Open Cultural Studies 2017; 1: 475–482 PREFACE Fabricating a Common Fiction Together (original) (raw)

Introduction: Transmedia Narratives

Artnodes, 2016

Ever since Henry Jenkins published his oft-cited article on “Transmedia Storytelling” in Technology Review (2003), transmediality has become a crossroads and a meeting place for researchers from different disciplines (Media Studies, Narratology, Visual Arts, Marketing, Comparative Literature, Semiotics, Theatre and Performance Studies, Game Studies, Sociology, etc.) as well as authors and the public that are involved in the emerging forms of multiplatform and distributed story creation, production and participation that such transmediality involves. Likewise, intermediality, with the phenomenon of adaptations at its core, crossmedia franchises and new theories on storyworlds, also form part of the space for reflection, discussion and the intersection of digital arts, communication media and interactive technologies that are put forward in this volume of Artnodes. The articles that make up this edition convey the complexity and variety of perspectives and objects of study and the need to revise or rebuild the methods and theoretical and critical tools that are used to construct cultural practice in the digital paradigm.

Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling

2014

It was slightly more than 10 years ago that Henry Jenkins (2003) first introduced the conceptualizations of transmediality into the mainstream of contemporary media studies, but the related academic research and scholarly disputes had been taking place in various alternative and peripheral domains of media and cultural studies for several decades before that. There had been studies of intermediacy and intersemioticity, of intertextuality and multimodality; the domain of adaptation studies had become increasingly complex in terms of the rich terrain of intermedia textualities it found itself covering. And there had been Marsha , who coined the term transmedia and approached the emerging phenomena of transmedia blockbusters from a critical viewpoint informed by various cultural studies and political economy approaches. Parallel to this work, the academic domain of audience research within media studies had been updated not only in terms of cultural studies' interest in the variety of everyday practices of sense making, use, and re-use of media content but also with regard to the changing affordances of digital textualities-of interactivity and participation, of remix and remediationand how these affected the ways audiences formed, acted, and interacted. Discourses on the individuation of media experiences, with anonymous mass audiences making way to the self-aware choices of individual users and consumers, had taken place, and so had discourses on new opportunities for these individual users' collective action and democratic empowerment, their cooperating and gaining in influence by sharing their choices, coproducing content, and meta-communicating on all value propositions. That is, Carlos A. Scolari: carlosalberto.scolari@upf.edu

Transmedia Storytelling and Creative Writing: Can Media Convergence Change the Way We Creatively Write?

2021

This article traces the history of transmedia storytelling and its evolutionary steps through multidisciplinary fields of media, art, culture and technology and the way it is currently being used and exploited. Transmedia storytelling as a particular narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.) has been engaged by professional and nonprofessional media as an example of media convergence. The current unprecedented access to content, products and media allows– at least in what is deemed the developed and developing world – unlimited control over a person’s experience as he or she can customise, personalise and respond towards a narrative in multiple ways and across multiple platforms. Trying to map this whole narrative universe offers a rather unique experience, especially for a creative writer and potential producer and consumer of this synergy of modes, media, technologies and conte...

'New Paths in Transmediality as Vast Narratives: The State of the Field'

Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes : A Narrative Ecosystem Framework, 2018

This chapter aims to provide a theoretical contribution to contextual understandings of narrative ecosystems. It does so by unraveling some of the industrial practices, conceptions, uses and cultural understandings of the contemporary transmedia phenomenon. This chapter in fact positions transmediality as in some ways key to understanding the ever-expanding and evolving nature of the various television series examined later in this book, and so I will here detail the overarching similarities and differences between transmediality as an overarching critical approach and the more specific narrative ecosystem perspective. I also explore the strengths and weaknesses of transmediality in the context of analysing vast serial narratives.

Transmedia (Storytelling?): A polyphonic critical review

Artnodes, 2016

This article looks at some of the fundamental problems that feed into recent debate and research on transmedia narratives and/or transmedia storytelling. These issues have been approached as questions or challenges for all the disciplines involved in the discussions (comparative media studies, transmedia narratology, game studies, cultural studies and comparative literature): from the key elements of the potential novelty of transmedia storytelling or transmedia narratives, through to the new role of audiences, the declining influence of the narrative factor as it is overtaken by the building of storyworlds and transmedia characters; the influence of videogames, attention and comprehension deficit to the role of adaptation in TS; the “demediating” effect or the loss of media specificity in TS theory; the importance of collaborative creation and how to stimulate it for new (academic/business) research projects and teaching, in order to respond to the new industry dynamics and sociocultural habits. In interviews, made and conducted by Domingo Sánchez-Mesa, these issues, among others, have been put to three prominent figures in academic research and the creative professions in the area of new media: Espen Aarseth, Robert Pratten and Carlos A. Scolari. The three-way dialogue, that also has connections with other articles in this edition, has generated a polyphonic discourse that aims to produce a critical x-ray of our object of study.

Transmedia Storytelling. Twelve Postulates

Clash of Realities 2015/16: On the Art, Technology, and Theory of Digital Games. Proceedings of the 6th and 7th Conference, Bielefeld: transcript 2017, p. 97-126., 2017