The idea that computer-based media can create liminal experience can be traced to Victor Turner’s (1967) idea that “in the history of societies and in the lives of individuals, [there are] … organized moments of categorical disarray and intense reflexive potential” (as cited in St John, 2000). Liminality is an ambiguous psychological state (Turner, 1986, p. 103) arising from the virtual status of computer-based media: that is, while experiences derived from computers are “real,” their relationship to the material world is difficult to define (although not, perhaps, impossible). Rob Shields (2003) suggests it is the fluid, potential, ambiguous status of these virtual environments that results in a type of liminality (p. 79). In such moments we can be caught in the act of interpretation, before we have managed to reconcile the simultaneous existence of material and virtual worlds. When Sue Broadhurst (2002) speaks of a space that is “between"—rich in potential, in the process of evolving, we can imagine moments during which meaning and interpretation are tumbling through various combinations and possibilities.

∆ Jenny Weight, RMIT. Forensics and memory: hyperhistory and liminal experience. Post Identity, Vol.4(1), pp.1-15. University of Michigan; Michigan, USA