A (not so) long time ago...

I watched part of the "Star Wars: One Letter at a Time" piece from the Electronic Literature Collection, but I have to say, I found the experience very weird. (I wonder if anyone's actually sat down and watched it all the way through, because even as I finish writing this blog post, we're only at the part where Threepio and Artoo escape to Tatooine in the escape pod. Anyway, on to the real post...)
I was a huge Star Wars fan growing up, so I've got practically that whole script memorized. Because of that, I was able to follow along most of the time, even if I stopped watching it for a while and came back to it later. At the same time, I found that if I stopped consciously thinking about which scene was being written out, they all just became individual letters without meaning. When that happened, the piece became almost entirely removed from Star Wars, because it could have been anything and still have just been letters flashing across the screen.
It was interesting to experience those different levels of meaning, how on one hand I was completely aware that it was the Star Wars script, and on the other hand the letters became nothing but letters.

Before I really started watching the piece, I was thinking about how much more interactive entertainment is. Instead of just watching a film or reading a book and talking to our friends about it, now people are actually creating their own work about the film or book or whatever it might be. We draw fan art, we write fan fiction, we make music videos from clips of the movie or TV show. The audience isn't passive at all anymore; we play a much more active role in how we respond to things. This Star Wars piece, for example, takes a familiar film, and turns it into something completely different. At the heart of it, it's still the same words, the same characters, the same plot, but it's an entirely new experience from watching the original film. Audiences today feel the need to be a part of the creative experience now, and it's reflected in all the fan-created material that's floating around out there online.
Even the marketing campaigns for shows have gotten in on this active audience idea. The marketing campaign for "Lost" comes to mind. Instead of just having a show on TV, now there's the whole "Lost experience" online. There are websites to go to with clues about the mysteries and the characters on the show. There are fake advertisements from Oceanic Airlines during the commercial breaks on TV. The creators of the show understand this shift in audience participation, and they're working with it to get people more into the experience of watching the show.
For me, personally, I quite like the shift towards a more active audience, because I'm exactly that kind of person. When I get into a TV show, for example, when I grow to love the characters, I feel the need to make them my own in some small way, usually by writing or reading fanfiction, and it just helps to make the world and the characters that much more real and the experience more enjoyable.