Liminal Tribe

If I had any doubt before this weekend, my experience at Transparency Camp 09 confirmed for me that D.C. is a place of great opportunity for tech savvy professionals from across the media, information and communication technology, creative, non-profit, and public administrative sectors. Represented at this weekend’s un-conference was the current generation of the class of professionals who have historically clustered in D.C. This class is described on the Camp’s website as a... ‘trans-partisan tribe...from all walks – government representatives, developers, NGOs, wonks, and activists” and I’d add to this list members of The Press.

This weekend made clear to me the professional opportunities that exist in the DC area for individual members of this tribe. But perhaps more importantly this tribe may represent an opportunity for us all to learn how to distribute the powerful potential of social media tools and practices beyond the industrial sectors that invented them and the generation who grew up with them. If this tribe succeeds, they may very well provide a bridge to help move social media and its benefits into broader areas of community, civic, and economic life.

Ironically DC is not recognized as a significant cluster of the social media economy. It is way overshadowed by areas like Silicon Valley, or New York City. It may be said the social media ‘tribe’ in DC are like a liminal people residing at the bounds between the originators and a broader adoption of social media technologies and practices throughout the civic life and the economy. And they share a common problem with other liminal people - they are ambiguous and unremarkable and seen as possessing no particular status, power, or role in the overall social structure. Liminal tribes, like the DC social media professionals are hard to see and define for their condition often defies classification by conventional means.

This experience of being ‘unremarkable’ on the broader economic map of social media was expressed by many of the individuals and groups I met throughout my research in social media in DC. Almost every individual I met who is involved in convening groups of social media advocates, every professional association executive, every individual who hires or in some way supports social media professionals in D.C. expressed frustration by the lack of recognition DC receives for the wide ranging social media work performed in the region. Individual professionals themselves also acknowledge their lack of broader recognition and indeed, this insight seems in part to drive them to work and learn and engage others in their social media endeavors. Much of the networking people do in social media in DC seems to me, to be partly motivated by a personal and collective desire to matter in the broader world of social media.

If my analysis is correct and the D.C. social media tribe represent a liminal stage between the powerful political, economic, social, and technological forces that gave rise to social media and its broader adaption and integration in civic and economic life, then it D.C must be seen as a site of great potential, learning, and personal risk. Liminal stages require greats acts of personal and group agency for it involves pushing past established boundaries and great collective effort that is often punctuated by significant meaning. Liminal worlds are naturally sites of individual learning and cultural development – people and their culture emerge from liminal states transformed in some way. What liminal people learn and how they learn it may be of value to all others who will inevitably follow them to the other side of their developmental cycle.

If the members of the tribe who came together this weekend achieve their aims they will not only succeed in making government more ‘transparent’ they will also be poised to help figure out what seems to be a fundamental question in the world of social media today. I argue that their efforts may help distribute and begin to normalize social media tools, practices and the collaborative culture it fosters inside of the hierarchical institutions that comprise and uphold our society and economy. The skills this tribe develops and uses and the way they organize to work and learn may have implications beyond their current aims – it may be a harbinger of things to come for us all who live and work within the bounds of the institutions that comprise modern life.