The Collected Works of @Wise_Kaplan

We had a first, of sorts, at last week’s TEDxUIllinois – the first TED Talk delivered by a fictional Twitter character. The character in question was @Wise_Kaplan, the brainchild of former New York Observer editors Jim Windolf and Peter Stevenson, who modeled him (and his twin @Cranky_Kaplan) on their former boss, legendary newspaper editor Peter Kaplan (who may or may not be tweeting himself under @Real_Kaplan… and @Kaplan_Premium). Confused? Don’t be.

Wise and Cranky were an inside joke for New York media reporters until Slate verified their creators’ idenities in a story last year. What started as a diversion blossomed into a pair of endless picaresques told in 140-character installments: 

Wise and Cranky are the children of a lost New York. From breakfast until deep into the night, they travel back and forth between the city and the bedroom community of Larchmont, N.Y., charting a path among Manhattan’s decaying cultural landmarks and greasy-spoon diners. Their heroes are the ghosts of jazz greats, long-dead stylists, and midcentury entertainers. In another time, Wise Kaplan and his démodé tastes might have found a home in the pages of a dime novel: The character is self-possessed but chronically bemused, the sort of guy who has just re-emerged into the world after decades in his own head. Stevenson and Windolf describe him as “all anxiety.”

Over the summer, an anxious Wise lamented publicly that he had never received a major award or invited to give a TED Talk. So I invited him to speak at TEDxUIllinois, naturally. Windolf and Stevenson were game, and we settled on one of Wise’s recurring motifs – “Lessons in Journalism,” a rapid-fire series of tweets espousing hilariously cynical advice (“An easy way to become an online star is to make like the Internetâ„¢ is beneath you”) and non sequiturs (“Hire a guy to slip drugs into your coffee every morning”). We arranged that Wise would address the crowd live, “in-person.” The audience reaction was… puzzled.

(The complete @Wise_Kaplan TED Talk is after the jump.)

Some audience members were unfamiliar with the fake Twitter character concept altogether, while others avidly followed satire accounts like @MayorEmanuel, which riff off the news to provide context. But many seemed taken aback by Wise’s double-barreled stream-of-consciousness. (Although there may have been an age gap in effect: the kids got it, but the olds didn’t.)

Video of @Wise_Kaplan’s talk, along with a concurrent audience Q&A with Pew’s Lee Rainie and Race After The Internet editor Lisa Nakamura will be posted later, but for now, scroll down to the bottom to read his pre-, post- and TED Talk tweets in their entirety.