Last night a bunch of folks of Twitter said tearful good byes to Chicago’s next mayor. Kinda.
@mayoremanuel was the profane parody Twitter persona of the real mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel. Kind of like Fake Gary Busey , @mayoremanuel was pretty much a running Rahm Emanuel joke based around his foul-mouthed, larger than life persona. (“Your next motherfucking mayor. Get used to it assholes,” reads his bio)
In a few short months, the anonymous Twitter account attracted nearly 40,000 followers. The real Rahm was at the very least amused by the fake account and reportedly offered to donate $5,000 to a charity if the voice behind @mayoremanuel revealed him/herself (which he/she didn’t) (UPDATE: on 2/28/2010 Columbia College professor and former Punk Planet publisher Dan Sinker revealed to The Atlantic that he was the voice behind @mayoremanuel)
On Tuesday, the same day the real-life Emanuel was elected mayor, @mayoremanuel revealed that he was not long for this world:
While the Fake Rahm tweets had always been great for a laugh, in the waning weeks of the mayoral election @mayoremanuel had started to take on a bit of a serial approach, with ongoing storylines and characters (loyal Carl the Intern, pet duck Quaxelrod, etc) As wonderfully documented (and annotated!) on Snarkmarket, the last few days of the @mayoremanuel story took on an almost mythic quality.
Yesterday… @MayorEmanuel outdid himself. He wrote an extended, meandering narrative of the day before the primary that took the whole parallel Rahm Emanuel thing to a different emotional, comic, cultural place entirely. It even features a great cameo by friend of the Snark Alexis Madrigal. The story is twisting, densely referential, far-ranging — and surprisingly, rather beautiful.
Definitely check out the storyfied version of the final @mayoremanuel tweets in the rest of the above post or if you have time and paper on your hands, download a 40 page PDF of all of @mayoremanuels tweets here.
I was one of thousands of Twitter fans who “watched” the last tweets of @mayoremanuel in real time – all the while begging him not to go, and retweeting profane eulogies from others. I realized that this was perhaps the first instance during my time on Twitter where there was a shared, mass public experience of watching a fictional story unfold on Twitter (not news, not a TV show)
It was very akin to watching a television program, only rather than collectively watching, say, the Grammys or America’s Next Top Model, the action itself – the story itself – took place on Twitter. And it was entertaining. This kind of twitter-as-storytelling isn’t totally new. Fans have been using Twitter as a medium for fanfiction for some time now. In a way, @mayoremanuel was basically real-person fanfiction. But what intrigued me was the mass audience that this particular story attracted, and how similar the experience was to other “mass watching” experiences of TV and film.
As far as I know, the voice of @mayoremanuel has not yet been revealed, but regardless of whether we find out, he/she created something special. In the future, could Twitter be a channel for a form of original storytelling to a mass audience? Is it already happening and I just don’t know about it?
You forgot Hambone! Aw, poor fictional pup. Always being forgotten.
Loved @mayoremanuel. I hope he comes back after the swearing in.
I totally forgot about Hambone. 🙁 yeah he gets to short shrift. I think @mayoremanuel will make a comeback. way too much material to mine.
I really hope so, but if not… that was one hell of an exit.