Frank Rose

Another word buzzing around the conference was "immersion" — as defined by Frank Rose in his fascinating new book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. In it, he talks about how the Internet is changing the way we create and consume narrative. He notes that media innovations, such as radio or television, take a few decades before we learn how to best utilize them. TV started out as live broadcasts and ended up creating a new form of narrative. The Internet started out as a digital repository for print journalism, but is now creating a new form of engagement. "We are ceasing to be consumers of mass media," says Rose, "we are becoming participants in social media — a far more fluid environment in which we simultaneously act as producers, consumers, curators, and commentators, sharing our thoughts and perceptions with people we know and with people we don't."