@MayorEmanuel's Twitter Picaresque

The story's a few weeks old now, but The Atlantic published the most complete and impressive piece on the @MayorEmanuel phenomenon of the last few months. They also happened to break the identity of the Twitter feed's owner -- Punk Planet founder Dan Sinker.

The entire article is worth the read, but what really sets it apart is the analysis of how Sinker used Twitter to create a whole new method of storytelling. Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal compares the 1,942 tweets (about 30,000 words) to a real-time picaresque novel, noting how the immediacy of the content allowed the reader to experience the raw composing process: "Writing happens in fits and starts, so the finished product should look that way, too. And that's the thing, with a Twitter narrative, your lines come stamped with a time and the kind of software used to send the message. You can't conceal the process of writing, so you have to learn to love that transparency."

Twitter was the only place this could have happened. We'll talk about @MayorEmanuel for awhile, but those who didn't experience it first-hand, as it was unfolding, won't have the same visceral attachment. Madrigal again: "@MayorEmanuel is a new genre that is native to Twitter. When you try to turn his adventures into traditional short stories or poems, they lose the crucial element of time. The episode where the mayor gets stuck in the sewer pipes of City Hall just does not work when the 15 tweets aren't spaced out over 7 hours. It's all over too fast to be satisfying. There's no suspense." It was that real-time storyline that made @MayorEmanuel not just a funny side story to the election, but a revolutionary discovery in modern storytelling.

At the end of the article, Madrigal posts some of the "goodbye" tweets from @MayorEmanuel's many fans, and one expresses pity for those who weren't there to experience the phenomenon: "@ourmaninchicago: I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who didn't watch @MayorEmanuel unfold." The sentiment, no doubt, is widely shared, and indicative of the uncharted frontier we've found. The experience was surreal, a chance to watch (along with tens of thousands of others) a real-time fiction manifest itself in one Firefox tab, while the other tabs were tuned to reality. Everything was linked, everything was happening at once, and we all watched it together. I'd even go so far as to say that @MayorEmanuel had a positive influence on the Chicago mayoral election by focusing more attention on it, particularly in regards to young people. It was amusement, but it also served a public service.

Twitter can create a forum to watch a brand new, incredibly engaging form of storytelling -- a type of writing that is truly contained in the 21st century. It is a formula that can without doubt be recreated. Now the question is...who will write the next great Twitter picaresque?