Ekstasis

“The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.”

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…This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”