Frank Rose, contributing Editor at Wired has a new book out called The Art of Immersion. I haven’t got my grubby hands on it yet but if this interview (part one and part two) with Henry Jenkins is anything to go by it looks like a must read of the year.

In this interview Rose essentially discusses the concept of ‘deep media’, where people can engage with a story at any level of depth they like. Whilst the interview mostly references the entertainment industry, it’s clear that this is bubbling over into brand communications on a more regular basis. Ford, Honda and BMW are examples of an entire category adopting a kind of ‘deep media’ approach as discussed by Rose.

As a general rule, the majority of advertising has been about lowest common denominator stuff for decades. How can we reach the most people for the least effort and the lowest cost? I’ve said before that people have always had thresholds when it comes to how immersed they are willing to become in a communication. The net result of generations having grown up playing, watching or participating in more immersive stories will change people’s expectations of everything. Even the most humourous 30 second TVC is quite frankly pretty boring to many people. Hence innovations like this from W+K.

However in addition to thoughts on deep media, Rose also goes on to make some fantastic observations relating to the history and evolution of storytelling and communications.

“the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible–and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as “a sense of immediate audience participation.”

But seeing new media as a threat–that’s a pattern we fall into again and again. Now it’s video games and the Internet. Before that it was TV, and before that it was the movies, and a couple hundred years ago it was serial fiction and people like Dickens. The only constant is that whatever is new is threatening. And usually it’s considered threatening because it’s too immersive–you could get lost in it. But that’s exactly what fiction is. If it’s good enough, people are going to want to inhabit it”.