People used to create their own entertainment. After dinner, they’d gather around the piano and sing. They’d make up stories to tell their children. They’d play sports and cards and board games. They’d knit and sew and crochet.

Then along came radio, television and film turning entertainment into a one-way street. Professionals entertained you and you sat back on the sofa with a bowl of chips and paid attention (or fell asleep, as the case may be).

Media that require passivity on the part of the audience aren’t new. Many are great art forms in the hands of great artists. You’re supposed to sit quietly in a theatre, at a concert, while reading a book. The experience of sitting back to be entertained can be wonderfully delicious. There’s nothing quite like gaining access to a rich story world and having its wonders play out for your pleasure.

People want more, at least some people do. I see this very clearly. People want to create and participate. Not everyone, but lots of people. Go to a knitting event. You’ll see hundreds of women buying yarn in order to explore colour and texture and make unique and beautiful things with their own hands. Look at YouTube and all the videos people have made. Look at how many zillions of blogs there are.

Yarn and needles are cheap easy ways to create. Computers and the web give us tools that allow anyone to be a creator/producer/publisher.

TV has dominated North American life for about 50 years. Maybe all this creating and participating is a kind of backlash to media telling people to sit quietly and listen for so many years. Maybe it’s just human nature.

I find the idea of telling stories in a medium that allows me to interact with my audience very exciting, but daunting as hell at the same time.

Yes, I want to know what my audience is thinking and how they’re responding to the story. But the next step after listening to them, is finding a way to invite them into the creative process. That is a scary thought.

Working on a television series you learn how difficult it is to create a story world when a committee is involved. In TV, the committee members include not just the writing team, but also the network, producers and directors. The actors often have something to say as well. It works best if one person has a strong vision and can get everyone else to buy into it. That’s the showrunner’s job; getting the entire team to visualize the same world and built it together.

Only the best and most experienced showrunners do it really well. And they are working with a team of experienced professionals.

Suddenly we have the possibility of audience co-creation. How the hell is that supposed to work? How do you allow an audience hungry to be creative and participatory into the creative process without destroying your end product?

My knee-jerk reaction is to say, you don’t. They can’t. I’m a pro. You’re not. Sit and watch. I’ll tell the story. But then I’m back to the TV experience.

The guys creating Purefold have an interesting model that maybe could work. It certainly takes you a step closer to involving the audience in creation. They are creating a story set in the future. The venture is branded entertainment. Advertisers are paying and their products are part of the story. You can learn more about Purefold in a variety of places around the web.

Their idea for involving audience in creation works like this. They are sharing the research that the writing team are using with the audience through FriendFeed groups. As an audience member, you have access to the same articles, videos and so on that the writers are reading to inform their story telling.

You can participate by commenting and rating articles. The content that most interests the audience will rise to the top and that informs what the writers write.

This is all still theoretical as far as I can tell. There are no Purefold episodes kicking around yet and there doesn’t seem to be a community rating articles yet either. Although I have found a couple of FriendFeed groups with Purefold in the title: Purefold Discussion, Ten Pilot and Directory of Synopses . None of these seem to have much activity in the way of commenting, rating or contributing content.

The Purefold method doesn’t let audiences in on the actual process that goes on in story rooms – the breaking of stories and creation of character – the really fun stuff. But it does allow their choices and interests to inform the direction the story takes, which means its more closely tailored to their interests. If you're in the employ of ad agencies, brands or networks this would probably give them a sense of comfort. It's like advance focus testing.

But in the real world of creating entertainment, will it help create entertaining product? We'll see as Purefold emerges. One thing I can say about this is that when people become fans of projects they are always hungry for more and this gives them more. Plus, the writers are still free to do what they want. They can create their stories however they think they're best created, taking the audiences' whims into account or ignoring them, which I think, is the environment a creator wants to be in.

Another thing it does is give audiences some of the tools that the creators have. Maybe they’ll use it to build onto the story world the creators are making. Maybe they’ll make their own episodes or create characters of their own.

One of the things I like best about the Purefold plan is that they are doing everything under a Creative Commons license which means that you -- no matter who you are -- can take the content they create and build on it, play with it, reshape it, mashup it. You can use it in anyway you choose to fuel your own creative endeavours and not only that, you can profit from doing so. That's very inclusive and foreward thinking.

This is an emerging art form. I find it fascinating.

Don't you want to be creating for this technology?

Mary Feuer is the creator of With the Angels, the most prolific of Strike.tv's new series -- they've already posted 19 episodes. But then again, Mary probably has a great deal more experience in digital than many of the other Strike.tv creators; Mary was head writer on LonelyGirl15. With the Angels is a fully realized web series with lots of character, story and juice to keep you intrigued. Mary kindly agreed to an interview. She's incredibly insightful and anyone working on digital drama will find her thoughts fascinating. The first part of the interview today, second tomorrow:

Q. How did you get started on the web? What's your background in the digital world? Do you have an relevant training? Were you interested in computers and technology? You've written for television, print and the web. How is writing for the web different? How are the three kinds of storytelling the same and different? Which medium do you prefer?

A. a) I got started when I got hired to be the head writer on Lonelygirl15. Before that, I didn't even know there were shows on the web.

b) I produced 2 features on digital video: Barstow 2008 and East Side Story. I wrote and directed a short called "Rock Bottom" that was also shot digitally.

c) All my relevant training - in pretty much any aspect of my life - has been on the job training.

d) I was not the least bit interested in computers and technology. I'm still not - but I know what I have to know to get the job done!

e) On some levels, storytelling is storytelling. That said, you have different tools at your disposal in different media.

In fiction, obviously, you're not dictating the visual to the reader. You can describe what you want them to see, and whose point of view you want them to assume, but they're going to filter it through their own eye and create the world for themselves, to some degree. Which is great. In TV and film you have the ability to actually use the visual as another layer of story: you can show things without having to talk about them, and people can draw conclusions from what they see that they might not have drawn otherwise. The web, for me, combines many of the best elements of both in that you have the visual available to you but there isn't this expectation that you're going to lean on it as heavily as you do in film and TV. In other words, you are free to have your character TELL instead of SHOWING if that works for your story. There's even an element of theater to it, because you often have the immediacy of audience reaction right there in the comments. Does that make sense? That's just a few small areas of difference. There are lots of others.

Generally, web storytelling is condensed in a way that TV and film are not. But again, storytelling is storytelling. There's as much if not more difference between "6 Feet Under" and "24" , or between a Steven King novel and, say, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The delivery mechanism is all those pairs of things have in common: the storytelling is completely different.

f) As to which I prefer, I don't have an overall preference. My characters and stories do, though: they pretty much tell me which medium they want to be presented in.

Q. How do you like working on the web (as compared to television)? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

A. What I like about working on the web right now is, frankly, that it could be gone soon. There are a set of tools and aesthetics you use in the medium that will eventually be eclipsed as TV and the internet combine. So I feel like I get to play with this great toy I might not get to keep. As TV viewing becomes more interactive, and web viewing becomes more passive, and as the delivery mechanism becomes the same, there won't be as much difference.

I like the way, on the web, your story can sprawl out into different forms and isn't limited to what's on that little screen. The same could be true of TV, too, if the networks would let it be, and they are more and more getting cross-platform savvy. But the web, by virtue of the fact that people usually sit alone and only a foot or two from the screen, as opposed to TV where you're often watching with someone else and you're 10 feet from the screen, draws you in very differently. It's more conducive to people jumping into the story themselves, feeling connected to it and to the community of others who are watching.

The advantage of TV is that you have a longer time to explore a character, an hour or a half hour every week, so you can often go deeper. Sometimes I miss that: having to make a character go through a beat in the 5 minutes a web show usually has is difficult at times. For example, I don't think you'd be able to get the incredible complexity that is Vic Mackey (from "The Shield") in 5 minute bites. On the web, you can deepen that experience through blogs, and through social networking, but it's a very different sensation both for the storyteller and for the person who's absorbing it.

The biggest difference in the experience of going it, though, isn't TV vs. the web, but ownership vs. non-ownership. I've been a "hired gun" on both web shows and TV; in both cases, there are issues that come up because you're trying to fit your own aesthetics into someone else's, and that "someone" controls your ability to tell the story, has the final say. I'm a collaborative person by nature, but the process of receiving and implementing notes can be difficult, no matter what medium it's in. If you and the people you're working with have a different vision of what you're doing, you're going to both be miserable. If you're on the bottom of that food chain, it can be soul-killing.

Q. What has working with Strike.tv been like?

A. A big part of the StrikeTV experience is in that ownership I just mentioned. There is tremendous respect there, and if my StrikeTV comrades told me they thought I was taking a big misstep, I'd definitely listen. but ultimately, my show is completely and totally mine. No one has told me what to do or how to do it. That's the great part. Almost everyone at Strike is an artist.

On the down side, almost everyone at StrikeTV is an artist. There are business decisions that have seemed somewhat random, and the communication is sometimes really not great. All in all, though, they have been great partners.

Q.Tell us about With the Angels. Where did the premise come from? How did you developed the idea? What kinds of creative collaborations have helped fuel you through the creation process?

A. The characters of Taffy, Ashley, and Andy have existed in several different forms: first in a play by Werner Trieschmann, then in a screenplay he and I wrote together, and now in "With the Angels." When the idea of StrikeTV came along, and the seed was planted that I might like to do a web show, Taffy came into my head. You know how I said the characters tell you what medium they want to live in? Well, I think Taffy's found her home.

When I decided I wanted to do this, I went of course to Werner, who gave his blessing, then helped enormously, though surprisingly more with the brand new character of Trey than with the others he'd created. And I went to Jonathan Kaplan, who is my closest writing friend: we tend to push each other very well. He helped me develop the story. My friend Ariel Lustig is a commercial copywriter, and there are some commercials that are part of the show, so I asked her to write those.

I knew from the beginning I wanted to have Neil de la Peña shoot this: we've worked together a lot, and he is one of the few DPs I know who is more concerned with the story than with flashy shots. I knew this wasn't going to be a flashy shot kind of show. Albert Cantu is an editor we'd both worked with and were excited to work with again.

Then of course, there's our absolutely amazing cast. I knew all the actors ahead of time, wrote the parts for them, except Jamie Tisdale, who plays our Taffy. She is incredible - the show would absolutely not be what it is without her. I owe a huge debt to Amy De Souza, our casting director, for bringing her to us.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's the first episode of With the Angels: