Deep Media and the Durability of Ideas

Deep Media – A while back I swore I was going to try and keep a running tally of new feeds I add to my daily RSS ingestion – the goal there was to try and give myself (if not you the reader) a more complete picture of the whos and whys of my online reading habits. Needless to say I have been a bit lazy in keeping to this regimen.

However, today I added a feed that is so completely within my philosophical wheelhouse I felt compelled to share it here. The blog (Deep Media) is for the upcoming book Welcome to the Hyperdrome by Wired columnist Frank Rose. In the author’s words:

The idea is to document—and where possible to participate in—the attempt to forge a new type of storytelling that’s native to the Internet. After centuries of linear storytelling, the Internet is encouraging the emergence of a radically new style of narrative—one that’s told through many media at once in a nonlinear fashion. Such narratives encourage you not merely to watch but to participate, and in the process they become something resembling a game. This is “deep media”: stories that are not just entertaining but immersive, that take you deeper than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit.

Great stuff. I toyed with very similar concepts in the early stages of thinking through my Master’s thesis – but a combination of facts (it was 1996, before literature was media, I was enrolled in a fairly conservative New Jersey teacher factory, none of my advisers had any real sense of what the internet was, they had a very formulaic structure for thesis writing) made it hard to do new types of work. So instead of traveling down the well worn road of academic literary theory I bailed.

In the decade plus it has been since I left the academic world sites like Deep Media and writers like Frank Rose (Henry Jenkins has to be singled out here as well) have provided me with the material I need to continue studying these ideas outside the institutional setting. For that reason I am excited to see just where he (we?) takes the blog and his book.