Eastwooding

2012

Date: 30 August 2012 · Place: Republican National Convention, Tampa, Florida · Figures: Clint Eastwood, performer · invisible Barack Obama, addressee · Mitt Romney, nominee · Tags: Live TV Meme, Political, Twitter Reaction 01. An Empty Chair At Tampa On the evening of 30 August 2012 the actor Clint Eastwood addresses the Republican National Convention with a twelve-minute improvised dialogue with an empty chair, treating it as Barack Obama. Within minutes a parody Twitter account @InvisibleObama accumulates more than thirty thousand followers. By morning the verb Eastwooding has been coined for the act of photographing an empty chair and posting it to Tumblr or Twitter. 02. Live Television Becomes A Format Eastwooding is the first political-convention moment whose dominant cultural artifact is a meme rather than a sound bite. It signals the arrival of Twitter as the live second screen for major political events, a role formalized over the following decade. It is also the first instance of an empty chair as canonical American political iconography, a vocabulary that will return in the 2020 Biden-Trump debate cycle and the 2025 Senate hearings. Sources • KnowYourMeme, 'Eastwooding' • The Washington Post, 'Clint Eastwood, the Empty Chair, and the Meme' (31 August 2012) • C-SPAN, RNC 2012 broadcast archive