canarytrap.net

In lieu of a typical weekly round-up, I want to just encourage people to read through the #FOE4 tweets from the Futures of Entertainment conference today and tomorrow. Plenty of great insights that will shift your thinking on everything from transmedia metrics to how puppets are awesome (hint: they’re really awesome).

On that front, I’ve been thinking on transmedia a lot lately, and Henry Jenkins’ keynote this morning, along with the first panel on Producting Transmedia Experiences has inspired some synapse-firing on my part.

This is a drive-by posting, disorganized, thinkiness without rigor:

Multiplicity has been transformed into quite the buzzword this morning. Henry featured the concept of multiple and conceptually-varied versions of popular franchises — Indian versions of Spiderman, for instance, or the story told by Mary Jane — as one of his 7 key concepts for transmedia. In short, re-imaginings or re-visions of existing texts that both challenge and compliment one another. In traditional media, the emphasis was on continuity and control, ensuring that stories maintained consistency through controlled authorship. In transmedia storytelling, however, the emphasis is on multiplicity, the emergence of multiple authors telling or re-tellings in order to build a rich, varied story world.

This ties into another of Henry’s 7 concepts. Subjectivity. In short, transmedia provides the opportunity to tell stories from different viewpoints, to include in the narrative voices that are typically not heard. This notion is politically provocative, since it suggests transmedia’s very narrative structures makes room for the production of unheard or background subjects and perspectives. In other words, it allows for the telling of stories and experience and character voices that would not otherwise be told.

This begins to sound not unlike a tool for political activism — a narrative structure and a production form that give voice to those who would otherwise be voiceless, to those often silenced or relegated to the background.

This (along with a brief twitter conversation with Faris Yakob and Sam Ford about paratexts and metatexts in transmedia — seriously, everyone should be following the #FOE4 hash tag) made me think of C3 Consulting Researcher Gail de Kosnik’s idea of fan production as archontic literature. The concept of “archontic” texts suggests that texts based upon or referring to other texts aren’t derivative or subordinate, but rather build an archive that expands the textual world. The archontic allows for infinite (and indefinite) re-tellings, but not just in terms of telling again, but rather telling more. Not just repeating, but adding to, building out, expanding, and drilling down.

Moreover, Gail talks about the archontic as “literatures of the subordinate.” In other words, the stories of those who aren’t always permitted to speak and tell their stories and perspectives. In that light, the multiplicity in transmedia storytelling makes stories more elastic — with every additional telling, the world expands, encompassing new viewpoints and subjectivities. And all of this begins to take on a distinctly political potential.

Going into the Transmedia for Social Change panel this afternoon, I can’t help but wonder: is transmedia a form that is particularly useful for communicating and enacting social change at a structural level? Does transmedia as a narrative strategy have not only formal implications, but also ignites some political ones?

I typically don’t post such not-remotely-developed thoughts, but questions of the “transmedia audience” and how it is related to fan production have been prodding at me and part of me thinks that it may be worthwhile to at least verbalizing the question, if not offering any actual answers.

The comments in my last post on transmedia and the multiplicity principle made me realize that though I posed the question of why some types of stories — namely genre fiction — seemed to lend themselves to transmedia development, one of the implicit hypotheses was that they don’t. Or, rather, it’s not only that genre stories lend themselves to transmedia, but that genre audiences are highly receptive to it.

The multiplicity principle isn’t merely dependent on an archive of shared meaning between multiple texts — it’s relies on a sophisticated audience who has developed a strong knowledge of these multiple texts. In short, multiplicity is dependent on fannish behavior.

Transmedia creators seem to understand this instinctively. Take, for example, the Purefold project which not only develops content based on audience input through the FriendFeed group, but also licenses all the content under Creative Commons for participants to further develop and remix the work. Based off themes from Bladerunner, Purefold aims to let brands and fans alike have an equal go at asserting their ideas into the stories. It should prove to be an interesting test case on transmedia audience relations, but also brings a key question to the fore: what is the relationship between fan production and transmedia?

Or, perhaps more to the point, might we consider fan production a form of transmedia?

Fans production such as fan fiction or fanvids have long been developing stories across multiple platforms, forms, and genres. Projects like Purefold seem to be a way to acknowledge what fans have always known: that stories don’t have to be part of an official canon to influence how we encounter them, especially now that the new media landscape is making the boundaries between audience and producer increasingly fuzzy. Transmedia is about decentering stories, destabilizing the authorial power of any single text or narrative tributary. Fans have been collaborating and building out their favorite story worlds in this way for decades, through fiction, vidding, meta, role playing and cosplay.

So much of how we talk about transmedia centers around production, but so much of what makes transmedia what it is happens through new practices of reception and participation. Given that, I guess my question is: what does a transmedia audienceship look like? How is transmedia shaping how audiences form and interact, how they identify themselves and their cultural stakes? And conversely, how are the increasingly visible and explicit narrative interventions on the part of audiences shaping how we think about the way stories are told as they move across platforms, cultural spaces, borders of all manner?

With FOE this year being heavily transmedia-centric, I’ve been thinking (and reading) a lot lately about transmedia — about what there is to say now that we’re past the phase of describing what it is and moving into thinking more deeply about what it does and how.

A recent interview at Narrative Design Exploratorium with Starlight Runner CEO (and past FOE panelist) Jeff Gomez got me thinking about the relationship of transmedia to “genre fiction,” or stories written with distinct formal conventions such as mystery, horror, sci-fi/fantasty, and romance.

In the interview, Jeff maintains that

“You don’t need a science fiction or fantasy story to spark up a transmedia narrative. Our main criteria at Starlight Runner is that the story, brand or message lends itself to a rich world, real or imagined. The world needs to have a past and future, it must be populated with engaging characters, and there has to be something about it that makes us want to be a part of it . . . you can easily take a soap opera scenario, a high school scenario, the building of a new model of car or home and blast away”

While I wholeheartedly agree that no specific genre is required for that transmedia spark, it does seem that transmedia efforts tend to skew towards Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and other stories that follow certain genre conventions. Similarly, as evidenced by the way the “cult media” panel at FOE 2 veered quickly into a transmedia discussion, genre fiction seems to have an affinity for transmedia as well.

comics archetype times table by Jacob Borshard

Transmedia and the Multiplicity Principle

Jeff’s comment about soap operas and high school scenarios being just as easy to extend into transmedia points to one possible explanation — what television scholar David Thorburn calls the multiplicity principle of tv melodrama, where the audience’s familiarity with the thematic or character conventions of a genre can help fill in and add nuance. Rather than flatten characters into stereotypes, however, the multiplicity principle in fact allow for deeper and more complex developments because they give these stories the freedom to render characters and themese more suggestively rather than spelling everything out.

As Thorburn explains:

“The familiar character-types and situations thus become more suggestive and less imprisoning. There is no pretense that a given character has been wholly ‘explained’ by the plot, and the formula has the liberating effect of creating a premise or base on which the actor is free to build”

Or, as in the case of transmedia narratives, it gives the audience a rich base to generates deeper curiousity and an exploratory instinct, which drives them to develop and expand the story further outside of the initial point of contact with the narrative.

Transmedia as Intertext

Through this multiplicity, genre fiction has the freedom to create rich, nuanced characters and themes that are still broadly rendered enough to leave room for the audience to speculate, contribute, and pursue the story further. This is one possible reason for the overlap between genre fiction lends and transmedia, since further pursuit of the story is precisely what leads people to engage with narrative expansions elsewhere. In other words, both genre fiction such as sci-fi or melodrama and transmedia narratives require the existence of multiple texts and stories, as well as  open invitations to curious, sophisticated audiences built into the narrative structure.

Perhaps then one of the deep affordances of transmedia stories is that they operate just not as a collection of texts, but as an intertext, a text that is produced within the interaction between multiple texts. This is part of what differentiates transmedia, media that moves across and between forms and platforms, from static multimedia nodes. Transmedia isn’t just about multiple stories or versions, but about creating a rich in-between space, an archive of shared meaning in-between different parts of the story. In short, a universe.

Recently, in preparation for an upcoming talk we’re giving at Turner Networks, my colleague Ana Domb and I were talking about how slippery the term “transmedia” has become. More and more, it seems to be used to talk about a range of different practices, from ARGs to adaptations, world-building to merchandising. While I do not advocate any set of hard and fast rules for what “counts” as transmedia and what doesn’t, being able to make clear (if not absolute) distinctions between these forms is precisely what makes them useful as categories.

So I wanted to start thinking through some of these issues here, perhaps in a loosely organized series, about some of the different aspects of how transmedia is used, talked about, and theorized. I wanted to take some rough first stabs at getting down some of things clanking around my head, more a documentation of the thinking process than the end result of clear thought.

When we began talking about transmedia, it was defined thus:

“Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” (Henry Jenkins, Transmedia Storytelling 101)

One of the classic examples the Matrix franchise, which told the story across the films, video games, animation, online, and so on, often to the detriment of those in the film-viewing audience who were just engaging with one of these channels, since they missed crucial parts of the narrative and world development.

But as the form becomes more popularized, we are beginning to see more “loose” uses of transmedia tactics, uses that aren’t quite fully integrated transmedia narratives, but nor are they merely replications of a story in a different format or merchandise extensions.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two general hybrid categories: accretive adaptations and narrative resonance.

Accretive Adaptations is a term I made up just now because I like alliteration I use to refer to adaptations or versions that are meant to be seen in conjunction with or as additions to previous versions, rather than stand in place of them. As such, they often add additional narrative development or reframe the existing narrative in various ways that expand rather than simply repeat the story. Anime franchises are a great example of this, wherein every version of the text — from the original manga, to the anime, to live action stage and screen productions — are created with the knowledge that significant portions of the audience are familiar with previous versions. For instance, because a majority of anime is based off of manga (comics), which produces stories slower than anime episodes, they often include “filler arcs” or storylines that aren’t part of the central narrative to stall for time as manga artists generate more content to be adapted into the anime. Thus, though an anime series is, strictly speaking, an adaptation of a manga, it includes expansions in the story as well. The most popular animes also have live-action stage musicals produces, where the story is retold as musical theater. Again, these retell the main story, but include additional interactions between the characters that potentially deepen character development or bring out aspects of character relationships that are not developed in the original texts.

Narrative Resonance are what I think of as story expansions that don’t fit as part of the story world, but “resonate” with it. In other words, though they are not part of the narrative, they draw their meaning from being related to it. One example is the recent Samsung “Anycall Bodyguard” campaign, which featured a 5+ minute musical drama with a secondary couple from a popular TV drama. The fictional couple were highly popular with fans, but were not the main focus of the show, so Samsung decided to take advantage of the fact that many fans wanted to see more development with the pair. Their musical drama advertisement generated a lot of interest and buzz because of its use of the characters and its development of their storyline, even though it has no place within the real story. It is also like an alternate universe story, a possible scenario or piece of fanfiction, that is adjacent to and resonates with the original, even though it isn’t directly a part of it.

These are just two ambiguous transmedia-adjascent hybrid forms that come off the top of my head, especially in my work in Asian popular media. I’m sure there are countless more forms and examples in media from all over the world.