaj