I will raise this question several times in this ethnography as it is as much a question I wanted to explore in the ethnography (see Osborne 2009) as it is something I felt tentatively able to assert when deciding to observe the community around the #Torchwood hashtag. My own experience of posting to #Torchwood in July 2009 had felt like visiting a vibrant and passionate fan community and I wanted to find out if that was largely a result of the trending of the hashtag around the screening of Children of Earth or whether this feeling persisted in the (non-trending) ongoing use of the #Torchwood tag.
Rheingold (2000) describes his own experience of using early CMC communities and talks about "participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture" (p. 2) and this was a phrasing that very much chimes with my own wider experience of emerging social interactions on Twitter. This ethnography is therefore very much intended to explore what the qualities and experiences of a self-designing community on Twitter may look like, how this community establishes, challenges, changes, reestablishes, rechallenges their own norms (to paraphrase Rheingold).
Smith (1994 quoted in Rheingold 2000) proposes that the social glue that binds a community might be:
Social Network Capital
Knowledge Capital
Communion
On the basis of these I wanted to see if any of these social glue factors might map to Twitter. At the outset my initial thought was that Social Network Capital might be indicated by the number of followers a Tweeter attracts, that Knowledge Capital might be indicated, to an extent, by the retweeting of Tweets (viral republication of Tweets by other people) and that Communion might be discerned by the number and quality of replies that might emerge from a Tweet or series of Tweets, by the regular participation of recognised Tweeters and by the bi-directional connections (following and followed by) between Tweeters.
#Torchwood is an interesting hashtag to use as a basis for exploring Twitter communities as, as Gatson and Zweerink (2004) note, communities based around copyrighted corporate-owned television shows create interesting relationships between copyright holders and commentators. Interestingly the BBC Torchwood website does not provide any official forum for discussion, instead pushing video content, quizzes etc. to site users. They do however provide embeddable videos and images in such volume that is seems they are aware of the importance of such artifacts to the fan community (where they are frequently reproduced - including on the Twitter profiles of some of those discussed here). Associated fan practices that intersect with #Torchwood also suggest notes of "autoethnography" (Geerrtz 2000a and 2000b quoted in Gatson and Zweerink (2004)) since Twitter is, by its nature, an incredibly self-concious and reflexive space where the core goal is to record ones own participation in the world.
In order to give a sense of what #Torchwood interactions I have compiled various visualisations based on Tweets. The first of these follows on the "A Taste of Torchwood" page. Familiarity with the technology and the hashtag can be a barrier to following conversations so I wanted to make the comments more human at first so that unfamiliar terms could be raised, and a sense of people talking communally about their shared cultural interests before looking at a specific day. This should help to a give a sense of the sort of campaigning and publicising activities on #Torchwood which I will discuss later.