Still can’t post a comment on your blog, and I can’t find a contact email for you on it. Let me know when it’s working!

By the way, your podcast from Aug 30th references someone discussing hard and soft transmedia. Sounds an awful lot like Geoff Long, who included hard, soft, and chewy (not making that up) as three ways to analyze transmedia offerings.

Scott

Would love some feedback on my blog – the settings are set to allow anyone to comment, so I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be able to, hopefully it was just a one time glitch.

W

I think too that as we start to see transmedia grow and evolve, the necessity of new terms to describe new practices that sort-of-maybe-but-maybe-don’t-really fall under the umbrella of “transmedia” is more and more important. Having a shared language to talk about things is one of the most important steps. In case anyone doesn’t have this, Christy Dena has a great comprehensive list of transmedia/multimedia/cross-platform terms that have been used.

And to the last point, there’s not tolerating involved! I’m really excited that I was able to provide a space for such in-depth and intense discussion!

Any tool (term) that better frames the discussion and gives us additional means for examining, commenting on, and critiquing transmedia is helpful. Disembodied narrative seems valid, as you’ve defined it, but I’m still working through its implications. I’m afraid that’s a result of my knowledge limitations, not a reflection of your idea.

I’m going to throw another one on the table: emergent world narrative. I’m still refining it, but it’s the concept that a world-level narrative emerges, over time, as a result of the organic and incremental additions of individual works that collectively contribute to the world-level diagetic body. It is, by necessity, dependent on time, and it evolves over time as a result of the systemic change each new work introduces to the world.

I, too, suffered from a delayed exposure to the term “transmedia.” I worked for over a year on the concept that became my company’s first offering entertainment intellectual property offering before I discovered that there was already a term for the multimedia branded world idea. A few months ago, I read “Convergence Culture” and have begun to back track my way to older sources and authorities, following the voices in this conversation. I think it was a case of not knowing the proper questions to ask that resulted in me working in a bubble for so long.

Thanks for joining the conversation (and thanks to Xiaochang for tolerating our exchange!).

Thanks for the syllabus.

Warren,

Nice, I tried to respond on your blog and couldn’t for some reason. I think the term is actually quite useful.

I’ve been thinking about transmedia and the future of popular culture story-telling for a long time now (I’d say it was the release of the Blair Witch that set me off), but it was only recently that I discovered the term ‘transmedia’ and the whole online community discussing it which was unlocked for me. Before, I was in my own little world trying to figure out all these ideas, and now with all these bloggers like Henry Jenkins, Frank Rose and Xiaochang Li I’m suddenly as giddy as a padewan in a lightsaber workshop. (It’s amazing how important knowing the right terminology is to discovering the information you want) In my own insular pondering, the term I came up with to describe what I was trying to understand was ‘disembodied narrative’, and given some of the semantic questions regarding transmedia discussed here, I think it might be useful. For me a disembodied narrative is not embodied in a single text, but rather is a narrative that exists simultaneously across multiple independent texts. It is irrespective of medium. By this definition the multiple stories in the one universe told only in comic form proposed by Erek would constitute a disembodied narrative. The texts in a disembodied narrative need to be independent, ie sequels and serializations in one medium need only be considered as one text. The key aspect of a disembodied narrative is that the individual elements within it should all aim to work on their own without requiring the consumption of other texts in the canon to ‘get them’.

The balance between elements working on their own and as part of a unified whole is the real challenge that transmedia stories / disembodied narratives face. It is difficult to even pin down what constitutes the ‘holes’ in a story that can/ought to be filled with other texts. Every major and minor piece of any story can be expanded upon by asking a continuing series of ‘but why?’ questions. The value and relevance of almost all information pertaining to character and plot will always be highly subjective. Stephenson’s distinctions between the new and original Star Wars trilogies is probably due more to the increased complexity of the plot attempted in the new trilogy rather then its transmedia nature. Kids can appreciate both trilogies without needing many questions answered, and similarly both trilogies invite plenty of ‘but why’ questions when considered a bit deeply.

I’m going to stop myself there before I get even more long-winded and rambling. So to my main point, Do you think ‘disembodied narrative’ is a helpful term?

I leave you in possession of the field, sir. It would appear we are in violent agreement.

Regarding readings, I confess I am consuming as much as I can, but that’s not much so far. Xiaochang may be more helpful with pointing us both to writers I’m not aware of yet.

I’m using the reading assignments from Jenkins’ class at USC as a primer (disclaimer: I’m auditing the class). He posted the syllabus on his blog, and much of the reading is available online:

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/transmedia_storytelling_and_en.html

So far, I would definitely head over to Dena’s site (http://www.christydena.com/), and I would peruse Frank Rose’s blog (http://frankrose.typepad.com/deepmedia/about.html) as he’s focusing on how narrative is changing in light of the Internet. They both refine Jenkins’ definition of transmedia, and you might find the differences informative in your own thought formation.

I would definitely track down Geoffrey Long’s “Transmedia Storytelling” thesis, and you might want to start investigating the following on wikipedia as a primer to their thoughts (their names come up multiple times in the current academic writings):

Julia Kristeva (intertextuality)
Gerard Genette (para/hypo/hypertext)
Roland Barthes (hermeneutic codes and readerly/writerly text)

Finally, Jane McGonigal’s work on I Love Bees and her subsequent papers on ARG are also interesting, as they bring in Levy’s theory of Collective Intelligence into the mix.

This is just a start, I’m sure I’m leaving other important voices out due to my own ignorance.

Thanks for a really thought-provoking exchange!

Let me preface this by saying that I am clearly distinguishing between medium and message. You are probably right about McCluhan but I was really just stealing his statement to make a cheap analogy, I didn’t think about it as deeply as you did.

So for our purposes we have medium and message.

1) Transmedia will become the standard/norm of storytelling

It will be the standard MEDIUM of storytelling in that media will become monomedia again as the very notion of medium all become some variation on the theme: computer. No matter what medium you are going to be dealing with it will most likely be digital. Print media will basically follow the life cycle of Generation X. In about ten years it’s descent into the niche collectors market will be clear and obvious to everyone. But the primary delivery formats for things will be digital. For the most part this means that it will be entirely online at least in terms of the user experience. The exception to this will be public media venues. But privately we will stop distinguishing between the computer and the television. Before long every monitor in your home will be pulling data from a central house server and you will just leave keyboards around the house like you leave phones today. If I’d said ten years ago that Voice Over IP would be nearly ubuiquitous in ten years, which I did, I would be told that it was immature and had a long way to go, which I was, and lo and behold, I was right. Today Voice Over IP is becoming SOIP across the globe. Meaning? Your phone and your computer are the same, they are internet connections. Obviously medium can also mean graphic, symbolic, textual, aural, olfactory or kinesthetic in which case there will still be some meaning to the word medium outside of its transmission vector. In otherwords: the book and the TV are dying.

2) Transmedia translates to a loss of something in the narrative

Yes. But that is true of choice in general. If you make a choice and act on it you obliterate the alternative possibility. By putting all of your eggs in one basket you are able to devote the full and personal care and attention to that particular self-contained story. There is something different about the experience of reading Brave New World, and reading dystopian comic books.

3) Transmedia’s problem is that it doesn’t provide self-contained works

Well I wouldn’t say problem, I’d use the word challenge. Transmedia’s challenge is deciding whether or not to provide self-contained works. Or even further, deciding which stories are self-contained and which are not.

Here’s an article Neal Stephenson wrote for the New York Times, that a friend of mine turned me onto when I told him about this discussion.

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

Basically he contends that the original trilogy gave you the information in a self-contained manner where you know which ship belonged to who in every movie, but in Revenge of the Sith it is not clear who the droid ship at the beginning belongs to. He specifically references how that information is contained within The Clone Wars which bridges the gap between the second and third movies. Basically he is pointing out that he missed something, and that a lot of people missed the same thing and that there was an awareness that the completeness of the whole was disturbed. This is dealt with in two ways. Traditionally the answer is: It doesn’t matter, it’s not integral to the story, it’s a tangent that was put in for color. Today the answer is: Buy the Clone Wars DVD!

So really it comes down to choices. How you utilize Transmedia is an affectation of the story you are trying to tell. The medium is the subject of the message and not the other way around as has been the traditional model for commercial media. We have yet to see a property that cannot be said to have a primary canon, IE Pirates of the Caribbean has the movies and Halo has the video games. At least I can’t think of one. But the day is coming when the primary vehicle for media consumption is online content. Everything is delivered via the web you get the audio and video from the site as you read the text that guides you to your content while manipulating visual symbols to cause the event that will spawn the media you desire to peruse right then and there.

I guess what I am saying is that the loss of linearity in the story-telling modality is alienating to some people. Obviously it’s not to you, or I, for that matter.

So when you work you are riding a line between monomedia and transfiction, and that’s what transmedia will do. Likely creative houses will begin to have a transmedia department which handles technical issues. I’ve always been curious to see how the canon is organized at Marvel Comics for instance. What I am saying is that you’ve got about ten years of fad before the sheen of Transmedia wears off and the word gets put in the cubicle next to Multimedia where they make the power point presentations in the marketing department. But until then we’ll get companies managing their brands through transmedia roll outs, and I am not talking about brands where the narrative is the product, but where the narrative is a vehicle to sell the product, whether it be cars or soda.

The way I see it Transmedia is a process by which we are uniting all multi-media into cohesion. What seperates Transmedia is the message. Right now Transmedia is the the message, so it’s a good time to be staking a claim to that field.

You’ve made me realize that I am light on primary sources here. I think I need to read some of these books. Do you recommend reading Christy Dena?