I’m so pleased you found my ethnography – thank you so much for commenting and letting me know! I can imagine it must be quite weird reading my observations so I’m particularly grateful that you’ve filled in some of the blanks. I am intrigued at how the LiveJournal community and Twitter activity interacts. I used to be a LiveJournal blogger so it’s nice to see that it carries on being a lively communal space.

I undertook the ethnography for a module I was doing for my MSc in eLearning so the the day I took the all the Tweets from was fairly quiet just because of the time I had available for the work (a few weeks in the middle of the module). I was on Twitter the night the Ianto death aired and I was watching (and joining in) the angry Tweets myself – that was what triggered my interest in covering Torchwood tweets in the first place. With that in mind I hope the campaign has some positive effects – I haven’t heard what the future of Torchwood is but I would love to see it (and Ianto – who knows how but it’s sci-fi so there are all sorts of possibilities) return.

Thank you again for reading my ethnography and leaving your comments. You’ve made my day!

- Nicola.

Patricia

I think you should definitely aim to be a Power Tweeter btw! I’m really not one yet but I can only imagine the useful responses you might get since I managed to find some useful references for a presentation through a request to my Tweeps yesterday

- n.

Loved this piece – very well thought out and I enjoyed the slightly creepy annimation!

This piece of research remined me of a quote from Hand that the internet will:

“help build a genuinely communitarian civic culture, contituting a ‘brave new world where heart and sould are restored to tht body politic by giving voice to the voiceless and public space to the individual’” Hand 2008 (pg 16)

The sad demise of Ianto Jones left many feeling helpless in the face of a ‘tragedy’ and the first response was a rush of outrage that this could be allowed (by the makers of Torchwood) to take place. Cries of “how could they” resounded. Save Ianto Jones seems to have arisen out of this to show displeasure at a programming choice and possibly to try to ‘encourage’ the makers of Torchwood to find a way to resurect Ianto (as anything in is possible in the Who-niverse).

As a result, an activist group has been formed out of what would usually be a sofa-based discussion between 2 or 3 people at best. So unlike many of the ethnographys we have seen this week, the internet has created this community, not simply transfered it from the real to the virtual.

This group has gone on to raise money for charity while still keeping the activism alive and therefore increasing their own profile and possibly increasing the volume of their own voices.

very interesting!

I’ll post a link to the other (matching) slideshow I made on the ethnography in case anyone else has the same problem with the Picassa one loading (it’s here if you want a peek: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurovision_nicola/sets/72157622742555940/show/with/4079298298/).

Thanks for the link to Mimi Ito et al’s work, I will definitely take a further look. The fan culture around #Torchwood really blew me away And like you say, Tony, emerging behaviours around social media and audience interaction is really fascinating right now.

There is something quite peculiar about the disembodiment of Twitter hashtags in particular. Clicking through to view all the posts on a hashtag can be like those scenes in bad slapstick movies where the leads duck through a door and find themselves in a chinese laundry or a brothel or a knitting club or something… a whole other world at close but almost invisible proximity.