Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Johannes Paßmann (Siegen/Utrecht)
Becoming and Un-becoming a Twitterati
My Ph.D.-dissertation draws upon a participant observation of the German "Favstar sphere"—a very wide-reaching part of Twitter that is counted among the most influential groups of the German social web. Over several years I have been working online and offline into this particular culture and its practices: I became a Twitterati and ended up being one of the most successful ones.
During the last months, I have been working myself through the process of leaving the field. As well as becoming a Twitterati, this process has its particularities as leaving such a digitally engaged field is not a carnal procedure in the first place—though this field has its physical places. Leaving means un-becoming, and this un-becoming is only weakly supported by physical boundaries between the field and the place of its theorization.
Still this process of un-becoming has insofar been successful as conceptualizations and theoretical 'fittings' of my participant observation have become clear within the last months: Fittings to the field of Intellectual Property Right (IPR), especially Low IPR Regimes, to theories about how artifacts spread in the social web, to the question of what constitutes digital nativeness around 2010 and how it differs from digital nativeness when it was coined in the mid-nineties.
Above all, un-becoming a Twitterati also means un-becoming a participant observer. Within this field, observation also draws upon software tools for social media analysis, including databases I created together with Dutch colleagues and mapping software we used to visualize these data. Critically reflecting this part of my fieldwork might finally be the most important part of it as it contributes to the reflexivity of (New) Media Studies: Ultimately, my media ethnography turns into an ethnography of media studies’ practices.
Johannes Paßmann is a Ph.D. candidate at the Locating Media graduate school at the University of Siegen and works as a lecturer in the New Media and Digital Culture Master’s program at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He studied Media Economics and Media Studies with a focus on Media Philosophy/Media Theory. His Ph.D. thesis is a participant observation about the ‘Favstar scene’ of the German-speaking Twitter.
johannes.passmann@uni-siegen.de
Recent Publications
2013a: “The Gift of the Gab. Retweet Cartels and Gift Economies on Twitter,” (with Thomas Boeschoten and Mirko Schäfer), in: Jean Burgess et al. (ed.), Twitter and Society. Digital Formations 89, New York: Peter Lang (forthcoming).
2013b: Navigationen 12/2, Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück, ed. with Raphaela Knipp and Nadine Taha (in preparation).