FRANK ROSE

I’m writing a book. It’s about the future of narrative in the Internet age, and how it affects entertainment, marketing, our brains, and myriad other stuff. Let me explain.

A year ago, in January 2008, I published an article in Wired about Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero—not the album but the alternate reality game, which Trent Reznor had developed the year before with a little company called 42 Entertainment. Together, the game and the album told the story of a future America ravaged by climate change, racked by terrorism, and ruled by a Christian military dictatorship. But where the album told this story in song, the game—a cascading sequence of riddles and puzzles that played out over several months, both online and in the real world—actually sought to give people a taste of what life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state might be like. After the article came out, I began to see such games as the leading edge of a much larger trend: a radical transformation in storytelling that’s sweeping not just entertainment but many other aspects of our lives, from marketing to commerce to education to the face we present to the public. After centuries of linear storytelling, the Internet is encouraging the emergence of a new type of narrative—one that’s told through many media at once in a way that is nonlinear, participatory, and gamelike in nature.

Now I’m starting a book on the subject. Tentatively called Welcome to the Hyperdrome, it will be published by W.W. Norton, the home of such writers as Nicholas Carr, Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman, and Michael Lewis. 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. No one yet knows precisely what form this new narrative will take. But we see signs of its emergence all around us: in TV shows like Lost, which spurs fans to collaborate online to figure out the latest twist in an increasingly convoluted plot; in movies like The Dark Knight, which drew millions of people into elaborate games that gave them a role in the story; in books like Scholastic’s The 39 Clues, which augments the storyline with information that can only be gleaned on the Web; in social media, from YouTube to MySpace to Twitter, which encourage people to document their lives online in a fluid, collaborative, and very public autobiography.

This is a period of intense experimentation, but it’s not the first time the way people tell stories has changed. Every major advance in communications has given birth to a new form of narrative: the printing press and the emergence of the novel in the 17th and 18th centuries; film and the evolution of cinema at the turn of the 20th century; television and the rise of the sitcom in the mid-20th century. The Internet, like radio and television in their earliest days, has so far served mainly as a vehicle for retransmitting familiar formats. For all the talk of “new media,” the Internet to date has served as little more than a new delivery mechanism for old media, from newspapers to music to TV shows. As disruptive as it has been to media businesses, it is only beginning to have an impact on media itself.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. It took at least 150 years for the invention of the printing press to give rise to the modern novel; 35 years for the invention of film to yield movies as we know them; 30 years for television to give us the sitcom. Each of these developments led to a major shift in human consciousness. By presenting the truth of individual experience, as the critic Ian Watt put it, the novel gave people for the first time a window onto one another’s lives. Hollywood provided a much bigger window, and substituted movie stars for ordinary people. Radio helped transform a fractious mishmash of immigrant populations into a nation, or at least a market. Television, as Clay Shirky has pointed out, did society the favor of soaking up all the free time created by vacuum cleaners, automatic dishwashers, and post-World War II prosperity. Now, 20 years into the development of the Web, the sitcom is practically dead (the best efforts of Tina Fey notwithstanding), and the concept of leisure time has all but evaporated in a constant bombardment of information. As digital media come to permeate our lives, boundaries that once seemed clear—between storyteller and audience, content and marketing, illusion and reality—are starting to blur. Decades ago, computer scientists introduced the idea of hypertext, which uses links to create a network of information sources. Now we are moving into a hyperdrome, into some sort of all-encompassing info-maze where everyone and everything are connected. Please visit my blog to learn more, and to participate in the discussion.

As a contributing editor at Wired, I've spent the past decade writing about the changes digital technology has wrought on media and entertainment. I've covered the video game face-off between Sony and Microsoft; the rise of Samsung and the Korean techno-state; the disastrous merger of Vivendi and Universal and the even more disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner; Motorola’s efforts to stay afloat in the mobile phone business; and network television’s attempts to reinvent itself as viewers leave and advertisers threaten to follow. In the process I've interviewed such people as James Cameron, Steve Case, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Nobuyuki Idei, Rupert Murdoch, Steven Spielberg, and Howard Stringer. I've also led debates about the future of media at such venues as the Cannes Film Festival and San Francisco's Churchill Club. On this site you'll find links to many of my major stories as well as expanded versions of some of the more recent pieces.

Before joining Wired, I was a contributing writer at Fortune, where I wrote about Hollywood and the global media conglomerates that dominate it. In the past I've worked as a contributing writer at Premiere, covering the film industry; as a contributing editor at Esquire, writing about pop culture and the rise of Silicon Valley; and as a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. I've also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, New York, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.

My most recent book is The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, a detailed look at the oldest and for many years most powerful agency in Hollywood. Published in 1995 by HarperCollins, The Agency is an alternate history of show business—a multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal that stretches from the vaudeville era to Morris’s near-demise at the hands of Michael Ovitz. My previous book, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (Viking, 1989), chronicled the launch of Macintosh and the power struggle between Steve Jobs and John Sculley. A national best-seller, it was named one of the year’s ten best by Business Week. I'm also the author of Into the Heart of the Mind: An American Quest for Artificial Intelligence (Harper & Row, 1984), a national best-seller about the efforts of a group of researchers at Berkeley to give a computer common sense.

A native of Virginia, I moved to New York shortly after receiving a B.A. in journalism from Washington & Lee. I started out covering the Lower Manhattan punk scene of the '70s for The Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads. I live in the East Village, a neighborhood that still retains echoes of Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, and Peter Stuyvesant.