MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The evolving environment of emerging media, with non-hierarchical organizational patterns, has the potential for both gratifying individual experiences and social frictions as members chafe at the breaching of unwritten rules. The Lancaster Twitterati provide a case study of just such contrasting results in a group using social media for DIY organizing. The Twitterati started using tweet-ups as a way to bring together local people with shared interests in Lancaster, Pa. The group was intended to have social and artistic purposes at first, being used to organize events like photo-walks. Three members used it to launch the Lancast, a podcast about interesting locals. Conflict and breaching occurred when some members started using it for what was seen by some as crass business networking. This paper is based on interviews with five key organizers of the group looking at problems created when a non-hierarchical method of organization allows anyone to take the lead on or participate in an event. There are benefits from harnessing the power of place-based virtual communities in positive ways extolled by new media optimists. There are also conflicts created by the same social patterns where an atmosphere of sociability is instead turned into a possibility for business networking. At play in this conflict are problems of affective/immaterial labor in social media and the management of social relationships in face-to-face interactions. In this instance there is the harnessing of immaterial labor that takes on a subversive character rejecting the motivations of capital in favor of pure sociability.