The Tribeca Film Festival began yesterday, meaning that:

• Movie-goers and celebrities alike will pack the typically quiet streets of Tribeca to attend screenings of both new and classic films – many of which are free and open to the public
• Sponsors will be competing for the best activation;

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The comprehensiveness of Frank Rose’s The Art of Immersion is a testament to its own assertions and concerns. In its 333 pages, the book managed to convince me of its philosophical backdrop: knowledge may be anywhere, in anyone, at any time.  The assertions, psychological and cultural allusions, and anecdotes form a huge—but somehow cohesive—network of meaning (kudos, Rose). At the center of Rose’s focus on the changing landscape of advertising and television are two things: storytelling and narrative, and Rose keeps the text interesting and diverse by invoking psychologists, classic writers, and even fictional avatars. He jumps right into the thick of it in his Prologue, discussing the human necessity of storytelling for two reasons: first, for its inherent reliance on a symbiotic human relationship between teller and hearer, creator and viewer; second, as we’ll learn later in the book, because humans crave meaning. In part because my Masters thesis deals with this very issue, I couldn’t help but unite the two reasons and wonder where, how, and by whom is meaning created?

Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare has been awarded The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina.

One billion dollars later, Facebook is now the proud owner of the ever-popular Instagram.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom have teamed up to bring everyone under one roof and make photo sharing an even better experience.

Unilever Germany is testing the boundaries of Brand-Consumer communication with promotions for its new line of low-calorie food products, using the tagline: “Fuck the Diet.”