Draft version with data and annotations - see p. 19. Original version submitted to IR 10, Oct ‘09 1 Liminality and Communitas in Social Media: The Case of Twitter Jana Herwig, M.A., jana.herwig@univie.ac.at Dept. of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna 1. Introduction “What’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever found?” Mac (Peter Riegert) asks Ben, the beachcomber (Fulton Mackay), in the 1983 film Local Hero. ”Impossible to say,” Ben replies. “There’s something amazing every two or three weeks.” Substitute minutes for weeks, and you have Twitter . On a good day, something amazing washes up every two or three minutes. On a bad one, you irritably wonder why all these idiots are wasting your time with their stupid babble and wish they would go somewhere else. Then you remember: there’s a simple solution, and it’s to go offline . Never works. The second part of this quote has been altered: Instead of “Twitter”, the original text referred to “the Net“, and instead of suggesting to “go offline”, author Wendy M. Grossman in her 1997 (free and online) publication net.wars suggested to “unplug your modem”. Rereading net.wars, I noticed a striking similarity between Grossman’s description of the social experience of information sharing in the late Usenet era and the form of exchanges that can currently be observed on micro-blogging platform Twitter. Furthermore, many challenges such as Twitter spam i or ‘Gain more followers’ re-tweets (see section 5) that have emerged in the context of Twitter’s gradual ‘going mainstream’, commonly held to have begun in fall 2008, are reminiscent of the phenomenon of ‘Eternal September’ first witnessed on Usenet which Grossman reports. The Usenet Culture FAQ, last edited in October 1995, described the phenomenon as follows: September The time when college students return to school and start to post stupid questions, repost MAKE MONEY FAST, break rules of netiquette, and just generally make life on Usenet more difficult than at other times of the year. Unfortunately, it has been September since 1993. With the growing sensationalism surrounding the “Information-Superhighway” in the United States, the current September is likely to last into the next century. What used to be an annual, tidal influx has since long become an all-around-the-year phenomenon that involves not only the individual learning to comprehend the established