Frank Rose's The Art of Immersion

Thanks to W. W. Norton & Co. for passing me a copy of The Art of Immersion, by Wired's Frank Rose. The book deals with one of my favourite subjects: storytelling, and how technology is shaping the way we tell stories. After four pages I had to put it down and fetch a pen and paper to keep track of all the ideas it was conjouring in my mind. And that was just the preface! So I thought it would be fair to write a quick review.

The brilliance of The Art of Immersion, to me as a story-teller, is that Rose only hints at the application of the technologies he discusses. With a few well-researched nods to innovative storytelling (e.g. the Wachowski brothers' decision to drape the Matrix narrative through several different mediums - film, game, animation) he leaves the rest for the reader to imagine. Rose also looks at the blind alleys of this innovation - audience feedback mid-movie, smell-o-vision - to find out why some succeed where others fail.

This is a book about the digital age and so it's no surprise that the bottom line is, of course, audience participation. We are a race of story-tellers, repeating, remoulding, reimaginging popular narratives regardless of origin or ownership. What is surprising is that this reciprocating model of storytelling stretches back far further than the litigious record companies and film studios would like to think. As far back as Dickens, who honed his craft by publishing books as serials, allowing the audience to voice their opinions and shape the story along the way. Or that hyperlinking, the foundation of the internet, was proposed as early as 1945, when the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, realised that the only way humans could navigate the exploding corpus of knowledge was through semantic connections - the architecture of the greatest encyclopedias of the world would not be hierarchal but associative.

Ultimately Rose reveals that storytelling is woven into the fabric of our everyday life - where fairground rides can become million-dollar movies and advertising campaigns can rival the best television shows for narrative. To read this book is to realise that we are constantly submerged in a ocean of stories, invisible currents brought into focus by one medium or another. It's a fascinating, exciting book for authors and audiences, and well worth reading.