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"Wired" contributing editor Rose examines how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way stories are told.
Trade review
An eye-opening look at the shifting shape of entertainment today, and how the art of storytelling is being reinvented. Rose introduces us to people like Will Wright ("The Sims"), James Cameron ("Avatar") and Damon Lindelof ("Lost"), and many others whose ideas are changing how we play, how we relax and how we think.
Book Details
Publisher:
W W NORTON & CO
Publication Date:
18-Mar-2011
ISBN:
9780393076011
Guardian review
The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose review
the guardian Tue 10 July 2012
"Man is by nature a social animal," wrote Spinoza in 1667. The truth of that statement is nowhere more apparent than on the internet. In the last decade, the Web 2.0 revolution has brought the mass media and social media together, transforming audiences from spectators to participants. The era of the couch potato, argues Rose, is at an end. Instead we have the "otaku", Japanese for geek or obsessive, a word which emerged at about the same time as "cyberspace" was coined by novelist William Gibson. From Star Wars to Lost ("television for the hive mind"), it is the immersive, "fractal-like complexity" of storytelling that turns on digital audiences and sends them online to extend the fantasy via wikis, Twitter and blogs. Rose predicts that the future of entertainment will look something like the holodeck, Star Trek's simulation engine peopled with holographic characters, the ultimate immersive art-form. His exploration of this brave new world in which linear narratives are replaced with more playful, participatory stories is compelling, no less so for being told via an old-fashioned medium: a book.