I attended Jason Mittell's talk on "The Case of Television Storytelling in the Digital Era" on Saturday. He spoke about how the nature of television shows is changing from a more passive medium to a more interactive one. This is what I am writing my midterm project on, so it was very interesting to me. Mittell spoke about the need for "storyworld consistency", which means that shows have to avoid contradictions and hold the storyline together. Mittell argues that this is increasingly important because viewers are becoming more and more involved with the shows they watch. If narratives include something that doesn't mesh with the rest of the plot, even if it is something insignificant, viewers will realize it and the news will probably spread around the web and breed negative attitudes about the show. Mittell also talked about new techniques that producers are employing in order to get viewers involved with the experience of the show. One new technique used is "varying temporality and perspectives", where the same scenes may be shown with different interpretations of time or from the point of view of another character. He then gave a list of American shows that he believed showed "narrative complexity". He noted Lost as being "something to be collectively engaged in" and showed the clip in which viewers got their first glimpse of the blast door map. He discussed how after seeing a couple-second clip, viewers from around the world got together to try to piece together the messages and drawings on the map. Within 24 hours viewers had created a translation of the map that was so complete that it overshadowed one released by Entertainment Magazine (who had been given a higher quality graphic by the producers). This really hit home for me because I was one of those people who saw the clip on the show and then went online to see what others had found out about it. This is not an uncommon occurance in Lost. After almost every episode I find myself going online to check up on some fact or picture, and I am never disappointed. There are tons of active viewers of the show, and they put their minds together online to "play the show" as if it were a game. So, in conclusion, Lost is amazing.