I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 movie based on it into existence within the world of the book. By detailing his characters’ reactions to the original, darkly disturbing novel depicting their lives, and then to its sanitized film adaptation, Ellis effectively creates a narrative world that extends, and can be experienced across these multiple media formats, each one adding its own element to the complete story. There is, currently, an emergence of popular entertainment specifically designed to be transmedia experiences, to jump from platform to platform, and, in the process, intertwine the real world with the fictional, but Ellis, who became a published author when he was still in college, has long maintained that, for him, a novel is just a novel, approached and developed according to the dictates of its own medium. Nevertheless, Ellis has always had a penchant for referencing actual pop culture — movies, music, fashion, celebrities, night clubs, etc. — within his stories. It’s pretty much his trademark. His work has, all along, incorporated multiple other media into its fictional world, and, in turn, become an indelible part of the popular culture on which it comments.

In this fantastic interview on BigThink.com, Ellis muses about the possibilities for the future of fiction in the digital age and touches on what is, essentially, transmedia storytelling. It could, he says, “even possibly re-energize my faith in fiction.”

Have a listen. It’s great stuff:

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Bonus: a fun clip of Ellis talking about schooling his publisher on how to function in the “post-empire“… errr … in the social media age:

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“God is alone — but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company;
he is legion.”
- Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude,” Walden, 1854

Standing on the field at Coachella 2008, the endless noise and heat like physical things pushing and shoving in a mosh pit, the blast clouds of music spilling out from monolithic stacks of speakers across four hundred acres, the polo field crawling like an ant-farm with a hundred thousand bodies, it suddenly occurred to me that the only historical precedent for this sort of massive concentration of people and resources and infrastructure in one place at one time had to have been… war.

I’d only slept a few hours the previous night, been up since early enough to hear Prince’s sound-check as the score to the start of my workday, and looking through the 100+ degree Palm Sprigs haze that afternoon under the sweltering sky, I imagined ancient Greek or Roman or Macedonian battlegrounds and thought they might not have looked too different.

In college I’d started throwing raves; at the turn of the millennium I was part of the promotions team at New York’s iconic Lunatarium, a 20-thousand square foot warehouse space in DUMBO dubbed “the studio 54 of the moveon.org crowd” by the New York Times; by the mid-aughties I’d been the Online marketing Coordinator for House of Blues Concerts in Southern California, lead the social media strategy for Live Nation’s Street Scene Music Festival in San Diego, consulted on web strategy for the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, and at the moment of that heat-stroked revelation on the Empire Polo Field was the Marketing Director for an independent event creations company which, in addition to Coachella, that summer would also work with the Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan, Optimus Alive Festival in Portugal, All Points West Festival in New York, the Virgin Music Festival in Baltimore, Electric Picnic in Ireland, and finish off the season with a stint at Burningman.

Needless to say, this wild proliferation and growth of massive music festivals over the past decade was something I’d noticed. Yet at the same time that I was in the front row seat at the concert industry, my career also overlapped with the ascension of social technology. At the time, already anachronistic phrases like “new media,” and “electronic marketing” were still being tossed about to describe my inevitable department. Just the year before, at SXSW Interactive 2007, when Myspace was still king of the web and Facebook was just a college dorm and the newly-launched Twitter was yet to be anything but the geeks’ private playground, there were still panels called things like, “Why Marketers Need To Work With ‘People Media’“. Hard to imagine now that just a few years ago, the term “Social Media” had barely entered the mainstream marketing lexicon. Witnessing the rise in demand for massive music festival experiences and the mass adoption of digital and social technologies, it occurred to me that these two seemingly disparate forces were not only gaining traction in tandem, they were, in fact, both part of a far lager and more meaningful societal shift.

“Mass Mingling” is what trendwatching.com called it, one of their “10 Crucial Consumer Trends For 2010:”

More people than ever will be living large parts of their lives online in 2010. Yet, those same people will also mingle, meet up, and congregate more often with other ‘warm bodies’ in the offline world. In fact, social media and mobile communications are fueling a MASS MINGLING that defies virtually every cliché about diminished human interaction in our ‘online era’.

So, forget (for now) a future in which the majority of consumers lose themselves in virtual worlds. Ironically the same technology that was once seen to be—and condemned for—turning entire generations into homebound gaming zombies and avatars, is now deployed to get people out of their homes.

Basically, the more people can get their hands on the right info, at home and on the go; the more they date and network and twitter and socialize online, the more likely they are to eventually meet up with friends and followers in the real world. Why? Because people actually enjoy interacting with other warm bodies, and will do so forever.

At SXSW Interactive 2010, convincing marketers that they need social media would have been about as necessary as convincing them they live on a round planet. Attendance for Interactive grew by 40% in the past year alone, and for the first time surpassed that of both the film and music portions of the festival. This year, the hot new thing getting everyone’s panties in a twist was location-based social technologies like Foursquare and G0walla, which add a real-time, real-place dimension to social media. You’re not just keeping up with your friends’ status updates or photo uploads anymore, you’re now actually aware of where they are in relation to you geographically — and perhaps it’s at the bar next door, which you may never have known otherwise, but now that you do, you can all meet up. Much of the appeal of these new location-based social applications is the alleviation — or perhaps the compulsive exacerbation — of FOMO (”fear of missing out”) on ever more potential social opportunities.

But what’s interesting to me in all this isn’t that, social creatures such as we are, we’re using yet more new technology to enable evolutionary imperatives — so, we’re using new gadgets to scratch the itch of 200,000-year-old human desires, and this is a new trend for 2010 why? — but rather that, much like music festivals themselves, our new social experiences seem to be happening at a consistently unprecedented scale. We are no longer content to have social experiences, we want bigger, faster, louder, immediate, MASSIVE social experiences. The kind of resources that thousands of years ago would have been summoned for the purpose of defending an empire, and decades ago for a singular moment in the Summer of Love, are now routinely assembled every weekend of the annual music festival season.

In his essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The End of Solitude,” former Yale professor William Deresiewicz writes:

Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she’ll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation’s experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one’s lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation.

Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about “the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment.” Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn’t even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

Which is why massive festivals have exploded like manic Murakami mushrooms after a radioactive rain. Having produced and marketed music festivals I am keenly aware that it’s not just the lineup that sells the ticket. “The Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness,” adds Deresiewicz, “as television is for the manufacture of boredom.” The same technology that allows us to be more connected than ever before imaginable, on its flip side, perhaps even simply through contrast, has increased our capacity for loneliness. We have built up a new tolerance level, and all we do is want more more more. Hence, the compulsion to feel a part of something, something massive, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other people, all experiencing the same trending topic stream together as it scrolls by. Of course, it helps that adding music to the cocktail lends a self-transcending aspect to the experience — as does rolling or tripping or being stoned or drunk, which, lets face it, you probably are if you’re at a festival. Taking part in these massive social experiences has become a default rite of passage, an almost religious annual ceremony, and, perhaps, an addiction like any other, demanding we keep upping the dose at every tinge of the creeping withdrawal that is loneliness.

So, as the legions prepare to head to the Palm Desert this weekend to score a fix at the kickoff to the annual music festival season (the first of the 2010’s) that is Coachella, and as the rest of us, too, keep tap tap taping our QWERTY keys and touchscreens like pushing the air-bubbles out of a syringe, Deresiewicz reminds us: “We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood. No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it.”

To the extent that any advertising works, the model in place at websites like Hulu and Fancast, that offer commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, is pretty damn effective. Unlike the 3-minute average TV commercial break, which most people Tivo past or click away for or simply go to the bathroom during, the 30-second “limited commercial interruption” on your online machine gets you to pay attention. 30 seconds isn’t enough to walk away for, after all. Sure, you can pause to answer nature’s call or email’s or SMS’s or whatever, but the remainder of the ad will play when you unpause. You can, at most, surf over to another browser tab, but nevertheless you’re still listening to the ad’s audio, and on several occasions I’ve gotta admit this was intriguing enough unto itself to get me to tab back. (The lazer-bassy sounding Asics ad with the Asian male model dude running through psychedelic milk formations is coming to mind).

At the same time, because the commercial interruption really IS limited — one ad per break — and often Hulu even offers a choice as to which ad you’d prefer to see and in what sort of format (a long-form ad before the program starts, with no breaks later on is also an option), it doesn’t feel nearly as offensive and imposing as the ads that you DO have time to walk away from on the teevee. The one thing that’s missing is a feature to click to see the ad directly, replay it, and embed or share it. Right now you still have to go over to youtube or elsewhere if you want to find the ad you just saw on Hulu (counter intuitive, no?) and sometimes you can’t even find the ad anywhere (the Timberland Earthkeepers ad where the sole of the shoe keeps morphing into all sorts of things like an eagle and a tire, etc, is coming to mind. I STILL can’t find that shit, and it was hella cool.)

As Hulu’s brand keeps growing — it overtook the big broadcast networks that own shares of it (ABC, NBC and Fox) in web traffic for the first time this past June — less, it turns out, really is more, paricularly when it comes to commercials. Now, how long until Hulu starts producing its own original content, you think? Let’s just hope Netflix (whose Red Envelope Entertainment division, responsible for licensing and distributing films such as Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby expanded to produce its own original content in 2006 only to close down just 2 years later in part to avoid competition with its studio partners) isn’t necessarily a permanent precedent.

This is a terrific initiative by Estee Lauder, seamlessly combining live + digital.

From AdAge:

The venerable Estee Lauder cosmetics brand has found a seemingly natural way to connect with social media: offering free makeovers and photo shoots at its department-store cosmetics counters coast-to-coast to produce shots women can use for their online profiles.

The promotion, which kicks off Oct. 16 at Bloomingdale’s in New York and will extend initially to Macy’s, Saks and other Bloomingdale’s stores in Southern California, Miami and Chicago, also includes a giveaway of a 10-day supply of foundation.
Defying convention in a prestige cosmetics industry that has buried consumers under piles of makeup totes and other “gifts with purchase” for decades, no purchase is required for these gifts. The gift that the brand hopes will keep on giving is that the profile photos include the Estee Lauder logo in the background, which, assuming they aren’t Photoshopped into oblivion, could give the brand lasting presence on Facebook beyond its own 27,000-member plus fan page. The promotion is being plugged on that page, as well as on Estee Lauder’s website, and the company is also using PR to spread the word.

With a target age of 35 to 55, Estee Lauder consumers aren’t necessarily prototypical social-media mavens. But the promotion has a dual strategy, said spokeswoman Tara Eisenberg: helping contemporize the brand for younger women while recognizing that somewhat older women have rapidly embraced social media, too.

AdAge’s Kunur Patel wrote about experiencing this campaign for herself at the initial New York event:

The session started with snapping a “before” pic at the Estee Lauder cosmetics counter’s newly installed computer kiosk, which salespeople tell me will stay around even after the promotion ends. Sitting in front of the kiosk, a webcam grabbed a picture of the not-yet-glamorous me, and a staff makeup specialist started to test out a range of shades on a pixilated palette version of my face. But instead of waiting for the Photoshop-esque makeover, I opted to scoot right over for the real thing. I sat down with an artist who started by rubbing some creams and gels into my cheeks. She very sweetly informed me I could use some hydration, and Estee had just the thing for me.

Layers of foundation, liners, shadows and powders later, I emerged a new woman. While I had asked for a toned-down, professional look, my new plum pout had me feeling more like a mobile upload to Facebook on Saturday night. Freshly done up, I headed over to the brand’s photo-shoot station, where the face of Estee Lauder, model Hilary Rhoda, offered to teach me how to pose for the camera. My pink oxford paled in comparison to her magenta mini dress and stilettos, so I politely offered to brave the lights and photographer on my own. A couple of smiles and flashes later and I was ready to go.

Behind the scenes, a retoucher hid the blemishes the makeup artist couldn’t, and by the time I got back to the office, my before-and-after pics were waiting in my inbox.

While Estee’s social-media service could use more subtle dials to get at those looks between off-the-street and super-vamp, a makeover is a makeover. It was fun, and the whole experience was a lot more glamorous than my previous experience with the brand, which was a dull tube of mascara and neutral eyeshadow in my mom’s bathroom cabinet. Though a couple other women getting makeovers were older than me, a good number of the salespeople weren’t. They were young and made-up but classy — a lot different than the rainbow, slightly gothic Mac Cosmetics people I usually buy eyeshadow from.

So, am I going to post my made-over pic to my LinkedIn profile? I would, if I were a news anchor. But I’m sure my Facebook friends will get a kick out of it, and I’m betting the Estee and Bloomie’s branding in the background won’t be lost on them.

Rian Johnson, the writer/director of Brick, has a new movie out called The Brothers Bloom, and it comes with a pretty neat idea:

I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before, and Johnson admits the same at the beginning of the commentary. But for the man who came up with the idea to make a movie cocktail out of mixing film noir with a high school flick in his first feature, doing something new is the name of the game.  In fact, at Brick’s opening night screening, at the Arclight in 2005, Johnson gave out little “Brick Talk” booklets that provided a glossary to guide viewers  through the movie’s particular slang world:

Also something I’ve never seen done before, or since.

The director’s audio commentary for The Brother’s Bloom is essentially the sort of thing you’d expect to find as a DVD bonus feature, and the idea is, of course, that you’re not listening to it the first time you watch the movie. Johnson jokes that it’s all just a ploy to get you to pay your admission a second time, but really, this idea has the potential for something much more. After all, interesting though it may be to listen to the director divulge all the subliminal symbolism and literary allusions embedded in the movie (hey, what can I say, I was a film student), it’s just a starting-off point for what this sort of audio “bonus track” could really be.

Think of it like 3-D (which is, in its 21-century digital reincarnation, once again all the rage) an extra “dimension” to how a movie can be experienced. It could be a supplemental soundtrack, or a character’s voice-over adding new meaning to the action, or even a layer of hidden clues — or puzzles — in a larger Alternate Reality Game around the movie. Who knows?

In the commentary, Johnson even toys with a social experiment: to see who else in the theater might be listening to the commentary track, as you are, he suggests all listeners cough on his cue.

Ok, so it’s probably smart to keep the encouragements for vocal “outbursts” in the theater setting to minimum, but this idea certainly presents a lot of possibilities in terms of how the traditional movie experience — which has more or less been the same for the past, like, 80 years — can be expanded and reimagined.

What’s more interesting is that the google results for the term “2012″ do not turn up a website for the movie. The closest you get is the IMDB listing, which is, like, half a dozen items down the list anyway. Meanwhile, the results do include such options as: “2012 – End of the World?” “Survive 2012: Ancient Mayan Doomsday” “Year 2012 Predictions” “No Doomsday in 2012” “2012 – The Future of Mankind” and so forth.

In case you’ve managed to escape having heard about this latest trend in end-of-the-world prophecy up till this moment, according to Wikipedia:

2012 is claimed by some with New age beliefs to be a great year of spiritual transformation (or alternatively an apocalypse). There is disagreement among believers as to whether 2012 will see an end of civilization, or humanity will be elevated to a higher level.

Many esoteric sources interpret the completion of the thirteenth B’ak’tun cycle in the Long Count of the Maya calendar (which occurs on December 21 by the most widely held correlation) to mean there will be a major change in world order.

Astrologer John Jenkins has determined that on this date, there will be “an extremely close conjunction of the northern hemisphere winter solstice sun with the crossing point of the Galactic equator and the ecliptic”, an event that will not be repeated for thousands of years. 

Several authors have published works which claim that a major, world-changing event will take place in 2012:

• The 1997 book The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin claims that, according to certain algorithms of the Bible code, an asteroid or comet will collide with the Earth.
• The 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck discusses theories of a possible global awakening to psychic connection by the year 2012, creating a “noosphere.”
• Riley Martin claims that Biaviian aliens will allow passage aboard their ‘Great Mother Ship’ when the Earth is ‘transformed’ in 2012.
• Terence McKenna’s numerological novelty theory suggests a point of singularity in which humankind will go through a great shift in consciousness.

And so on.

Clearly, there’s quite a good deal of differing speculation going on, all of it perfect subject matter for the creator of such cinematic fare as 10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, and Godzilla. By offering a google search instruction instead of a url, the film avoids narrowing such a broad, hot-button topic down into a typically useless movie website, and, instead, capitalizes on the full breadth of the phenomenon that is 2012.

For people who’ve never heard of 2012 before, this is a great way to add an unbeatable, real-world level of intrigue to the promotion of a Summer Action Disaster flick. For those that have, it’s a great way to leave all the contested options (Armageddon? Enlightenment? Close Encounter?) out on the table.

Creating a real-world narrative that can be used to expand the promotion for an entertainment property is what Alternate Reality Games are based on. What’s interesting in this case, though, is that the movie takes advantage of a back-story that already exists, and, furthermore, has been defined not by ARG designers, but by an open-source kind of process. The phenomenon behind the movie is whatever reality google says it is.

For context, imagine a remake of Waterwrold, where at the end of the preview, the instructions would read: “Google Search: Climate Crisis.”

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