Bin Laden as Global Celebrity
G. R. Boynton

Culture is what we share. We share language. We share stories. We share experiences and practices. We share games. We share celebrities. As new stories and experiences and games and celebrities emerge a new domain of culture comes into being.

Global communication, and specifically microblogging, is ripe for the emergence of cultures. It is human communication, which happens only in sharing, reaching across time and space and language. One sharing in this global communication is games. One came into being February 26, 2010.

This is a trendline for the use of "somewhererightnow" on Twitter. The game is to follow that expression with a person or groups or something and an action. It had started earlier but the surge began at 5:00 p.m. CST, reached its peak at 7:00 p.m. and then declined slowly afterwards. The game may have been around as long as Twitter has been in existence, but it seems to occur in spurts and then it goes away until the next spurt. This instance started at a point in time and rather quickly collected a large number of 'plays.'

Celebrities are often brought into the humor and games of the culture. What I found striking about this game was the way Bin Laden was being brought into the game and its humor. We know that Bin Laden never disappears from the global microblogging sphere. I collected Twitter messages that include his name from early September through the beginning of February.

This is the trendline of mentions aggregated by day. There are a number of spikes in the trend line. Othewise there are only a few hundred messages per day. But he very rarely does not appear. He is almost always present in this physical manifestation of an emerging global culture.

But on this day Bin Laden was getting a lot of attention -- more than 500 tweets. And 198 of them included "somewhererightnow" usually followed by Bin Laden is . . .

He is a figure on a par with two presidents of the United States. He is a champion in the game of hide and seek. Another tweet asked where between Anne Frank and Bin Laden are my hide and seek skills. It is a game at which he can best the two presidents. There are also lots of crude sexual references for which microblogging is justly famous. And there are many allusions to various ways in which Bin Laden is getting ready for his next -- whatever he wants to do next.

And one more tweet that I particularly liked: "its God's job to forgive bin laden, its our job to arrange the meeting"

The point: Bin Laden is a dark, fierce, threatening figure in many of the stories we tell. But he is also playfully brought into the humor and games of global communication practices. He gets the full treatment. A global celebrity is created. And it is another small move in the emergence of a global culture.