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.

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.

Ad people (they’re not just men anymore) begin to realize they need to stop preaching to consumers and start listening to them. That’s what “sense and respond” means—a dialogue.

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.

“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.

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.

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

Crucially, Why So Serious? was nonlinear. Like hypertext—text that has embedded within it links to other texts, an essential feature of the Web—it could lead you along different paths. Links can carry you deeper and deeper into a story, revealing levels of detail that would be impossible to convey in a single, two-hour movie.

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