First, I posed just this question to Henry Jenkins yesterday: how has transmedia affected us, as consumers, over time? So much of what is written is focused on the creator, but we have little to say about the consumers of transmedia vis a vis deciphering how much of what is going on is a result of fans pulling creators along versus creators pushing fans along. Fan participation over the years has had an effect on monomedia content production, but I haven’t seen much in the way of specifically analyzing it with regard to transmedia content.

Second, let’s take your question about fan-produced content and see how we could bend the definition of transmedia to include it. I’m not proposing to redefine transmedia, mind you, I’m just temporarily making the frame larger to incorporate content that was not produced by the property owner and seeing where it takes us. I have no answers to your questions, but they prompted me to offer up this twist.

Step up to the concept of consumer-produced material being transmedia and then take one more step beyond to include all of the meta-content produced by consumers.

In this case, the collection of transmedia would include blog posts about a movie, advertisements for a TV show, watercooler conversations regarding the latest comic, etc. The transmedia portfolio becomes the entire collection of what

To go even further, consider a group of friends watching a sports game on TV. There is far more social activity occurring than there is passive consumption of the individual plays of the game. Some of the activities that might be happening – sometimes simultaneously – include betting (where it’s legal), fantasy league updates, checking online game updates (most likely about other games), critiques of the recent play, conjecture about the next play/game outcome/trade, etc.

If, then, you include consumer-produced content in the transmedia portfolio (even if it were not considered canonical), could you also not include the consumer-produced metacontent? And what would that say about the shift from singular authorship to audience authorship? Who, then, truly “owns” the narrative/world?

Granted, I’m stretching this particular case far past the point of torture, but the implications are interesting.

Now, please take a break from posting for at least a few days, I have a deadline to meet. : )