BOUT FRANK ROSE AND THE SEA WE SWIM IN
Website: https://www.frankrose.com/
FRANK ROSE is the author most recently of The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World, just published in the US and the UK and recently featured in the New York Times Book Review’s “New & Notable” column. His previous book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, was a landmark work that showed how technology is changing the age-old art of storytelling. Sparked by a decade of reporting on media and technology for Wired, it has been called “a grand trip” by New Scientist and “a new media bible” by the Italian daily la Repubblica.
A senior fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, Frank teaches global business executives as faculty director of the executive education seminar Strategic Storytelling, presented in partnership with Columbia Business School. He is also awards director of Columbia’s pioneering Digital Storytelling Lab, where in 2016 he launched the annual Digital Dozen: Breakthroughs in Storytelling awards to honor the most innovative approaches to narrative from the past year.
Frank speaks frequently on the power of immersive storytelling. He has given keynotes at ad:tech Sydney, the Film4 Innovation Summit, The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, and Sheffield Doc/Fest; debated the future of media at South by Southwest, MIT, Ars Electronica, and the Politecnico di Milano; and lectured at Stanford, USC, and NYU. He has addressed global marketing summits at Timberland and Unilever, joined R&D symposia at the Museum of Modern Art and the BBC, taken part in speaker series at Google and Lucasfilm, and led workshops at L’Oréal, TBWA\Chiat\Day, and the United Nations.
A native of Virginia, Frank graduated from Washington & Lee with a degree in journalism and moved soon after to New York. He got his start covering the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads. During this period he partnered with photographer George Bennett on Real Men: Sex and Style in an Uncertain Age, a book about styles of masculinity that featured profiles of seven men—a military cadet, a punk rocker, a professional hockey player, a gay designer, a steelworker, a playboy stockbroker and a Hollywood actor. After that, as a contributing editor at Esquire in the early ’80s, he documented a variety of highly idiosyncratic subcultures—New Wave in New York, generals and bureaucrats in the Pentagon, Christian surfers in southern California, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. One of the first national magazine writers to start reporting on digital technology, he waded into the controversy around artificial intelligence with Into the Heart of the Mind, a Bay Area best-seller about researchers at Berkeley trying to program a computer with common sense.
In his next book, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, Frank delved into the cult of Macintosh and the power struggle between Steve Jobs and John Sculley that ended with Jobs being expelled from the company. Now available in an updated edition, it too became a Bay Area best-seller and was named one of the ten best business books of 1989 by Businessweek. He then turned his attention to Hollywood, becoming a contributing writer at the movie magazine Premiere and profiling such figures as Tim Burton and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Acting on the suggestion of legendary “superagent” Sue Mengers, he turned a story on turmoil at William Morris into The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, a multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal at what was once the leading talent shop in Hollywood.
In 1997 he became a contributing writer at Fortune, where he broadened his focus from Hollywood to the global media conglomerates that dominated it—News Corp., Walt Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Viacom, and Universal—and the often ego-driven moguls who controlled them. Two years later he joined Wired as a contributing editor and over the next decade covered such stories as Samsung and the rise of the South Korean techno-state, the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood, and the making of James Cameron’s Avatar. When he realized as a result of this reporting that digital technology was changing the way we tell stories—that it was making them nonlinear, participatory and immersive—he left Wired to write The Art of Immersion.
Frank’s essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, New York, The New Yorker online, Rolling Stone, strategy+business, Travel+Leisure (where he was a contributing editor in the late ’90s) and Vanity Fair. In addition to his speaking, consulting and academic work, he currently contributes to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He lives in the East Village of Manhattan and travels as widely as possible.
THE SEA WE SWIM IN
How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World
by Frank Rose
A practical guide to “narrative thinking,” and why it matters
in a world defined by data.
“If you want to connect with customers—that is to say, with the audience for the experience
you’ve created—Frank Rose shows not only that you have to think narratively, but how to
go about it, element by element. And he wonderfully exemplifies his ideas, for his stories
about storytelling are superbly written and expertly woven together. Read this book to be
immersed in the sea of storytelling that’s so crucial to business success today.”
—B. Joseph Pine II, coauthor of The Experience Economy and Authenticity
“A master storyteller on the story of stories. Frank Rose deconstructs them expertly—
how they make us pay attention, how they move us, and why we remember them.
His eloquent toolkit will help us make our own stories more effective and avoid
being buffeted by the strange modern sea of digital stories that surrounds us.”
—David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy
“Terrifically readable, as compelling as the many successful stories
and stories of success it tells.”
—Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories
“Frank Rose’s fascinating new book is an essential companion for our age—
when narratives, no matter how incredible, produce real-world outcomes that defy all
reason. The Sea We Swim In takes us systematically through the elements that create
compelling stories and offers a practical guide both to creating powerful tales
and to resisting the pull of the most dangerous.”
—Rita McGrath, author of Seeing Around Corners
and The End of Competitive Advantage
“What a delightful read and a novel contribution. The Sea We Swim In is an essential master
class in how to think about that next pitch you need to make, letter you want to write,
speech you have to deliver, or anything else you hope will be persuasive. The right story can
open up a person’s heart and change their mind far more effectively than an argument
or set of data—and Frank Rose explains it all beautifully.”
—Daniel J. Levitin, best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music
and The Organized Mind
For decades, experts from many fields—psychologists, economists, advertising and
marketing executives—failed to register the power of narrative. Scientists thought stories
were frivolous. Economists were knee-deep in theory. Marketers just wanted to cut to the S
sales pitch. Yet stories, not reasoning, are the key to persuasion. With THE SEA WE
SWIM IN: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World [W. W. Norton & Company; June
29, 2021; $25.95 hardcover], Frank Rose, author of the landmark book The Art of
Immersion, offers a practical guide to “narrative thinking,” and why it matters in a world
that’s defined and increasingly governed by data.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, stories determine how we view the world and our
place in it. That means the tools of professional storytellers—character, world, detail, voice
—can unlock a way of thinking that’s ideal for an age in which we don’t passively consume
media but actively participate in it. Building on insights from cognitive psychology and
neuroscience, Rose shows us how to see the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be
argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told.
Leading brands and top entertainment professionals already understand the vast
potential of storytelling. From Warby Parker to Mailchimp to The Walking Dead, Rose
explains how they use stories to establish their identity and turn ordinary people into fans—
and how you can do the same.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Rose is the author of The Sea We Swim In and The Art of Immersion, a landmark
book on tech and narrative. A former contributing editor at Wired and contributing writer at
Fortune, he now teaches global business executives as faculty director of Columbia
University’s Strategic Storytelling seminar and heads the Digital Dozen awards program at
Columbia’s pioneering Digital Storytelling Lab.
TITLE: THE SEA WE SWIM IN: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World
AUTHOR: Frank Rose
PUBLICATION DATE: June 29, 2021
PRICE: $25.95 hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-324-00313-7