The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?

Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. That it’s common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener—an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy. Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature—a face, a figure, a flower—and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise.

The way we tell them changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. The Internet is the first medium that can act like all media—it can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above. It’s nonlinear, thanks to the World Wide Web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It’s inherently participatory—not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in. And it is immersive—meaning that you can use it to drill down as deeply as you like about anything you want to know about....

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