I recently read a book on immersion called The art of Immersion by Frank Rose. It’s a good book and it’s entertaining. In a nutshell, it describes the changes that hit the “content industry” (film studios, publishers and – related to it – advertising) when the Internet emerged as a global communication means. It discusses some of the attempts to include “the Internet” in the way how stories are told in movies and books and how some companies tried to involve fans for commercial purposes.
It is no surprise, however, that the industry at first struggled (and some companies sill do) to understand phenomena like fan-movies, web sites dedicated to a TV series and so on. After all, they wanted to control “their product” which they sold to their customers. This is easy to understand from a purely commercial point of view: if you own something, you can easily sell it. But this has changed: (some) customers just do not want to be told how and what to consume. They want a different experience and are not passive consumers anymore. They want to be immersed into stories by actively participating and thus changing them. They desire influence and control over the content they are confronted with.
Similar things can be observed – on a different level of “immersion” – with users of mobile phones: some just want to have complete control over their device and to do whatever they please. But it seems that carriers have something against this: they lock the devices and provide pre-installed software (and no way of changing this). Especially on Android, it’s common to have a carrier-customized phone. While this is understandable from a commercial perspective (is it really?), lots of power users are frustrated: they bought a device for several hundreds of Euros and – by making an analogy to cars – cannot even open the hood to take a look “inside” or remove some of the pre-installed software. It’s a matter of control (and money): a carrier has contracts with software companies and the latter pay to have their software installed on the devices of the users. Having software on a device that you own which you don’t want strikes me as strange: after all you don’t go into a supermarket, pay for milk and get tea instead.
Filmmakers have begun to understand that you have to give up control to have something of real value for the people to like. I think that this is something carriers need to learn: let the user have (full) access to their phones and thus give them something they want. Obviously, this is not suited for every user, but eventually it will create satisfied customers and isn’t this what carriers want?
your ikangai team
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