Title of Project: Facebooking Ulysses.

The claim of this digital project was that transposing Ulysses into Facebook offered the chance to cast social networks under a light that would reveal something about the way they really are. Though it did at times delve into topics of literary theory, owing to the contributions of Kundera (2007) and Jay David Bolter (1991), the project was more interested in the analogy between the conveyance of the human relationship online and the human experience in Ulysses. It found that, despite there being no a priori reason for a social network to manipulate the narrative in a way that is detrimental to its coherency of the story, Facebook’s landscape is too abrupt and unfamiliar to accurately convey something so total as Joyce’s masterpiece.

In my first post from a few weeks ago, I wrote with the illusion of being able to break Ulysses into a new medium, projecting it from a text into a distributive narrative. Facebook offered itself as the perfect closed network; by being able to control who can take part, I can manipulate the online space to align with the landscape of the narrative. Yet, my delusion in wanting to explode the text entirely were realised only in theory. I feel as if I have failed. Despite my best efforts, Ulysses is still very much a universe stuck inside a novel, no matter what I try and do to it on Facebook.

Last week’s video blog ended with Christina coining the term “malleable memory”. She meant it in response to the idea that distributing a narrative across a digital network – one that is always upgradeable should it ever run out of memory – seems to render the narrative not in a kind of suspended animation but in a mode of perpetual flux. I argue here that “malleable memory” is in truth a symptom of the reader’s (the user’s) plane of experience. The concept that the coherency of the narrative is lost when you transpose it into a different format is one with its roots in the science and experience of reading. To wit, it is worth exploring Henry Jenkins’ (2003) idea of Transmedia Storytelling for its analogous and fundamental question; is ‘control over the narrative an enhancement of the creative process or a distraction or corruption?’

An article in last Sunday’s Boston Globe asked what it would be like to carry around an entire research library on an iPod? (Winter, 2007) The article went on to pose the more important question of whether the seemingly boundless possibilities of the latest innovations in storage memory will render human forgetfulness obsolete. Beyond its reference to new technologies, the article seems to offer little in relation to the task I set myself to turn four chapters of Ulysses into a distributive narrative in Facebook. I argue, however, that what I am attempting is akin to the way new RAM storage technologies unlock the potential to record and remember everything. Facebook and its kin, I maintain, enable us to know, to experience, and to traverse a text in its entirety. In this view, Facebook becomes a memory bank, different from only physical RAM by a matter of degrees.

What I am attempting here is to build a distributed narrative in a closed network. The blunter term would be remediation, but the enterprise here aims to do more than merely convey a text through a new medium. What I’m meaning to do is to shatter the text across a networked debris field, in order to convey the artwork in a manner that is outside its original container. The aim is not to implode the text – or try to deconstruct small fragments that I manage to separate from their textual base - just the opposite. I am trying to explode Ulysses, not pull it apart and place it under a lens, but send its narrative into the virtual space of a participatory network and back again.

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Just so you all have some idea of what I'm doing:

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Title: Ulysses, the Facebook.

Synopsis:
This project is an attempt to translate the universe of Joyce’s Ulysses into the facebook network. It looks to examine what happens to the work of art in an age of digital representation by filtering this particular cultural artefact through the prism of the social network.

Detail:
While the contents of Facebook and other such social networking sites are rarely accurate representations of proper social groups as they might exist in the real world – a flaw upheld by constraints of access, content, and the exclusionary binary mode of existence - there is the interesting potential for the social network to be employed as a means of representation. The work of Jill Walker (2004) is particularly useful to this project, and I use her ideas of what the concept of the 'distributed narrative' actually entails in order to define the margins of this project.