Deep Media and Transmedia

*A lot of interesting struggle with the vernacular here.

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/01/deep_media_transmedia_whats_th.html

Henry Jenkins: Another key idea running through the book is the idea that entertainment is now designed to be engaged by collectives, often of the kinds that form in and through social network sites. What are some of the consequences of perceiving audiences as collectives of people who interact with each other and with the producers rather than as aggregates of isolated eyeballs?

Frank Rose: I'm not entirely sure, and I don't think anybody else knows either. (((Yeah.))) It's too new, it's too different from anything we've ever experienced before. It's not that we haven't had participatory entertainment–we've had game shows on TV ever since the late '40s, and on radio before that. But the idea of people working together to "solve" or interpret a story at any scale beyond the water cooler is unprecedented, simply because no technology has enabled it before. Will it change storytelling? It already has. Inception, Lost–because its narrative was so convoluted, Lost implicitly demanded that people connect online to figure it out. No one ever dared do that on TV before. Does this herald some emerging facet of connected existence? Definitely. How will it change us as a society? Too early to say.

Frank Rose is the author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Genera-tion is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, to be published in February 2011 by W.W. Norton, and a contributing editor at Wired, where he has written extensively about media and entertainment. ...