The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own.

the people who formerly constituted the audience are now capable of running off with the show. The same tools that enable people to spontaneously coalesce online make it easy for them to start telling the story their way, if they care about it enough to do so.

We live in a moment when two modes of popular culture are vying for supremacy: passivity versus participation. Mass media versus deep media. Mass media are industrial, manufactured by someone else and consumed by you. The deep-media experience is digital; it offers a way to participate.

The bigger lesson is, don’t attack the audience for trying to connect with a story you hold the rights to.

But with the arrival of the Internet, fan fiction could no longer be ignored. After an initial period of hesitation, Lucasfilm adopted an embrace-and-encircle strategy.

Ian Schafer, the agency’s CEO, told AMC execs they shouldn’t attempt to shut down something that was generating so much free publicity. “Sometimes the best thing to do in a situation like this is nothing,” Schafer told me later. “But that takes a lot of self-control.” Within 24 hours the accounts were back up, with AMC’s tacit blessing but little i

Cameron, Landau maintained, had a better idea of how movies and games could work together. By creating the movie and the game in tandem, he hoped to have a game that would explore elements of the story the movie could not. He also wanted a home for some of those extra creatures he was coming up with.

“a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.” We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur.

The author starts the story; the audience completes it. The author creates the characters and the situation they find themselves in; the audience responds and makes it their own.

Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together.