From the moment I published The Art of Immersion—what, five years ago?—I've been focused on the idea that digital means blurring boundaries. The industrial age was all about categorization, in media as elsewhere: You had newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, television, each with its own distinctive format and delivery mechanism. To see a movie you went to a movie theater; to listen to radio you turned on the radio; to watch television you turned on the TV set; to read a newspaper you had to pick it up from the driveway. But now, except for the movie theater (sometimes), that's all rapidly becoming history.
So why do digital media—books, video, video games, advertising, art, journalism—still exist for the most part in their own separate universes? Not that they'd ever be the same thing, but you might expect more crossover. That was one of the questions I had in mind when I helped launch the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab's "Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling."
Continue reading "Columbia's first annual Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling" »