Transhumanism, transmedia and the Serial podcast: Redefining storytelling in times of enhancement (original) (raw)
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Transmedia Serial Narration: Crossroads of Media, Story, and Time
The concept of transmedia storyworlds unfolding across complex serial narrative structures has become increasingly important to the study of modern media industries and audience communities. Yet, the precise connections between transmedia networks, serial structures, and narrative processes often remain underdeveloped. The dispersion of potential story elements across a diverse collection of media platforms and technologies prompts questions concerning the function of seriality in the absence of fixed instalments, the meaning of narrative when plot is largely a personal construction of each audience member, and the nature of storytelling in the absence of a unifying author, or when authorship itself takes on a serial character. This special issue opens a conversation on the intersection of these three concepts and their implications for a variety of disciplines, artistic practices, and philosophies. By rethinking these concepts from fresh perspectives, the collection challenges scholars to consider how a wide range of academic, aesthetic, and social phenomena might be productively thought through using the overlapping lenses of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity. Thus, the collection gathers scholars from life-writing, sport, film studies, cultural anthropology, fine arts, media studies, and literature, all of whom find common ground at this fruitful crossroads. This breadth also challenges the narrow use of transmedia as a specialized term to describe current developments in corporate mass media products that seek to exploit the affordances of hybrid digital media environments. Many prominent scholars, including Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins, acknowledge that a basic definition of transmedia as stories with extensions and reinterpretations in numerous media forms includes the oldest kinds of human expression, such as the ancient storyworlds of Arthurian legend and The Odyssey. Yet, what Jenkins terms " top-down " transmedia—that is, pre-planned and often corporate transmedia—has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention, with modern franchises like The Matrix, the Marvel universe, and Lost serving as common exemplars (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny; Hadas; Mittell; Scolari). Thus, many of the contributions to this issue push the boundaries of what has commonly been studied as transmedia as well as the limits of what may be considered a serial structure or even a story. For example, these papers imagine how an autobiography may also be a digital concept album unfolding in reverse, how participatory artistic performances may unfold in unpredictable instalments across physical and digital space, and how studying sports fandom as a long series of transmedia narrative elements encourages scholars to grapple with the unique structures assembled by audiences of non-fictional story worlds. Setting these experimental offerings into dialogue with entries that approach the study of transmedia in a more established manner provides the basis for building bridges between such recognized conversations in new media studies and potential collaborations with other disciplines and subfields of media studies.
Narrative Across Media: Trans-Stories In-Betweeness
Digital Media and Textuality
In 1996, Sherry Turkle gave her first Ted Talk to express how moving it was to be connected in chatrooms and to belong to certain virtual communities. According to Turkle, what was important about those moments was not just the act of connecting, but also, and above all, that of disconnecting in order to lead our own lives and live our own identities. Years later, in 2012, in a new presentation called "Connected but Alone," Turkle claimed that technology is dragging us places we really do not want to go. Mobile devices have such psychological power that "they don't only change what we do, they change what we are." We are becoming accustomed to coexisting "alone together," to hiding from each other, even though we remain connected as a group. 1 Along these lines, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han uses the term digital swarm to refer to the mass of isolated individuals that possesses neither soul nor spirit. These "individuals are melting into a new unit; its members no longer have a profile of their own" (Han 10) and "lack the interiority of assembly that would bring forth a we" (11). Han also employs the Japanese term hikikomori to refer to these people who live at the margins of society, seated in front of their computer screens. In the face of this isolation, Sherry Turkle, in her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), strongly advocates face-to-face dialogue to regain the power of physical interaction, impaired by the advent of electronic media. Digital networks and the current state of the entertainment media have favored the rise of personalized production and creation, à la carte, via streaming, as the tool of various distinct narrative forms. These recent cultural models adopt intermedial or transmedial methods, situating themselves in virtual spaces which have replaced physical ones and which require a great deal of interactivity. These are spaces of presence, given that their temporality is that of an "immediate present" (Han 15) in which representation becomes co-presentation (16). I would now like to discuss those narratives that are ingrained between memory and the ephemeral, between conservation, reinvention, multiplication
A Song of Transmedia Storytelling
Advances in Media, Entertainment, and the Arts
This chapter describes how being one of the outcomes of new media, convergence culture enables individuals to participate in the production process of media. The active and participatory nature of the members of the modern web society has led media conglomerates to seek new methods. Transmedia storytelling is the concept which emerged as a response to this. It can be seen that this type of storytelling is commonly adopted for tv series which have lately become popular. In this chapter, being delivered with transmedia techniques, Game of Thrones tv series is analysed in terms of transmedia storytelling.
Transmedia Storytelling and Other Challenges (and Opportunities) for the (Digital) Humanities
2016
The evolution of research infrastructure toward digital formats seems to undermine not only the ways we do research in the humanities but also widespread assumptions about the role of the humanities as a whole in contemporary society: what is at stake is not only the transformation of the procedures of humanistic research but also, and more importantly, the transformation of its goals . The emergence of the so-called Digital Humanities (DH) has further fueled this debate within our profession. The Authors identify five fundamental challenges for humanities research in the digital age: 1) a challenge of scale - in the age of big data, also the humanities feel somewhat compelled to increase the scale of their object of study; 2) a challenge of evanescence/ obsolescence , the actual vanishing (or deliberate destruction) of our object of research; 3) a challenge of ethos, with an alleged shift from individualistic toward increasingly "collectivized" values, as a result of the ...
Introductory chapter: narrative transmedia as a new social and cultural phenomenon
Intechopen: London, 2019
Open access (free download chapter at Intechopen) at link: https://www.intechopen.com/books/narrative-transmedia/introductory-chapter-narrative-transmedia-as-a-new-social-and-cultural-phenomenon The transmedia narrative is the product of the evolution of the narrative with the possibilities offered by new technologies. It is also favored by the mentality of the receiver that is more participatory and feels more protagonist in this century. CITE Beatriz Peña-Acuña and Alba Maria Martinez Sala (January 8th 2020). Introductory Chapter: Narrative Transmedia as a New Social and Cultural Phenomenon, Narrative Transmedia, Beatriz Peña-Acuña, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.88510. Available from: https://www.intechopen.com/books/narrative-transmedia/introductory-chapter-narrative-transmedia-as-a-new-social-and-cultural-phenomenon
Narrative-Verse: On Transmedia, Narrative And Digital Media Audiences
Estudos em Comunicação, 2018
Current trends point at narrative as a way of better doing storytelling, and as a medium in itself to accomplish brand awareness. Works of fiction are empowered by new narratives as they intersect one another through the release of new narrative films, novels, games and TV shows. In the background of today's post-modern reaction to narratives lies the fact of post-modernity declaring the fall of the grand narratives. With no massive narrative to tie ourselves together, we stand vulnerable to narratives provided by films, TV shows, gaming and new novels targeting mass adoption. To better understand this phenomena , we will analyse the Ridley Scott's Alien franchise as a case of study to search for how a story can evolve throughout the years and cross the boundaries of cinema to be present in multiple media. The subject of consistency, gender studies, technology, story world, transmedia storytelling and decentralised information will be the subjects of our analysis. One of the utmost important features we can draw as a conclusion is that the mainstream viewer, or the casual gamer, is no more the rule. These days we are all seekers and searchers, not just passive viewers.
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...
Transmedia Storytelling and Transforming Human Imagination
AJIT-e Online Academic Journal of Information Technology, 2016
New media norms are determined by technology. New forms create multiple medianorms with transmedia and social media applications. Publishing and/or broadcasting parts of a story in electronic/digital cross-media broadens the network of mental engagement more compared to mere adaptations of a literary work to another medium. With developments in transmedia outlets, new layers are added to the story and storytelling is further broadened and deepened. It is then necessary to consider how the human imagination will be affected by new progresses: Will it expand or narrow? Will it be virtuality or reality oriented? How can we guide imagination in this unpredictable media environment? In this theoretical study, possible answers are examined in order to propose satisfactory responses and to gain insight into the nature of the subject.