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.

response,

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Lucas may have created Star Wars, but even he had to admit to Roffman that the fans own it now. He meant this figuratively, of course. In a literal sense, ownership is something else entirely. But it’s all bound up with a much larger issue, which is control. Who controls a story—its creator or its fans?

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.