Two examples of how latent readership can become real-world interaction …
xkcd
What’s it like to be a young twentysomething and reject NASA for a career in comics? Ask Randall Munroe of xkcd. Then ask him about September 23.
Wired interviewed the successful web comic author after one of his posts sparked an offline event. In that comic (see below), the hero recounts a vivid dream in which a mysterious dream girl leaves the hero with a set of coordinates for a place and time in the near future.
In the comic, nothing happens. “It turns out that wanting something doesn’t make it real,” the comic’s narrator says mournfully.
But in real life, those coordinates pointed to a real time and place: Sept. 23, 2:38 p.m., in Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. On that day, nearly a thousand xkcd fans from as far away as England and Canada converged on the park, bearing tape measures and Rubik’s cubes. At the assigned minute, Munroe emerged and spoke.
“Maybe wanting something does make it real,” he said as his fans cheered and fought duels with foam swords. The comic that spurred the gathering was enlarged and hung from a fence, and fans took turns contributing to a new last panel, where dreams can come true.
From “Real Geek Heart Beats in Xkcd’s Stick Figures” (Wired News, 11-13-2007)
Homeless Man Speaks
The power of personal transparency was exhibited on Homeless Man Speaks, a blog giving voice to Tony of Toronto. The entire blog, which has frequent posts by Phil, the transcriber and bridge in this particular digital divide, is filled with personal accounts of living on without a home. One of them occurred this week involving a dangerous bike maneuver:
So I try to miss hitting the Porsche but I wiped out, into into the back quarter panel. So, of course, the guy gets out of the car, of course he’s pissed at me, and I’m telling you, he’s six-foot-something and he’s got biceps that could crack walnuts. So he looks at down me and says: ‘I know you. You’re homelessmanspeaks.com.’ So he’s was pretty nice to me considering but now I owe him $100.
This is why something so innocuous as 140-character updates on the minutiae of individual lives is so interesting and important. When we are able to connect the little things we read with the humans behind them, the world grows significantly smaller.
