Political/Narrative Experience for a Digital Culture

Through all the hoopla about President Obama's first 100 days, that much-lamented, over-analyzed, arbitrary marker of a president's success, one that most people will forget, Slate.com has given us the brilliance of 100 Days of Barak Obama's Facebook News Feed. Except for the fact that they get the formatting wrong (Facebook news feeds appear in reverse chronological order, like blogs), Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson use a dead-on parody of Facebook's features, starting with Obama's joining the Washington, D.C. network and ending with Arlen Spector joining the group Democrats. The piece is reminiscent of what seems to be an emerging genre--the Facebook narrative. See, for example, this version of Hamlet.

Two thoughts about this interest me. First, it seems that Facebook especially, but also perhaps MySpace and even blogs, are becoming stable enough genres that they are able to help us organize experience. That is, the "tropes" of joining networks, commenting on statuses, sending gifts, and the like are recognizable enough that they can constitute a meaningful narrative experience. Second, and in relation to the first, is the idea that this specific "facebook narrative" points up the possibility that Facebook feeds are now even able to organize political experience. Beam and Wilson implicitly evoke Obama's masterful use of Facebook for fundraising and campaiging and ask us to consider how that political experience might be informing the present. This seems to have two effects: it reveals the extent to which Obama used Facebook to push the boundaries of the "genre" of political campaigning, but perhaps more importantly, it also show the ways in which political experience is typified, or genred, and the ways that it can be reduced to a set of typical "moves" in the vein of a Facebook page. Political intrigue can be reduced to pithy posts: " Barack Obama sent Somali Pirates a Trio of Snipers."

So it goes both ways: Facebook narratives (especially parodies) are becoming a way to organize political experience, but they also reveal the ways in which poltical experience has always been typical--Facebook feeds just do it in a more compressed, systematic, and therefore recognizable way.

I guess more remains to be seen in this vein, but I would like to continue thinking about genred experience in digital environments. If you come across anything interesting, send it my way!