Frank Rose on Storytelling and the Art of Immersion

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🗓️ 10 October 2011

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion and correspondent for Wired Magazine, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how the web has changed the art of storytelling and the interactions between the web, advertising, games, movies, and television. Rose argues that when a new medium is introduced, whether it is the book, movies, or the web, there is always a period of exploration as to how storytelling, the author, and the audience will interact. While there have always been readers, viewers, and listeners who immerse themselves in good stories, the web allows this immersion to expand dramatically, partly because the audience can share reactions and insights with each other as well as becoming part of the creation of the story in ways that past media have not allowed. Rose chronicles these developments with specific examples and speculates on where storytelling on the web might be headed. The conversation closes with a brief discussion of the passing of Steve Jobs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is October 6, 2011, and my guest is Frank Rose, author and writer
0:44.1	for Wired Magazine. His latest book is The Art of Immersion, how the digital generation is
0:49.5	remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories. Frank, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:54.6	Thanks, Russ. Nice to be here. Our topic today is your book, The Art of Immersion, which I found
0:59.8	utterly fascinating, learned a great deal from it, and found it very provocative as an economic
1:05.6	storyteller. Your argument is that storytelling is changing, along with advertising movies, TV,
1:12.3	and the web, how? What is The Art of Immersion? Well, the idea is essentially the focus of the
1:20.5	book is on how the internet is changing storytelling, and the idea is really that every time a new
1:26.4	medium comes along, it takes people 20 or 30 years to figure out what to do with it, to
1:31.1	figure out the grammar of that medium. The motion picture camera was invented around
1:35.5	1890, and it was really about 1915 before the grammar of cinema, all the things that we
1:43.8	take for granted now, like cups and point-of-view shops and faves and pans, all of those things. We're
1:51.7	consolidated into the first, what we would recognize as feature films, birth of a nation being
2:00.7	the real landmark. It wasn't the first film that had these characteristics, but it was the first
2:08.6	film to use all of them, and it was the one that people settled on, that really made a difference.
2:16.4	I think we're not quite there yet with the internet, but we can see the outlines of what is happening,
2:24.1	of what's starting to emerge, and it's very, very different from the mass media that we've
2:30.7	been used to for the past 150 years.
	...

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