Media Mindfulness

A clever marketing trick: make a commercial from a fictional product in your book that is unusual, strange and sexy. Add YouTube and the blogosphere, mix and you have a meme. Additionally the Web tie-in is similar to what the ABC series Lost has done with its show by constructing a parallel universe on the Web that features characters, companies and false histories that coincide with the show. In the case of Lost, the program has also devised games that are like treasure hunts which use its various Web sites and video games for generating clues. It’s a vastly more interesting form of entertainment than we are normally accostomed to because it goes beyond the normal boundary of the program, thereby expanding the initial ecology of the media piece. In the case of of Michael Crichton’s book, NEXT, this is a very interesting development for books, his position on global warming not withstanding.

Visit the book’s fictional company at NEXTgencode.

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