What do American Idol, lonelygirl15, and Invisible Children have in common?
They were all instituted to function based off of mass audience interactions and they all deliver strong and dramatically-compelling narratives. The idea of interactive preexists video games and virtual worlds, and it’s alway refreshing to go back and examine new ways that interactivity plays out in our world today.
American Idol is the most “house-hold” of the three, mostly because it is most accessible, simple, and easy to digest. The TV show draws you into the parallel narratives of all the contestants on the show. Of course, for a contest where individuals have the opportunity to go against the odds in order to live their greatest dream, American Idol pulls on some core intrinsic desires among all people. Overall, it benefits from this need to satiate a desire for the dramatically compelling and perhaps, affect the outcome of something that matters to somebody. Maybe to abstract even further, it’s to give people a sense of being part of something important or interesting (albeit, there’s not a whole lot of agency as an audience to American Idol).
EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research 
