"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.