University of Vienna

 

The present paper examines the process of learning to utilize a social media service - in this case: micro-blogging - drawing on Victor Turner’s work about liminality, the fragile, middle phase in a rite of passage that precedes the assimilation into a community. Current Micro-blogging services such as Twitter.com or Identi.ca allow users to post chronological messages of typically no more than 140 characters, to read messages of other users (requiring that they, in the language of these services, begin to “follow” them) and to gather their own “following” of readers. Micro-blogging interfaces typically prompt users to respond to the question “What are you doing?”; however, various alternative uses have meanwhile emerged, accompanied by a set of symbolic and semantic conventions to enrich meaning and function of messages (e.g. by designating them as replies or categorizing them) which can both be read by humans and manipulated by algorithms to provide further context and meaning. Based on a close reading of the ‘twitter-stream’ of selected individuals, this paper aims to trace how users cope with liminality, i.e. with the early phase of Twitter-usage when they yet need to build their web of followers/followees. Secondly, this paper takes its cue from actor-network theory by seeking to record how initiation is effected out of a network of human and non-human actors, including the user interface, the forms of communication and interaction it allows, available semantic conventions and (alternative) uses to which users put these opportunities and the results of external services which - typically of a web 2.0 service - tie into the micro-blog’s Application Programming Interface (API). Thirdly, the paper analyses discourses about microblogging on the web which, due to their polarizing nature, further encourage users to either take up the subject position of an affirmative, or of a disdainful (non-)user. In the sum total, and through these three perspectives, this paper seeks to shed light on the complex processes that are involved in the initiation to a social media service, which go far beyond the requirements of a skills-based media literacy, and which can only be grasped through using a micro-blogging service, but not through studying its separate elements. For the integrity of our argument, it is therefore also vital and beneficial that one of the authors is a proficient Twitter user (http://www.twitter.com/digiom)