Polonius is no longer online

From a recent McSweeney’s: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition). Sarah Schmelling’s done a great job taking Hamlet and rewriting it as if it occurred as a series of events reported in your Facebook News Feed. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something for all of us to learn in all this. For some time now, I’ve been taking events at work and “modelling” them as a series of tweets or as a series of events in a news feed. Not because it’s cute or clever or anything like that. But because it makes you think about the events. What was material about them. What was worth sharing. What would be useful and valuable to others.

Imagine you were asked to provide input into a time capsule that would be opened in a hundred years. What would you put into it?

Now imagine you were asked to provide input into a time capsule that would be opened in a year. A month. A day. Get my drift?

Every now and then, you read reports about a house that has been untouched since Victorian times. A kitchen that has been preserved in 1950s fashion, with real bits. A lounge or sitting room that’s authentically Sixties. The magic is in the mundane. Because that’s how people live. Talking, cooking, eating, cleaning, sleeping, watching, reading, running, listening, snoring, ironing, lazing.

Just a thought.

[My thanks to Anant for the tip-off].

5 thoughts on “Polonius is no longer online”

  1. This is fantastic — going to go read the whole thing. I just love the concept of seeing any conversation or situation through the lens of how we interact online. Thanks for sharing!

  2. Hi JP, I’ve been reading the blog for a while now, though just in Google Reader, so I haven’t left any comments before. In any case, I should stop by more often :)

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