Why Lost is genuinely new media

This post about Why Lost is genuinely new media looks fascinating:

I’ve been as impressed with the way that the creators of Lost have enabled interaction around the show as with the show itself. Perhaps ‘enabled’ could be replaced with ‘coordinated’ or even ‘manipulated’, but strategically, the call-and-response relationship between the form of the show and the unfolding interaction across varying platforms would appear to indicate a very sophisticated understanding of contemporary media indeed. To aid communication, I’ve attempted to illustrate this process with a hastily-produced graphic score (below), but first, some set-up …

A while ago, I wrote about a theory of using the ripples made possible by new media, to enable a trackable ’social life of a broadcast’, based on our work at BBC radio. What Lost has done is far beyond that, truly raising the bar for much mainstream media. Again, it’s ever clearer - frankly it was at the time - that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at ‘new media experiences’. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I’d suggest this piece of work - Lost, when viewed in its entirety - is truly new.

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Unfortunately I had to stop reading a few paragraphs in because I’m waiting for season 2 to start on Channel 4 and There Be Spoilers part way through the post, but Dan Hon assures us that the article is worthwhile and I’m quite prepared to believe him. I have to wait about six months to find out for myself, but if you’re up to speed with the US broadcast schedule and find the introductory remarks above intriguing you should probably have at it…

[Via Words]