About this item
A field guide to the visionaries—and the fans—who are reinventing the art of storytelling. Not long ago we were spectators, passive consumers of mass media. Now, on YouTube and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, we are media. And while we watch more television than ever before, how we watch it is changing in ways we have barely slowed down to register. No longer content in our traditional role as couch potatoes, we approach television shows, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate—as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will. Wired contributing editor Frank Rose introduces us to the people who are reshaping media for a two-way world—people like Will Wright (The Sims), James Cameron (Avatar), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and dozens of others whose ideas are changing how we play, how we chill, and even how we think.
About the Author
Frank Rose is the author most recently of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, published in the US and the UK by W.W. Norton and hailed by the International Journal of Advertising as "an essential overview" of the fundamental changes affecting media. He has explored this theme as a keynote speaker at such conferences as ad:tech Sydney, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and the Guardian's Changing Media Summit in London, as well as in talks at Google, Lucasfilm, Unilever, and other major companies. A senior fellow at the Columbia University School of the Arts, he is faculty co-leader of digital storytelling strategies, an executive education seminar co-sponsored by the Columbia Business School. Before writing The Art of Immersion, Frank spent many years reporting on the impact of technology on entertainment, advertising, and society. As a contributing editor at Wired and a contributing writer at Fortune before that, he covered such topics as the making of Avatar, Samsung and the rise of the South Korean techno-state, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New York, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Travel Leisure, and Rolling Stone. Frank's 1989 best-seller West of Eden, about the ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple, was named one of the ten best books of the year by Businessweek and was recently republished in an updated edition. Among his other books is The Agency, an unauthorized history of the oldest and at one time most successful talent agency in Hollywood. He lives in the East Village of Manhattan, where he got his start covering the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice.
