Deep Media

Jan. 29, 2016: From the moment I published ‘The Art of Immersion’—what, five years ago?—I’ve been focused on the idea that digital…

Jan. 5, 2016: A year ago I wrote about the newly re-imagined Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum in New York, for…

Oct. 12, 2015: When Advertising Week happened a couple of weeks ago, I joined a discussion…

Sept. 15, 2015: Last week I came across one of the more extreme commentaries on advertising I’ve ever …

July 20, 2015: We’re sup­posed to be living in an “attention econ­omy,” right? But standard Web metrics don’t really measure attention. Uniques, page views, monthly…

June 29, 2015: When I talk about the future of media, one of the images I use to illustrate the transition from industrial-scale, mass-circulation newspapers to what we’re seeing now…

May 26, 2015: The New York Times describes Charter Communi­ca­tions’ $55 billion bid for Time Warner Cable as the result…

April 27, 2015: “Great brands and great businesses have to be great storytellers too.” So begins a video that Angela Ahrendts, then CEO of Burberry…

Jan. 28, 2015: It’s a happening time for museums. The Louvre, the world’s most-visited, drew 9.3 million people in 2013. American museums get more visitors than theme parks…

Dec. 30, 2014: For anyone who follows not just stories but meta-stories—that is, stories about storytelling and how it’s evolving—2014 was a pretty big year. Along with…

Sept. 23, 2014: Summer is now officially over, and for Hollywood the results were not good. No, the industry didn’t suffer a repeat of the string of debacles that hit last year, when one…

Aug. 7, 2014: Can the smartphone really save journalism? Can anything save journalism? Both those questions have been raised in response to my essay in the current…

April 15, 2014: Behind the savage bloodshed, naked power lust…

March 17, 2014: For years, people have been speculating about the day when viewers go “over the top,” cutting their cable or satellite connections…

Feb. 13, 2014: “How can we regain control, establish balance, and preserve what makes us human? This is what we will be exploring…

Jan. 13, 2014: After last fall’s Future of StoryTelling summit in New York…

Dec. 17, 2013: When JWT Intelligence announced its “10 Trends for 2014 and Beyond” recently, trend #1 was “immersive experiences.” Certainly you can feel this in…

Nov. 27, 2013: For a couple of years now, “transmedia” has been the buzzword most people use to…

Oct. 31, 2013: What’s missing in most of the discussions media executives have about their businesses’ future? The audience. Media…

Aug. 27, 2013: I’ve long been a fan of David Carr’s media column in The New York Times, but yesterday’s was…

Aug. 1, 2013: It’s been nearly a year now since a couple of McSweeney’s alums released ‘The Silent History,’ a story…

June 13, 2013: Sometimes you really need to sit up and pay attention. That was clearly the case at USC last night as George Lucas and Steven…

June 10, 2013: Okay, here’s an admission: I’ve never been able…

May 28, 2013: Over at Medium, Matt Locke has a fascinating post on “emerging patterns of digital attention.” Taken from a talk he gave…

May 23, 2013: It’s never been easy to market an indie film—but in a blockbuster universe, getting people to care about a low-budget production…

May 3, 2013: Images are powerful, stories even more so. But how do you collect them from hundreds if not thousands of people and present…

April 19, 2013: Not long after the If Book Then conference in Milan and Stockholm, Neil Gaiman…

April 4, 2013: What’s a book, anyway? The answer used to be simple: two covers, a lot of words in between, printed on paper and meant…

March 15, 2013: For this year’s SXSW, I worked with the ad agency JWT to…

March 1, 2013: Douglas Rushkoff’s announcement earlier this week that he was quitting Facebook happened to coincide with a major…

Jan. 17, 2013: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead”: With this pithy dictum, Henry Jenkins summed up the…

Dec. 19, 2012: We all have our bad days — but some bad days are way worse…

Oct. 10, 2012: Okay, I give up—what is the future of storytelling? Last Friday’s Future of StoryTelling conference, held in a tranquil and…

Sept. 20, 2012: For all the buzz this year about social TV, it’s mainly…

Sept. 10, 2012: For David Fincher’s film adaptation of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’…

June 4, 2012: One afternoon recently I spent a couple of hours with Jason Silva, the longtime Current TV host…

May 3, 2012: Last June, when I gave the opening keynote at the Crossover Summit at Sheffield Doc/Fest, I was asked to talk about the relationship between games and stories.

April 11, 2012: Some of the most intriguing innovations in story­telling these days are happening in the UK, where broadcasting…

March 12, 2012: In March 2011, when London’s Punchdrunk Theatre Company opened Sleep No More in an abandoned warehouse block in…

Feb. 29, 2012: Yesterday saw the release of one of the most compelling TED talks ever: Peter Weyland’s…

Jan. 30, 2012: When Campfire’s Steve Coulson set out to create an immersive experience around the HBO…

Dec. 30, 2011: Earlier this week I was asked to appear on Bloomberg Rewind, the daily TV recap hosted by Matt Miller, to talk about the legacy…

Nov. 30, 2011: Late last month I got an advance look at the new IPG Media Lab, recently relocated from LA to New York and sporting all manner…

Oct. 31, 2011: If the term Department of Human Management gives you a bit of a chill, check out…

Sept. 7, 2011: W.W. Norton is publishing ‘The Art of Immersion’ worldwide in English, but the first foreign-language edition is being published by the Korea…

Aug. 25, 2011: Everyone loves Apple today. Apple sells us lustrous white laptops and impossibly slim music players and software that transforms bedrooms into recording studios and cell phones that function as…

Aug. 22, 2011: A couple of years ago I found myself in a small town in Patagonia called San Martín de los Andes. The town lies in a fold in the mountains, but a short, steep hike…

Aug. 5, 2011: The games blogger at The Guardian, Keith Stuart, posted an essay recently that started out like a broadside against the whole idea of…

July 19, 2011: “IT ALL ENDS JULY 15.” Seldom has a marketing slogan…

June 14, 2011: Everywhere I go this year, I seem to run into a branded content discussion. From DIY Days in New York, to the “Brisk: Machete”…

May 20, 2011: When Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the show-runners who kept Lost going for six seasons, negotiated an end to the series…

March 13, 2011: Decades before anyone thought to create an alternate reality game, Walt Disney invented…

Feb. 28, 2011: Call it a delayed reaction. I think the full import of Social Media Week began to hit me a couple of hours after my first event…

Jan. 12, 2011: I suspect the real reason the ad industry is so diligent about giving awards to itself is that…

Dec. 23, 2010: It’s been a week now since Faber and Faber, the UK publisher, released Malcolm…

Dec. 20, 2010: It’s always a little hard trying to keep up with Guillermo del Toro, but the past couple of weeks have been tougher than usual.

Nov. 30, 2010: Just in case 3-D wasn’t immersive enough for you already, Oakley has come up with a way to make it even more…

Oct. 20, 2010: The last time I spoke with Tommy Pallotta, he was in Texas producing Richard Linklater’s…

Aug. 18, 2010: It used to be that after the movie was shot, the actors went home. But last spring, months after TRON: Legacy had wrapped…

March 23, 2010: From the moment of its introduction at E3 2006, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain promised an experience games have never truly…

Dec. 14, 2009: One of the most intriguing comments I heard while reporting the making of ‘Avatar’ for Wired came not from James Cameron himself (though there were plenty of those) but from…

Dec. 7, 2009: Ubisoft, developers of ‘Avatar: The Game,’ are fond of saying that the world of Pandora can be experienced through…

Nov. 24, 2009: If last Wednesday’s program at Future of Television East offered a taste of the deep media future, this past weekend’s Futures of Entertainment 4 at MIT was a full-on…

Nov. 19, 2009: The deep media approach to storytelling is clearly gaining momentum. At last year’s Future of Television East conference in New York, the focus…

Nov. 3, 2009: When Take Two Interactive lifted the embargo on previews of BioShock 2 last week, gamers discovered a major…

Aug. 15, 2009: There’s been a lot of discussion over at the TPM Café Book Club about what the Internet is doing to the music scene — not just to the industry, which…

July 23, 2009: Those razor-beaked flying squid that terrorized divers off San Diego last weekend were not — repeat, not — mutant…

July 2, 2009: Variety discovered deep media this week (okay, they called it transmedia, but I’m not going to get pedantic) in the person of Jeff Gomez, whose…

June 16, 2009: Sometimes you seize the moment, and sometimes the moment seizes you. That’s what’s happening with Twitter right now.

June 9, 2009: Can a video game rival a movie for emotional intensity? Clearly David Cage thinks so, and he’s out to prove it with the PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavy Rain. “I see…

May 27, 2009: The June issue of Wired has a provocative piece by my colleague Steven Levy on Googlenomics—that is, Google’s extraordinary success at transforming…

May 12, 2009: Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers — too much, it may turn out.

May 8, 2009: Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the phenomenally popular CSI franchise on TV, came to New York last week to unveil…

April 21, 2009: Barely a month after book publishers took a beating for their dearth of new ideas at SXSW Interactive, we’re starting to see signs of what innovation can…

March 14, 2009: When does videogame marketing stop being just a promo come-on and become part of the product? This kind of crossover…

Feb. 28, 2009: For anyone interested in how digital technology is changing storytelling — and every other creative endeavor…

Feb. 3, 2009: In thinking about deep media, I’ve been rereading McLuhan. And one thing that’s struck me is how much the idea of media that’s participatory—that you don’t…

Jan. 24, 2009: After nearly a decade of writing full-time for Wired, I’ve started a book. It’s about how narrative is changing in the Internet age, and how that affects…