June 18, 2007
Bloomsday on Twitter
Bloomsday on Twitter: A performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, and a commentary on both. Created by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy :: I do not like Twitter, the micro-blogging service that allows users to send short (SMS-sized) text-based updates that are displayed publicly and shared with friends social-network style.
For me, Twitter represents the worst trends in the new internet culture. It purports to allow people to "communicate" in new ways, a promise that mostly creates new obligation and infatuation to stay "up to date" and "connected." In the world of Twitter, you (and me, and everyone) pay constant, tiny homage to a new gimmickry.
This is a gimmickry that doesn't even rise to the level of the gadget, with its industrialist promise of technological progress. It is a kind of softer soft-pornography determined to make identity-assertion the new masturbation. Russel Davies' Twitter parody Dawdlr comments on this trend, asking users to send updates via postcard.
In the world of Web 2.0, a public sheds the chains of a tightly-controlled mass media market in which individuals are converted into the "consumers" needed to purchase mass produced goods and services. In its stead, that public gets a loosly-controlled micro media market, in which individuals are converted into the "users" needed to create databases for sale to Google or Yahoo! or News Corp for $35 a head. But now the market outsources manufacture to those very "users." The workers may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but the users are lining up to link their own together. It's the new fashion; chains are the new black.
Invective like this may amuse, but it doesn't necessarily change opinion or create discussion. My friend and sometimes-collaborator Ian McCarthy and I had been talking in San Francisco recently, looking for an intervention that would both comment on Twitter as a social force and also attempt to use the service in a culturally interesting way. What if the focus on socialization and identity is actually the least interesting way to use Twitter?
So, here's what we came up with.
Today, like every June 16, is Bloomsday, a holiday that celebrates James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, which takes place on this date in 1904. Ulysses already offers a parallel commentary; Joyce conceived of the book's principal character, Leopold Bloom, as an everyman counterpoint to Odysseus, whose adventure Bloom's parallels. Each of the book's 18 chapters take place in roughly an hour's time.
The 10th of these, Wandering Rocks, follows 19 Dubliners walking through the city, doing their daily business, some intersecting with others. It's a famous and often-studied section of the book, one that also speaks to an experience of urban modernity that has become second-nature to us now.
Enthusiasts often retrace the characters' steps on Bloomsday, and innumerable animated maps and the like have been created by fans and scholars. The latter technique still doesn't really represent the interleaved simultaneity of Wandering Rocks, the complexity yet ordinariness of space and interaction that Joyce's writing accomplishes. And the former technique turns the ordinariness of the episode into a kind of theme park, missing the importance of the Wandering Rocks as a vignette of the scenario that grounds the rest of the novel (I've written about this theme more in relation to videogames in a chapter of my book Unit Operations).
We took Wandering Rocks and adapted it into a large series of 140-character or less utterances in the first person. We organized and timed these and built a database for them. We registered key characters in the novel as users on Twitter. For example:
STEPHENDEDALUS: I see Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress, shut the book quick, don't let see.
Then we wrote some software to automate the performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, so basically we just turn it on and it runs. The result, we hope, will offer both an interesting and unique perspective on the novel and on Twitter. I'll let our critics be the judge of that.
Bloomsday tradition normally demands that festivities take place on Dublin time, which is unfortunately 6 hours ahead of the US East Coast. Wandering Rocks starts at 2:55pm, which is barely the crack of dawn (especially on a Saturday) out on the West Coast. So we decided to synchronize our performance to EDT. If you wish, you can watch the public stream on Twitter starting at 2:55pm EDT. You can also watch the individual characters, or even add them as "friends" to get the updates.
Update: the performance is now completed; while there were a few hiccups that made a very small minority of the characters unable to participate, the vast majority worked as planned, and you can now click through to read their contributions. I'll put together some documentation of the live version to share soon.
BUCKMULLIGAN
STEPHENDEDALUS
[go to post for live links]
LEOPOLDBLOOM
BLOOMSCAT
BLAZESBOYLAN
JOHNCONMEESJ
ONELEGGEDSAILOR
WIFEOFSHEEHYMP
BRUNNYLYNAM
DENISJMAGINNI
MRSMGUINNESS
BLONDEINTHRNTNS
HELYS
MISSDUNNE
TOMROCHFORD
SATCHELLEDBOYZ
NOSEYFLYNN
MCOY
LENEHAN
JJOMOLLOY
UNLABORINGMEN
CORNYKELLEHER
CONSTABLE57C
THESHOPMAN
EARLOFDUDLEY
OLDWOMANONTRAM
PATRICKDIGNAM ALMIDANO
THELACQUEY
DILLYDEDALUS
SIMONDEDALUS
HAINESINDUBLIN
JOHNPARNELL
ELIJAHISCOMING
KATEYDEDALUS
BOODYDEDALUS
MAGGYDEDALUS
MISTERKERNAN
NEDLAMBERT
CLERGYMANJACK
FRBOBCOWLEY
DENISBREEN
BENDOLLARD
CASHELFARRELL
BLINDSTRIPLING
DUDLEYWHITE
RICHIEGOULDING
THEPODDLERIVER
2SANDEDWOMEN
THEPOLICEMAN
MARTNCUNNINGHAM
JOHNWNOLAN
HORNBLOWER
MANINMACINTOSH
Late last night, partly to test and partly to put a stake in the ground, we did perform the first ten minutes of the novel properly synchronized to Dublin time.
Happy Bloomsday!
[blogged by Ian Bogost on bogost.com/blog] [Related]
Bloomsday On Twitter
Perhaps one day we will remember Twitter as the peak of exhibitionism on the Internet, a phenomenon that started with blogs and social networks. It is hard to imagine anything more compulsive: Twitter is a community of thousands of people who publish brief messages answering the simple question "what are you doing right now?". It is a sort of self-imposed big brother, a Babel of self-referential statements ("I'm checking my email", "I'm buying a computer on eBay"), a massive collective stream of consciousness. On June 16, in Dublin, there are celebrations for the Bloomsday, a day of cultural activities centered on James Joyce's Ulysses. Among the most important events of that day is the reenactment of day of Leopold Bloom, the odissey of the common man that unravels on the streets of Dublin in a single day. What do the most important novel of the twentieth century and the most extreme platform of web 2.0 have in common? Nothing, or so it was before the last June 16, when Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy, game designers and non-linear narration researchers, chose Twitter as the stage of a strange online performance. The tenth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, that narrates simultaneously the lives of nineteen citizen of Dublin was adapted to microblogging. The original text was broken down into fragments and inserted into a database for a computer program to read and publish as messages on Twitter at the right times, signed with the names of the characters/users. The result is a bizarre short-circuit between time and space units, between high and low culture. Characters from a novel are animated by a machine and their voices mix with those, paradoxically more artificial, of real human beings. The performance, coherently with the pace of that chapter, lasted only an hour, and it probably wasn't noticed by the users of Twitter, lost as a drop in an ocean of communicating solitudes. - Paolo Pedercini, Neural.
Posted by jo at June 18, 2007 06:49 PM
