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

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.

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

A small shop based in midtown Manhattan, Deep Focus works with clients like Samsung, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts to develop online promotional campaigns that seek to involve fans with the product.

“Now you get to live in that world from 10:00 to 11:00 on Sunday night,” Ross said. “But I see the potential for telling that story in a different dimension—for bringing more of that world to an audience that has expanded because the world has expanded.”

If the story is meaningful enough, a superficial encounter won’t leave them satisfied. They’ll want to go deeper. They’ll want to imagine themselves in it, retell it, make it their own.

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.

But people now don’t want subtext, they want subtitles”—clear explanations of what’s going on. And that’s what the characters provide on Twitter.

It started with the videocassette recorder. In 1975, when Sony introduced the notion of “time shift,”

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