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.

Hedging itself between a project that would map Joyce’s Ulysses as a ‘distributive narrative’ (Walker 2004) and an attempt at a ‘transmedia storytelling’ (2003), this has been an attempt aimed at exploring the capabilities and the limits of what I simply term ‘Facebooking Ulysses’. Building character profiles and linking them to each other was a straightforward but time-consuming task. The amount of effort required to forge profiles discourages is enough to discourage anyone doing what I did on a greater scale. Mine was a token effort compared to what would need to be done to do Joyce’s whole book, page by page.

Moreover, the kind of narrative that one can relay once the profiles are built and the ‘friends’ status is approved is entirely in control of the creator. This means that there is nothing to say the intermediary between the book and the network cannot exert their own reading and ignore the ‘facts’ of the book. Rather, where characters are said to meet, for example, I simply denoted them as having become friends. Where the characters live, I denote their location on a Google Map. What they say to each other becomes a ‘posted note’. This process goes on and on, mirroring the details of Ulysses but never quite attaining the same illustrative or evocative quality.

Towards the end I became quite hampered by the technical limits of Facebook. Its platform certainly does not lend itself to easily relating the stream-of-consciousness style of, say, Ulysses’ last chapter. Moreover, the final video episode was completely thrown into the trashcan when Facebook’s administrators deleted my fake accounts. A recent article in The Age (2007) newspaper proves I am not alone in this experience. Yet, what I think this reveals is twofold; first, that Facebook is not a dependable platform by any stretch of the imagination, and second, that it is still ultimately a network run and controlled by relative few.

Therefore, any discussion of the constraints of Facebook ought really to discuss the way it acts as another example of a media exerting a controlling influence over mass society. Facebook’s valuation at $15bn (WSJ 2007) shows that it is more than just an empty site for bored, distracted officeworkers; it is in fact a source of new wealth for the economy and the intrusion of the commodity fetish into the nebulous of human relationships.

This is why I was interested in seeing whether the coherency of the narrative is lost when you transpose it into a different format. If Facebook is indeed something new, is it, or the logic contained within it, empowering the concept of ‘malleable memory’? That is, what Christina (in the second video) saw to be the derivative condition from the way that Facebook can’t ever hold a narrative with the same concrete consistency of a novel. Since Facebook has no border around it, no place for the narrative to end, it is ever-expanding. In this way, the narrative is never tied down in the same way that the narrative is. Now more than ever, the post I quoted from “Kara” is pertinent here,

“What if Charles Dickens' character of Estella was not someone you met when you first read Great Expectations, but someone you knew from a social networking website such as Myspace or Facebook? In the simplest of terms, readers would be closer to the character if they have been exposed to them before. The narrative could then evolve to the point where readers felt as if they were reading about someone they know. Traditionally, readers come to know and relate to characters as the narrative unfolds. In the digital age, we want information and we want it fast. This old process may loose [sic] some readers simply because they don't relate to a character soon enough. If the reader doesn't relate to a character, then they may not care what happens to that character and lose interest.”

In the above view, Facebook and the technology it embodies poses a dichotomy of possibility. On one hand, it presents the ability for users to have a closer relationship to the narrative, allowing them – and here I cite my attempt to ‘Facebook Ulysses’ – to engage with the characters and the narrative in a relationship rather than a reading. On the other, the medium poses the danger of becoming a concentrated site of control, worth billions because of its access to the patterns of relationships of the masses.

The difficulty with this project has been the time I’ve had available to manipulate Facebook as a stage for Joyce’s masterpiece. The quality of the videos would have been better had I not been so pressed, though as far as technical prowess goes, I regret that more of them weren’t as adventurous as they should have been. That said, I am content with my attempt to relay Ulysses into Facebook so far as I have stayed true to the original idea: to uncover something about Facebook by exploring it through the filter of some alternate universe.

Works Cited.

Bolter, J. D. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Erlbaum Press.

Jenkins, H., 2003. ‘Transmedia Storytelling’. Technology Review. MIT, Available Online: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/13052/ [1] (Viewed: 12 October, 2007)

“Kara” 2007. ‘Transmedia Storytelling’. September 5. Available Online: http://thisconfessionhasmeantnothing.blogspot.com/2007/09/transmedia-sto... [2] (Viewed: 13 October, 2007).

Kundera, M. 2007. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. Trans. Linda Asher. Faber & Faber: London.

Kwek, B. 2007. ‘Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away.’ The Age. Available online: (Viewed: 30 October 2007).

Walker, J. 2004. ‘Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks’ paper presented to the 5th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researches, Brighton, 19-22 September.

Wall Street Journal. 2007. ‘Microsoft sees ad dollars in Facebook.’ KansasCity.com. October 27. Available online: (Consulted 30 October 2007).