Counting Your Chickens

Now that people have a number of potential profile pages at their electronic disposal, countdown clocks that tick off the time until the current president is out of office have become a popular feature of this strange form of identity politics that inhabits the increasingly mass produced environs of what was once only represented by the vernacular architecture of an HTML page. (See John Labovitz's essay on"The Evolution of the Home Page" for more about the pre-widget web era.)

Facebook actually has two competing applications: Bush Countdown Clock and Official Bush Countdown Clock. The Firefox browser even offers it as an add-on. There are also hard goods being promoted for this purpose, such as calendars, clock magnets, and clock keychains that are timing the president's exit. Of course, there were countdown clocks in 2004, some of which are now partially defunct, so perhaps digital citizens shouldn't count on it.