On June 18th, I had the privilege of attending the final show of Minnesota Public Radio’s four-part radio series, Wits at St Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater (of Prairie Home Companion fame), along with (potentially) a few million others. OK, maybe I’m overstating that by just a bit, but bear with me. (Disclosure: My invitation came through Sara Gavin, president of Weber Shandwick Minneapolis, who is on MPR’s board.)
The featured guest was John Hodgman, humorist, author of The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require, contributor to McSweeney’s and the New York Times Magazine; a former literary critic, self-described “minor TV personality,” and fake expert; and since 2006 probably best known to the public at large as “PC” in Apple’s “Get a Mac” commercials. Hodgman also appears as a contributing reporter on The Daily Show where he is (what else?) the Resident Expert.
Host John Moe interviewed Hodgman on the evening’s topic, An Examination of Diversions, Distractions, and Hey Look at That Thing Over There! The show won’t officially air until August 1st, but the 2 hour event was streamed live via USTREAM. For those so inclined (or if the embed below doesn’t work) the entire program can be viewed at www.mpr.org/wits.
True to its stated theme, the evening was built around a rambling (and of course, distracting) conversation between Moe and Hodgman, with occasional time outs for musical interludes courtesy of singer/guitarist (and “feral mountain man”) John Roderick of The Long Winters and Moe’s co-host and “musical guide” John Munson, the singing Ascots — and at one point, from Hodgman himself on the ukelele (starting at about 00:59:45 on the video). Somehow, it not only all works, it works entertainingly well.
Also stopping in were author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, creator of “The Sandman” comic books, and Damian Kulash of OK Go, who was in town for the MPR-sponsored Rock the Garden concert. He appeared solo and sans yellow jumpsuit to perform “The Last Leaf,” which, he assured his audience, would eventually end up on a video featuring animated food.
Social media was a recurring theme and social interactions were mindfully woven into the fabric of the event, starting with the performers themselves, all social media junkies. In addition, MPR had stationed specially designated “Twitter leaders” in the “Twitpit” such as MPR’s Interactive producer Julia Schrenkler, whose focus was on convening an online community, whether in-house or via the live video stream, and curating the Twitter conversation (the hashtag was, of course, #wits). In contrast to the usual rule of no cellphones during the performance, the theater was sprinkled with the glowing screens of mobile devices (mostly iPhones and even a few iPads), their owners happily bouncing back and forth between viewing the stage performance and tweeting away in the online conversation. Here’s a sampling from the tweetstream that began hours before the the show (MPR hosted a pre-show tweetup) and was still going several days later:
OK, but how do we get to millions of attendees? Let’s do the math. All the performers promoted the event to their Twitter followers, which for @hodgman and @OKGo are in the neighborhood of 400,000 apiece. Add Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) with over 1.4 million followers, not to mention several thousand more for @JohnMoe, @JohnRoderick and @Munsongs. That gave the event a potential reach far beyond the walls of the Fitz. Not millions, but not chump cheese either (as Hodgman might put it).
And that’s really the point, as MPR’s Director of Live Events Tony Bol explained to me during intermission. Artists and entertainers today not only draw a local audience to a live venue such as the Fitz, they also arrive on the scene with their own ready-made audience who then can participate via the social web, enabling the show to play to a much larger crowd and generate significantly more buzz. What we think of as an “event” – or for that matter, an audience – is no longer bounded by time or space; it’s become multidimensional, as social media has made it possible for people to participate before, during and after the fact.
Though this was technically the last Wits in the four-part series, it was far from a finale. Bol and MPR are just getting warmed up. “This isn’t going to turn into a new media conversation, is it?” Hodgman admonished Moe, glancing fretfully at his iPad. But it hardly seemed avoidable in a roomful of people, all in on the joke, many glancing distractedly down to their tiny screens – guilty as charged. So for now, let’s give the last word to John Roderick, who toward the end of the show tweeted: “Taking the stage and tweeting about it in real time. Modern life is rubbish. Hilarious rubbish.”
Update: Disclosure added re our connection with MPR.