On-Demand Narrative:
Database Logic as part of the Poetics of Transmedia Storytelling
Abstract: New media resulted in new sorts of narratives, transmedia storytelling being one of them. While often thought of in terms of fan consumption or seen as technological novelty, this paper argues it can be placed in the mechanics of database culture and should foremost be regarded as an on-demand narrative. When looking at the expected
consumption mode of transmedia users, it correlates with that of on-demand consumption patterns and has both elements of fan behavior and media literacy in it. This behavior is then not specific for a selected cult following, but to all audiences, mainstream and cult alike. This paper introduces an alternative discourse to debate transmedia storytelling in, positioning it in the discourse of database culture by comparing it to an interface to an underlying
database of the story called the storyworld.
Keywords: Transmedia storytelling, on-demand, database, mainstream audiences
Name: Rick Hoving Supervisor: Anne Kustritz
Student number: 5634210 Second reader: Sebastian ScholzProgram:
TV and Cross-Media Culture Department: Media Studies
E-mail: rick.l.hoving@gmail.com Date: 27-06-2014
Page Index
Introduction 3
1: Transmedia Storytelling and Convergence Culture 4
1.1: Transmedia Storytelling 6
1.2: Transmedia Storytelling is Storyworlds 9
1.3: The Art of World Building 12
1.4: Transmedia Storytelling and Non-Linear Storytelling 17
1.5: Storyworlds as a Narrative Database 19
1.6 Conclusions 21
2: Fans, Casual Audiences and New Media 23
2.1: New Media Literacy 24
2.2: Here Come the Fans 26
2.2.1: New Media’s Assimilation of Fandom 29
2.2.2: Domestic Fandom 30
2.3: The Transmedialist 31
2.4: Conclusions 34
3: Transmedia Storytelling as a Database 35
3.2: Story Algorithms 37
3.2.1: Death of the Plot 38
3.2.2: Narrative Branding and Cycles 40
3.3: Rise of the Interface 46
3.4: The Logic of Selection 47
3.5: Conclusions 51
Conclusion 52
1 Introduction
“The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. […] We’ve learned the lesson the music industry didn’t learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, for a reasonable price and they’ll more likely pay for it than steal it. […] All we have to do is give it to them.” – Kevin Spacey at the Edinburg Television Festival 2013 on the success of House of Cards (2013-ongoing)
Audiences know what they want. The promise of true interactivity is finally taking shape in on-demand services as audiences can now get the movies, series and television programs they want, when they want and where they want with a few clicks. With the arrival of new technologies audiences will expect new stories. This paper will argue that transmedia
storytelling, a narrative so large that it is dispersed over multiple media, is that new story. It is a new form of storytelling that is related to this new on-demand mode of consumption. As a matter of fact, it will argue that transmedia storytelling is an “on-demand narrative” closely interlinked with database logic.
Transmedia storytelling, however, has become a buzz-word, a way of motivating consumer sales, but also a heavily debatable term that doesn’t seem to allow for precise academic demarcation. It is a terminology that often feels misapplied because it can be applied to everything and nothing. In its broadest form every franchise dispersing its content over two media is transmedia storytelling; on the other hand when following the strict academic concept there are almost no examples of the ideal shape of transmedia
storytelling. While working towards the claim of transmedia storytelling being an on-demand narrative it’s going to combine several different theories on how casual audiences, cult fans and technology adaptors can all take part in the transmedia storytelling experience. The first chapter of this thesis sets out to find the core principles of transmedia storytelling. One of these principles is the concept of “storyworlds”: the universe in which a story is set. It will conclude that these principles can be positioned in the mechanics of the database and should be accepted as part of the on-demand narrative. However, as there are no clear boundaries to what exactly constitutes transmedia storytelling on the production end, the receiving end might serve as a better indicator.
For that very reason the second chapter will explore transmedia audiences and coin the term “transmedialist” as a new kind of user, defined by its new mode of consumption related to database logic. Yet, if “[a]udiences are predominantly positioned as viewers of
2 content or users of technology” (Evans, 2011: 5) then so is the understanding of transmedia storytelling: either as a part of fan consumption or as a technological novelty. It is a common practice of the modern age to imagine the worlds of technology and culture as opposites and divide everything into one of these two camps. Even though architects, painters, sculptors and writers are as much engineers as they are artists. Then where does that leave audiences in our understanding of transmedia storytelling that are not excessive fans or early adaptors? This paper will argue that they are two sides of the same coin when it comes to transmedia storytelling. Carlos Alberto Scolari, who has written extensively on this topic, acknowledges these claims in his article “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production”(2009): “research should focus on
transmedia consumers. […] Is ‘transmedia consumption’ a property of new users?” (601). Is it possible that transmedia engagement has not already become the prime modus operandi for everyday users? And is, instead of fan consumption, perchance the rise of new media literacy its raison d’être? There is an interdependence at work here that makes both technology and fandom closely connected when it comes to transmedia engagement. The second chapter will develop this premise further. As will become clear, that interdependence can be best understood in the discourse of database culture. While it sometimes might seem that when this paper is dissecting transmedia storytelling it’s also trying to resolve the formula of its successes it is, however, not its intention to do so. This paper aims to place transmedia engagement by mass audiences squarely within the processes and mechanisms of database culture.
For transmedia storytelling to be a true on-demand narrative transmedialist need to be able to access all the data from the database at any place and at any time. The third and last chapter will explore the notion of transmedia storytelling as an interface to its own underlying database and explain how the transmedialist operates within it. Important here is the assumption that database is taking over narrative as the key form of cultural expression. This paper will coin the term “cryptos” as part of storyworlds that allow audiences to make sense of separate entities of information. It is evident that audiences are not engaging with the stories that transmedia storytelling is telling, but with its database consisting of a wide variety of characters, locations, narrative strings, themes and so on.
In order to illustrate theory and arguments this paper will use three different transmedia franchises as examples towards the overall argument. These examples will not be elaborated upon in detail as case studies in a chapter, but merely provide abstract theoretical arguments with a more concrete comprehension. All three are contemporary cases of upcoming transmedia franchises whose primary text did not have its roots in
3 television and have since its first product consequently found different audiences across several media platforms. In non-particular order the first of these is the fantasy game franchise Warcraft which consists of several games and other products; the post-apocalyptic universe of The Walking Dead about a zombie outbreak; and the novel turned television series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones which is more on the brink of becoming a large transmedia experience—having all the potentials as it is set-up to be one—than an established one. These examples are all complimentary to the overall argument made. That is to say: the arguments are not case study specific. This paper delves into the larger phenomenon, as it works towards adding to the poetics of transmedia storytelling.
The concept of on-demand narrative will answer the question how casual audiences, cult fans and early technology adapters can all engage with transmedia storytelling in the current misconception of theories about transmedia storytelling; it aims to develop a new theoretical insight in how the different theories and readings concerning transmedia
storytelling can be combined under one conceptual umbrella. As will become apparent to the reader this thesis is a preliminary exploration; it is an attempt to bring ideas together and suggest how transmedia storytelling might be regarded in its mode of consumption. It argues that database logic is the primary discourse to debate and understand transmedia storytelling and its audiences in. At times it might even speak more of a reality to come than of the present state of transmedia storytelling. While it tries to restrain the enthusiastic possibilities of the future, it cannot be stretched too much that these developments are on the horizon and thus will sometimes slip into the arguments. This thesis is also well aware that there will always be multiple and different viewership positions, that audiences are not homogenous groups in which every individual operates the same way and that meaning of texts can be completely miscommunicated or reinterpreted by audiences. It always makes its arguments on the basis that they are an important way of looking at transmedia storytelling. In the end the goal is to be one step closer towards the poetics of transmedia storytelling in a debate that’s become more occupied with stretching than regulating definitions.
4 Chapter 1: Transmedia Storytelling and Convergence Culture
This following chapter will explore the term of transmedia storytelling, its academic premise and how it has become not only a troublesome one, but in some case a non-term as well. It will thus try to reduce it to its core principles that are important in understanding how audiences engage with transmedia storytelling. The starting point will be the
convergence of media and how authors and producers used this convergence to construct vast narratives over several media. The following chapters will look deeper into the
construction of the worlds that accommodate the stories and how they can be seen through the eyes of new media terminology.
Due to non-stop technological innovations and developments notions of the media environment are constantly changing and shifting. Media—and in particular television—have according to Will Brooker in the contemporary media landscape their primary text
‘overflowing’ across multiple platforms. This phenomenon of what is called overflow “transforms the audience relationship with the text from a limited, largely one-way
engagement based around a proscribed time slot and single medium into a far more fluid, flexible affair which crosses media platforms […] in a process of convergence” (Brooker, 2002). Next to that, inventions such as the VCR, the remote control and the internet have all significantly changed the way people produce, consume, interact and appreciate media (see for example Seiter, 1999; Evans, 2011; Gillan, 2011). The interplay between technological, social and cultural developments has then resulted in a media landscape in which media increasingly converge, blurring their initial boundaries. Henry Jenkins’ labels this
contemporary media landscape with the term “convergence culture” in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) and describes it as following:
By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want (Jenkins, 2006: 2)
With the binary opposition of “new media” and “old media” in Jenkins’ book there is a problematic sense of revolution, while in reality all media are an evolution from its predecessors and retain many of their original features. No matter the categorization, scholars like Gillan stress that these new technologies and devices have influenced viewer behaviors and practices and how television is watched, measured, distributed, financed and promoted (Gillan, 2011: 2). Thinking in old and new ways can thus be helpful to understand
5 differences but also reinforces the belief of the new coming into being at the expense of the old. This notion does not only relate to technology but to audiences as well. Ellen Seiter did extensive research in 1999 on television audiences and their motivations to engage with television. In her book Television and New Media Audiences Seiter included a chapter on the connection of television with the internet—which was in everyday life still more of a curiosity than commonplace back then. While the chapter mostly tries to foreshadow the future of research on the combined topic she does an important observation among her research participators. According to Seiter it is a healthy corrective to recognize the many parallels between the two in terms of audience research and “incorporate the insights of television audience research into the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere, […] the complexity of individuals’ motivations to seek out media, and the variety of possible interpretations of media technologies and media forms” (Seiter, 1999: 115). That is to say that the new technologies, modes of consumption and even new audiences can and should just as much be understood in their context of old habits and consumption patterns as they move towards new ones.
Two forces are then at work here when—for a lack of a better word—“new” media becomes available: nullifying the existing discomforts of the old and the expectations of the new in which something unseen takes place. This is an important assessment for the
understanding of how audiences engage with transmedia storytelling as will be later explored upon. Convergence media allows viewers to watch television shows through a wide variety of alternative delivery systems such as DVRs and streaming services; this shift does well in subverting the displeasures of the old broadcast schedules. As Lev Manovich wrote in his book The Language of New Media (2001), in which he rigorously theorized new media, audiences do however expect when new media presents itself it to have new media specifics. In his own words Manovich mentions it as following:
We want new media narratives, and we want these narratives to be different from the narratives we saw and read before […] We do expect computer narratives to showcase new aesthetic possibilities which did not exist before digital computers (Manovich, 2001: 204)
As Jennifer Gillan describes the changing television landscape in Television and New Media: Must-click TV (2011) she alludes to how producers and makers work on ways to use the convergence of media towards these expected new media narratives. The new possibilities of different content development initiated by new delivery systems have given birth to
6 and on-mobile formats with all kind of extras. Audiences can find character backgrounds, exclusive storylines and engage with peripheral characters or plot points dispersed across dispersed media (Gillan, 2011: 15). Convergence is then not only defined through the collision of old and new media but as Jenkins put it is a cultural shift as well in which “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (Jenkins, 2006: 3).
Chapter 1.1: Transmedia Storytelling
Convergence culture has thus according to Jenkins, Gillan and to a lesser extent Manovich resulted in transmedia storytelling. These first few chapters will work towards a definition of transmedia storytelling in relation to the changing mode of consumption rather than that of technologic innovation. It’s a common rhetoric in media studies, but nonetheless it’s important to note the term has been and still is subject to rapid change. As the meaning in production has evolved and changed so too has its meaning in academic papers. A true definition of what a transmedia story exactly entails is as of yet no fait accompli. Several scholars have made way to break down the transmedia experience into bits and categorize it with ever growing lists of binary oppositions (see for example: Scolari, 2009, 2013; Ryan, 2014; Mittell, forthcoming). With the increase of definitions they are contributing to the confusion of what transmedia storytelling exactly contains as well; as they add secondary entries such as paratexts, fan fiction, parody and unofficial publications into the mix, they blur borders and they push the frontier. The range of products that constitute the
transmedia experience and the importance of canonical authorship are important discussions in the discourse of transmedia storytelling, but will be neglected mostly in this paper. Instead this paper will go for a definition of transmedia storytelling that distills the common basis of most—if not every—transmedia story.
With its most well-known introduction in Covergence Media by Henry Jenkins in 2006, transmedia storytelling is mostly understood in the discourse of cult fandom. This paper however is more concerned with the position it takes in the media consumption of casual users or mainstream audiences. Thus it tries to reevaluate it and move it out of the
discourses it has been mostly understood and debated in. That is not to say that transmedia storytelling cannot or should not be studied with fans at the center as Jenkins does but that there is a limited understanding of transmedia storytelling in its connection to casual or mainstream audiences. Nor should it be merely seen as the unexpected results of technological innovation. In order to do so the definitions and limitations of transmedia storytelling and what it is in its most basic form must fully be understood.
7 The first movies to trigger the excitement of the idea of a new phenomenal were The Blair Witch Project (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999), The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001). These movies made use of several media to engage with their audiences and expand their universe. Henry Jenkins was one of the first to write extensively about it and his definition of in Convergence Culture has become a mantra for other scholars tackling transmedia storytelling. Taking his cues from the Wachowski’s Matrix he calls transmedia storytelling “a narrative so large, it cannot be covered in a single medium” (Jenkins, 2006: 95). Important here is to note Jenkins’ choice of words as he favors narrative over story. Narrative is a more complete package and concerned with the method of delivery as well. While the terminology is new, the concept itself has been around for a long time. Next to that there currently are many other concepts working in the same playing field: “multiple platforms, hybrid media, intertextual commodity, transmedial worlds, transmedial interactions, multimodality, intermedia” (Scolari, 2009: 588). Marie-Laure Ryan points out in her essay entitled “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality” that, while it’s tempting to see transmedia storytelling as something new taking place in the future, the telling of stories through several media already partook in ancient civilizations. The Greek for example explored their mythology “through various artistic media – sculpture, architecture, drama, epic” and even most of the world religions today have “[their] stories retold” countless times through different media (Ryan, 2014: 362, my emphasis). This comparison did not escape Jenkins as well, though he is more wary to make it. In these cases one should rather speak of intermedia storytelling rather than transmedia storytelling, as the stories are being retold, rebranded and refashioned. Jenkins stresses the need for each medium to bring its own unique abilities into play:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be introduced in film, expanded through television, novels and comics, its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park
attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be selfcontained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole (2006: 96)
However, this model is a proposed ideal. As Ryan contributed to the conversation on transmedia storytelling during the 2013 International Society for Intermedial Studies (ISIS)
8 Conference named Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, there are in fact very few cases that meet that very specific definition. Jason Mittell comments that there is need for a distinction between Jenkin’s academic notion of what Mittell calls “balanced transmedia” and the reality of the practice in which there is more than often than not “unbalanced transmedia”. In the former no one medium is privileged over the other and the latter there is one primary text that spawns several others (Mittell,
forthcoming). Balanced transmedia requires consumers to become hunters and gatherers to fully understand the big picture. Even Jenkins acknowledges in later years that his academic perception of transmedia storytelling often does not correlate with the reality of the practice. On his personal blog he is currently holding a refined definition:
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. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story(Jenkins, 2011)
In case of The Matrix the Wachowski brothers “have narrowed their audiences by making too many demands on them […] for the casual consumer, The Matrix asked too much” (Jenkins, 2006: 126). Moving away from Jenkins, this paper wishes to propose that this does not mean that casual or mainstream viewers can’t enjoy balanced transmedia, but that there is an earlier breaking point in the amount of story gaps—in relation to extra required media consumption—they are willing digest. Evans highlights the aspect of product sovereignty as well by saying transmedia storytelling is “to form a matrix of interconnected fictional texts that are not only an extension of the [original] text, but are capable of providing different kinds of entertainment in their own right” (Evans, 2008: 198). While this is a more workable definition, transmedia storytelling is more than just a connection of texts. As will be explored upon further at the end of this chapter this paper will argue that it is in fact a database of texts.
While a multitude of scholars, as shown, are working towards a better, more suitable definition of transmedia storytelling it was Jenkins himself who in his speech during the 2013 ISIS Conference called for a more flexible, sloppy, indefinite definition. According to him in the ever changing media landscape in which producers are in the practice still exploring, struggling with transmedia storytelling on a trial-and-error basis there is no use of a solid academic definition. This paper agrees with Jenkins’ viewpoints. Yet, it will look for middle
9 ground in which most definitions of transmedia storytelling can—at least partly—be
understood.
Chapter 1.2: Transmedia Storytelling is Storyworlds
The following chapter will go past the exploration of transmedia storytelling
definitions and introduce one of the bases of its poetics. To understand this core mechanic it’s helpful to look at The Matrix’ lack of success. The critical and commercial failure of The Matrix franchise1 must not, however, be understood in the fast expansion of its universe or its potential to be discovered through film, games, comics, anime and collective knowledge, but in its need to be discovered through that trajectory in order to make sense. Its failure was its inadequacy to deliver a solid experience when not completing every step on the way; leaving many consumers indifferent. Jenkins acknowledges this by saying: “The sheer
abundance of allusions makes it nearly impossible for any given consumer to master the franchise totally” (2006: 99). One of the problems of The Matrix was that in order to fathom what its story was about, was to completely understand the core mechanics of its world which were spread out over several media. To an extent one’s enjoyment of the movies depended on its understanding of the world the story took place in: the “storyworlds”. Quite literally audiences became lost in this world, in much the same way a person can become lost in a city. When thinking about orientation in a navigable information space cities and storyworlds do not differ that much. Famous urban planner Kevin Lynch showed in his book
The Image of the City (1960) how cities give cues of information in orer to navigate. Lynch suggests: “[L]et the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to sue how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being […] The very word ‘lost’ […] carries overtones of utter disaster” (1960: 4).
Although Jenkins never mentions the word storyworld in his chapter in Convergence Culture, it is essential to his description of transmedia storytelling as a narrative that’s too large to be contained in a single medium. Ryan expresses it as following: “[t]he notion of storyworld is central to transmedial storytelling, since it is what holds together the various texts of the system. The ability to create a world, or more precisely, to inspire the mental representation of a world, is the primary condition for a text to be considered a narrative” (2014: 364). Jenkins recognizes this development by saying that storytelling “has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or
1
The Matrix currently holds a weighted average score of 73 on the review aggregator Metacritic
(http://www.metacritic.com); The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions hold respectively a metascore of 62 and 47. According to Box Office Mojo, the difference in box office success between the last two movies was roughly halved as it dropped from $742,128,461 to $427,343,298.
10 exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise” (2006: 114). To conclude then it can be said that transmedia storytelling is all about the presenting the storyworlds to an audience through different media. In a way, this allows for audiences to choose through which medium they wish to examine the storyworld.
Yet it will not do to think of transmedia storytelling as only being about products that engage with a fictional storyworld: cross-media experiences can be found throughout all kind of media objects such as journalism, documentaries and advertisements (Scolari, 2013: 51). The storyworld is the object of engagement and while the cross-media experience might seem to be merely the means to it, it is in fact an object of desire onto itself as well. The cross-media experience is the defining aspect that makes the ubiquity of the storyworld; someone might put a book down in favor of watching television while still wishing to engage with the same storyworld. Even in that same sense looking at an advertisement, reading fan fiction or watching a trailer are forms of engagement with the storyworld.
It is paramount that scholars defining transmedia storytelling value the construction of the storyworld over the story (see for example Jenkins, 2006, 2011; Ryan, 2014; Klastrup & Tosca, 2013). A storyworld is an assortment of many different elements, but this paper propounds that it is an inherently locked meaning inside the storyworld—not the story or the media window—that defines the storyworld. Other elements like characters, locations and so on might flesh out the storyworld and leave an impression, but can’t create enough meaning by themselves. Transmedia storytelling has in this aspect similarity with the concept of genre. For is it not true that genres are defined through similar aesthetics, topics, themes and recurring concepts as well, but mostly meaning? The difference between genres and transmedial worlds is that genres can be seen as themes; transmedia worlds on the other hand are themes with a common background story, narrower in scope, and with more coherent spawn-offs (Klastrup & Tosca, 2013: 2). In the following chapter the notion of how storyworlds consist of preset conditions and elements will be further explored upon.
In comparison to the transmedia experience of The Matrix franchise, that stretched its revelation of the storyworld over several installments, most transmedia franchises favor a much kinder and opener structure in which new elements are “further expanding the range of potential meanings and intertextual connections within the franchise” (Jenkins, 2006: 113). Meaning has become one of the main dimensions to define a
franchise—just as much as per say theme, setting, character or plot have been. This does make it easier for a franchise to appeal to an audience as not every element has to be watched, played or fully understood in order to enjoy the overall meaning in a single
11 element. Just as a viewer identifies a genre it identifies a transmedia world, knowing which conventions to apply (Klastrup & Tosca, 2013: 2). Klastrup and Tosca make a link between how audiences engage with, for example, a genre movie for the first time (the viewer knows the conventions, themes and meaning, but is yet unaware of the story) and how they
engage transmedia storyworlds. Transmedia elements then do not focus on the same story being told over several media but focus on telling new events of the same storyworld. It is not “the individual characters or events that become important, but the creation of a
universe that is ‘complex’ and ‘vast’” (Evans, 2011: 28). Transmedia storytelling is thus about creating large storyworlds, consisting of innumerable amount of data and meanings.
Narrative has been the key form of cultural expression of the modern age (Manovich, 2001: 194). However, as discussed above, not the telling of the story but the creating of the storyworld is the most important aspect of transmedia storytelling. Too often the question is how a medium can tell a story—What are the limitations? What are its strengths and
weaknesses?—but for the creators of storyworlds this is but a part of it. Their starting point is the construction of the world and from that world come the stories that can be adapted into a medium. George R.R. Martin, writer of the epic fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire
(adapted by HBO into Game of Thrones), used to be a screenwriter in Hollywood but got fed up with the restriction and limitations of his occupation. In an interview with Laura Miller in
The New Yorker he is paraphrased:
Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft. You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge. [I told myself] I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want (Martin, 2013)
Ryan argues that these transmedia storyworlds are either constructed through which she calls “snowballing” in which a product starts in a single medium and expands by popular demand or as stories conceived from the very beginning to be told over several media (Ryan, 2014: 363). Again medium is the focal point of attention. Although Ryan agrees with Jenkins on the fact that storyworlds must have an encyclopedic capacity (Ibid: 383), the notion that the creation of the storyworld starts regardless of medium seems to escape the equation. As the quote by Martin exemplifies: storyworlds are thought up first and then fit into media. Evans makes a valid point by stating that “[t]he presence and importance of a fictional world offers the space for transmedia storytelling to be explored; the committed viewing patterns encouraged by a complex narrative and visual style encourages transmedia
12 engagement and the possibility of ensuring access to the full text” (Evans, 2011: 13). Apart from the convergence of media and the possibility for a narrative to be told over several media it has become apparent that the creation of storyworlds are one of the defining core mechanisms of transmedia storytelling.
Chapter 1.3: The Art of World Building
Though this paper places storyworlds at the centre of transmedia storytelling experiences it is aware that this can also be said for single medium long. However, as the following chapter will explore, these transmedia storyworlds are setup differently than those in long narratives. They are designed in such a way that they have multiple entry points for different media. What exactly constitutes a storyworld is hard to pinpoint and, though difference may apply, the best words to describe storyworlds would be vast and complex. Jenkins writes on his blog on transmedia storytelling that one of the pleasures of engaging with the storyworlds is the fact that it “always expands beyond our grasp” and thus has a very different pleasure than the closure classic narratives offer; with transmedia storytelling and storyworlds the audience is not left with everything required to make complete sense of the story (Jenkins, 2011). This vastness is also attributed to storyworlds by Dudley Andrew in his book Concepts in Film Theory (1984):
Worlds are comprehensive systems which comprise all elements that fit together within the same horizon, including elements that are before our eyes in the foreground of experience, and those which sit vaguely on the horizon forming a background. These elements consist of objects, feelings, associations, and ideas in a grand mix so rich that only the term ‘world’ seems large enough to encompass it (Andrew, 1984: 38)
In her upcoming article entitled “Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse”Anne Kustritz notices that transmedia narratives have the increasing tendency to “start from moments of complex conflict”, demanding audiences to reconstruct what has happened before (Kustritiz, forthcoming). Storyworlds are thus a vast and complex environment offering narratives that are created in-motion or in-transit. This paper draws the conclusion that the audience has become more of an onlooker or a witness instead of a specific targeted listener. For practical reasons this paper will still address these audiences as
audiences, but one should remember that audiences are merely bearing witness to the story instead of specifically looking for it. They aim to learn, see or experience something else, but
13 even though story has become secondary to other elements it is inescapable. In his book
Building Imaginary Worlds Mark J.P. Wolf explains it the following way:
The notion of transmediality […] suggests that we are vicariously experiencing something which lies beyond the media windows through which we see and hear it, since it posits an object that can be seen and heard through different windows, and one that is independent of the windows through which it is seen and heard, even though it exists only in mediated fashion (Wolf 2013: 247)
In other words these transmedia storyworlds are just out there, waiting to be engaged with and continue to be whether or not they are explored. Transmedia storytelling is a means to an end in exploring that strange new territory and introducing, revealing and mapping the environment. If the amount of media windows increases the world becomes more real and more existent. According to Wolf this suggests “the potential for the continuance of a world” (247). This results in perhaps a rather paradoxical view on storyworlds as they can’t exist without media windows, but in a sense also exist beyond their media windows.
Ryan distills all elements of a storyworld as belonging to either the static or the dynamic components. In the static components audiences are introduced to the world and its background information: demography, characters, history, geopolitical maps, natural laws and ethics. The dynamic components consist of physical events that bring changes to the existing world and the emotional events that signify them (Ryan, 2014: 364). Unfortunately Ryan’s setup does not account for prequel stories as they linger somewhere between her static and dynamic components; the physical events (dynamic component) in the prequels play out in the history of the storyworld (static component). Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca studying game environments worked towards a framework on how to look at transmedial worlds and added to the understanding of storyworld components by defining three core dimensions in these worlds: “mythos”, “topos” and “ethos”. Ryan’s static components correspond to those of mythos, topos and ethos. Whereas the dynamic
components in Ryan’s world are the playing out of the story through various media, Klastrup and Tosca see the played experience as the dynamic component. This paper will work with the three core elements of Klastrup and Tosca and adding a fourth. Mythos is the knowledge of its lore, conflicts and characters one needs to have to interact and interpret events in the world, topos is the setting of the world at a specific location and time and ethos is the moral conduct of the world (Klastrup & Tosca, 2013: 4). These things all account for what this paper will call the infospace of the storyworld; storyworlds are so rich with information that it
14 is hard not to talk of them as infospaces. However, as storyworlds are a narrative brand consisting of “a set of characters, topics and an aesthetic style that define the fictional world of the brand” (Scolari, 2009: 600) they are also one of “recurring motifs” (Jenkins, 2006: 113). As a result, this paper would like to add a fourth dimension of to the distinction of topos, ethos and mythos named “cryptos”. Cryptos constitutes of the underlying and recurring tropes or motifs that drive the story and give meaning to it as an allegory or metaphor. It’s the thematic core of the storyworld as well as the hidden narrative mechanism that might be experienced only subconsciously.
Ryan and Klastrup & Tosca seem to overlook the importance of a thematic core from which everything else sprawls. Cryptos is the thematic glue between all the different
elements and media products in the transmedia storyworld—and a way audiences can make sense of the transmedia storyworld. It is the core that makes sense of information in its raw form. Drawing on as Andrew suggests for narratives for storyworlds: “[T]he plot may
surprise us with its happenings, but every happening must seem possible in that world because all the actions, characters, thoughts and feelings come from the same overall source” (1984: 39). Building on the case studies as examples mentioned in the introduction, Robert Kirkman’s serialized comic book The Walking Dead would have as its topos the United States in the near future after a zombie-apocalypse; the mythos is defined through Rick’s group of survivors fighting both armies of zombies and other survivors and it’s ethos would bring about the ethical means in order to survive—the killing of humans before they turn into zombies is a question often raised. But what bind all of the transmedia products together is the cryptos, which the author gives a striking explanation of in the introduction of the trade paperback Days Gone Bye (2004):
“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. […] There is always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness” (Kirkman, 2004)
The cryptos becomes even more clear when asked in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about the philosophy and the message of the story, to which Kirkman replies:
We made a mistake at some point in our history […] when we were living in houses that we built, growing food that we ate, interacting with our families and living our
15 lives. Looking back on that era, it seems kind of appealing. […] Now, we’re doing jobs that we don’t enjoy to buy stuff that we don’t need. I don’t mean to sound like Tyler Durden, but it seems like we’ve screwed things up (Kirkman, 2013)
This return to pre-industrial society is something scholar Dan Hassler-Forest has noticed in his analysis of the serialized comic as well, referring towards the seemingly return of patriarchal society and power in his article “Cowboys and Zombies: Destablizing patriarchal discourse in The Walking Dead” (2011). The comic shows the internal conflicts that arise with a post-industrial society returning to a pre-industrial society with patriarchal power constructs.
In much the same way the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones has a constantly recapped cryptos in it, that forces the hand of every character and event. George R.R. Martin is cited in an interview with Amazon (2002) and Assignment X
(2011) about the underlying motifs of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones:
I wanted to keep magic in my book subtle and keep our sense of it growing, and it stops being magical if you see too much of it. […] In these books, magic is always dangerous and difficult, and has a price and risks (Martin, 2002)
Good versus Evil […] it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need anymore, ‘Here are the good guys and they’re in white, there are bad guys, they’re in black’ (Martin, 2011)
Martin’s fantasy world, based on medieval Europe and the War of the Roses, is very much so about persons having all shades of grey in them and magic—considered by most people in Westeros as a bed time story—returning to the world. These constructs of the cryptoscan be found throughout the series: characters who are not black, nor white such as Jamie
Lannister a classic villain turned hero; the noble cutthroat Sandor Cleglane who loathes the hypocrisy of knighthood; Theon Greyjoy, the well treated self-loathing warden of the Stark family who became their downfall; and events recalling magic in the world such as the hatching of dragons, long thought dead; Melisandre and Thoros of Myr, Red Priests of R’hllor, bringing a dangerous new faith full of magic to Westeros; the reappearance of an ancient enemy consisting of magical army made up of creatures named Wights and The
16 Others/White Walkers. To a lesser degree2 the Warcraft franchise deals with topics of pride and corruption as cryptos keeps dictating the same formula into the series. These examples offer but a glimpse of the canonical cryptos of named storyworlds. The demarcation of this term is left vaguely on purpose for there are just as many canon creations as there are fan creations dictating mythos, topos and ethos. For that same reason there is not one definition of the cryptos in any storyworld, just as there is not one definition of what entitles the mythos of a storyworld.
This means that text is never experienced by all readers in the same way, nor by writer and reader. There has been extensive writing on how media messages can be interpreted differently. For example, Stuart Hall developed the encoding/decoding model of communication in his influential essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1974) and Jenkins talks in Textual Poachers (1992) about resistant reading in which fans clash with producers over the meaning of texts as well; there will always be more themes and motifs hidden somewhere to be encountered. It is but one appeal among many. The idea of cryptos then mirrors more to Roland Barthes’ ideas of meaning making by ways of social value systems producing myths. In Mythologies (1947), Barthes describes how objects speak a hidden reservoir of manufactured sense signifying normalized meaning; in very much the same way storyworlds count on cryptos—which is manufactured in the true sense of the word as it is created by an author. Plot devices, narrative strings, events and
character relations are in most parts normalized and made logical by ways of cryptos. Just as Lynch’s way-faring city dweller “selects, organizes, and endows with own meaning what he sees” (1960: 6) just so does the audience navigate through the storyworld. It would be impossible to claim that all the metaphors and allegories are recognized or even accepted by all readers. The cryptoscan mean many different things to many different people and the examples of cryptos distilled above form but a few. They are always weighed on an
individual level as the dominant cryptosof the storyworld; just as some people might find a secondary character more valuable than a primary character. Yet their mythos, topos and ethos, and in particularly cryptos offer a “set of paradigms, a global source from which [the author] could draw” (Andrew, 1984: 39). To refer once again to the metaphor of the audience as a city dweller, it is Lynch who says that a navigable, “distinctive and legible environment” offers security, depth and increases the experience (1960: 5). While authors may produce these areas of space it is transmedia storytelling that gives them depth.
2 Since the MMORPG World of Warcraft deals with so many different quests that can be seen as separate
17 Chapter 1.4: Storyworlds and Non-Linear Storytelling
The last chapters explored upon the principle basics of transmedia storytelling. In its most basic form it consists of different media windows that access a storyworld that’s
consistently in conext. This understanding does however not outline the ways how audiences could possible engage with the stories in these storyworlds. Scholars like Evans suggest that the age of linear media has come to an end and that the current media landscape can now be seen as non-linear; a shift has occurred and the main reason for this change has been the rise of new platforms such as the internet (Evans, 2011: 34). This thesis proposes in line with Evans’ last argument that new media’s structure can greatly explain how audiences engage with storyworlds. The next chapters will place transmedia storytelling on par with new media developments such as “hypertext” and databases. In his 1992 book called
Hyptertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology George Landow touches upon this assumption as well, citing Robert Coover’s at the time
unpublished works, in which he argues that the defining attribute of story in the sense of Aristoteles perception—its linearity—is not completely dismissed and cannot completely disappear. However, there are now narrative bites that don’t follow each other in a page-turning chain. Story space has become multidimensional and in a way possible infinite (Landow, 1992: 104). The rise of storyworlds is linked to the possibilities of non-linear storytelling and can be seen as a part of it. The object of this new story system anchored in hypertext then no longer is to present a plot of probable and structured sequence of events from beginning to end, but as Pierre Lévy addressed by Jenkins says “to prevent closure from occurring too quickly” (Jenkins, 2006: 95). Closure means an end and an end means linearity. George Landow claims that famous scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes “argue that we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks” (Landow, 1992: 2). The concept of storyworld perfectly aligns with these propositions of a conceptual system without hierarchy as there is no center or linearity. Important in the understanding of non-linear storytelling is the concept of hypertext. Hypertext is a way of non-sequential writing and reading; the text branches off in different paths and allows for the reader to choose his own (Ibid: 4). This change in technology has not only had its impact on narrative alone but on audiences that are getting used to it as well: “filmgoers educated on nonlinear media like video games were expecting a different kind of entertainment experience” (Jenkins, 2006: 119). In these complex structures of hypertext no one user can have the same trajectory experience, although users might have the same overall structural experience. Users “create paths through a corpus of related
18 materials” (Landow, 1992: 6). In his chapter on audiences and agency in Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context Beryl Graham comments that one of the primary pleasures of engaging with an interactive medium is the idea of control and that perhaps no control or “token control is a site for […] displeasure” (1996: 171). With rapid technological
developments and a rise in media literacy people are getting used to exerting control over the media they are using. Internet, for example, has the “connotation of increased audience agency” (Evans, 2008: 203). As this paper has mentioned before, audiences decide what is playing on their screens, at what time and in which setting is progressively becoming something they decide. With gradual introduction of more and more products that allow control—VCR, computer, the Web, CD-ROM, tablets—it’s easy to argue that audiences are expecting that same amount of control in their consumption of stories: they wish to choose their own pathsthrough the storyworld.
Landow notes that these ideas of nonlinearity storytelling greatly contradict the ideas of plot and story that have been upheld since the times of Aristotele’s Poetics. It’s in this book Aristoteles argues that one of the defining attributes of plot is its sequencing in a beginning, middle and end. It is not possible for a good plot—or narrative—to begin or end at any point it likes (Landow, 1992: 101). As discussed above one of the characteristics of transmedia storytelling is that any given product is an entry into the franchise as a whole, it is a beginning. Though there might be as Evans suggests prioritized products in transmedia storytelling, the transmedia storyworld can be engaged and understood as a self-contained entry with any product. The elements of the storyworld are “an interlocking set of stories that together flesh out the world” (Jenkins, 2006: 119). As the possibilities of technology, the audience’s willingness and demand for more control have increased, so has the use of non-linear storytelling like transmedia storytelling. Nowadays it’s unexceptional for high-profile series not to employ some form of transmedia strategy (Mittell, forthcoming). Yet, Jenkins cautions: “Hollywood can only go so far down that direction if audiences are not ready to shift their mode of consumption” (Jenkins, 2006: 130). However, information era audiences tend to be per definition not ennui. This claim will be developed further upon when discussing young media audiences in the second chapter of this paper, but it is important to note here as well.
Although this paper shies to make big arguments as to say that with the conglomeration of television and new media all sorts of audiences have been easier to activate, it is interesting that the concept of passivity as a term becomes less helpful to define television audiences. Evans acknowledges the complexity of activity and passivity now that users hop from one medium to another. While there has always been a form of activity
19 while watching television by the television audience in evaluating meaning, these audiences have also taken on the more active role of decision making which has been mostly seen as an attribute of game audiences (Evans, 2008: 198-200). While Jenkins claims that in 2006 “the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic prospects sweet, and the audience primed” (96) the new effects of new media have only recently settled. Television users can merely change channels, but audiences that grew up with games are used to a more active role. In computer games players take the actions and do the decision making, interacting with the text (Evans, 2008: 200). The clear distinctions between these two groups are fading. Have we become a transmedia audience that has become used to being active and choosing its own paths even in the face of passivity?
Chapter 1.5: Storyworlds as a Narrative Database
Though the similarities between the structures of hypertext and the non-linear paths that audiences take in storyworlds are evident, there needs to be more to this similar to be an exact fit. In order for paths to be chosen there need to be branches and structures. Critical in the development of and engagement with storyworlds is the rise of new media as previously stated. New-media theorist Janet Murray writes in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) that new media has great potential for encyclopedic capacity; thus allowing for greater structures, branches and details. New interfaces allow the gigantic storyworlds and wide variety of different media to be easily archived, stored, engaged and consulted. Perhaps this was possible even before new media. However, new media allows this to be done in the domestic space contrary to large libraries and archives or one medium if necessary. This chapter aims to place storyworlds within the mechanisms of databases.
There are no schedules anymore. In case with downloading services content is provided in archives and library formats (Evans, 2011: 55). The different media have then become the different interfaces with which we engage, the “interlocking set of stories that together flesh out the [story]world” (Jenkins, 2006: 119). Despite television and other media growing together in one big conglomeration they do, however, “offer different forms of engagement” (Evans, 2008: 203). Ryan contributes to this by saying that “[s]ince different media have different affordances, giving them different expressive power, it is virtually impossible for two different media to project the same world” (Ryan, 2014: 368). The medium is the vehicle with which one can engage the storyworld. It is the navigator, the viewer, the searcher and in its own premise delivers by its own merits. The storyworld is the information space that is being expended upon, but a better comparison would be that of
20 the storyworld as a database.
In his book The Language of New Media Lev Manovich argues that database taking over narrative is the key form of expression. According to him there are plenty of new media objects that don’t tell stories. Instead they present a collection of objects that all have the same significance, which are not organized through the means of story: beginnings and endings (Manovich, 2001: 194). As discussed above transmedia storytelling is defined through encyclopedic transmedial worlds that consist of a collection of elements. Scolari argues that transmedial worlds expand beyond themselves through branding. “In transmedia storytelling, then, the brand is expressed by characters, topics, and aesthetic style of the fictional world. […] It is a ‘moveable’ set of properties that can be applied to different forms of expression.” (Scolari, 2009: 600). Then as Klastrup & Tosca put it: “Transmedial worlds are abstract content systems from which a repertoire of fictional stories and characters can be actualized or derived across a variety of media forms” (Klastrup & Tosca, 2013: 1). Manovich states as a matter of fact that when elements keep being added it is anti-narrative logic and is more of a collection than a story (2001: 196). In other words, all the
components that consist of the transmedia storyworlds have become data; moveable data that can be accessed, connected to others, be part of stories or be newly created.
Transmedial worlds are their own sort of database with their own kind of data. While this assumption is strongest in its metaphorical sense, the way audiences engage with
transmedial worlds is much the same as the way in which they engage with databases. Though this idea will be explored upon further in the third chapter it is good to
provide a few examples of storyworlds as narrative databases. Looking at the storyworld of a real-time strategy game like Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos it offers players specific and unique campaigns for each playable race: Human, Undead, Orcs and Night Elves. While campaigns are already separated narratives in this database, the campaigns themselves are separated into mininarratives called missions as well. In these missions players have the option to do only the “main quests” and the “optional quest”, resulting in even more little narratives. Even a well-timed save game in a mission can divide the “main quest” into two separate narratives too. The mission Dissension has halfway through a very specific fight against dragons, in order to defeat these the player needs to recruit several mercenaries. Saving the game on such an important story node the player evidently breaks up the narratives into a “before the dragons” and “after the dragons” part. This does however only apply in retrospect as it is not optional to start from a yet to be created save game. All these narratives—while some need to be unlocked first—can be individually engaged by the players. They choose the narrative they want to play out of this narrative of databases.
21 These transmedia storyworlds are evidently out there for everyone to engage with at any time, any level, in any of the many possible ways, as much as any other database—or in this case constructed imaginary storyworld. It’s up to individuals to determine if, when, how and in what scope they engage: even negative commitment is commitment. This is the true experience of non-linear storytelling as discussed regarding hypertext in the previous chapter: the possibility for users to navigate through data starting at any node in the database. “One experiences hypertext as an infinitely de-centerable and re-centerable
system, in part because hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into transient center, a directory document that one can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next.” (Landow, 1992: 12). However, the individual components and elements can have their own narratives. Yet, they are part of a database of narratives.
Databases are well-organized structures that allow their users to quickly use and engage with the information relevant to them. Manovich highlights that all new media
objects are essentially databases, even if they are not engaged by going through the records of the database. Databases are becoming the center of the creative process. As content and interface are separating, so it becomes possible to engage the same material through a different interface (Manovich, 2001: 200). As stated before: the medium has become a vehicle for the user to engage the transmedia storyworld. Perhaps it is redundant to state that while transmedia storytelling can be explained through other models like fan
participation as Jenkins tends to do, it is lacks in explaining how casual audiences making use of transmedia storytelling. Evans on the other hand constructs transmedia storytelling as not quite being Raymond William’s theory of flow, John Ellis’ collection of small units, nor as Derek Kompare’s notion of the DVD box as television, but being somewhere new and in between these theories and positions (Evans, 2011: 55). This paper attempts to combine these theories of transmedia storytelling as a technological novelty and as a fan constructed experience. A major premise in this attempt is Manovich’s notion of database logic:
transmedia storytelling owns more to database than to narrative and can be seen as the on-demand version of the narrative.
Chapter 1.6: Conclusion
Transmedia storytelling is a concept that has been a buzz word throughout media studies and television production. In its most basic understanding it is a narrative so large that it spans several different media. This chapter made several assumptions important to understanding the place of transmedia storytelling in discourses outside fandom or that of a technological novelty. It tried to reveal underlying technical new media patterns of its
22 storyworlds. Storyworlds are in fact its most important core feature. Transmedia storytelling cannot take place without a well spun out mythopoeia. It is for this reasons that audiences wish to connect with the storyworld, rather than with a story from that storyworld.
On a more technical level this paper made the assumption that new media logic can be applied to transmedia storytelling. In its non-linear storytelling it looks a lot like how hypertext makes sense of databases, it allows audiences to jump to, to skip or to ignore certain elements of the storyworld. This is more or less exactly the same way that hypertext would allow one to browse a database. For that reason, among others, it can be said that storyworlds are in fact narrative databases. These are important concepts in order to understand casual audiences and their relation to transmedia storytelling. These notions of transmedia storytelling, unlike those of Jenkins and Scolari, do not segregate audiences into a hierarchy: everyone can access a database and—probably—understand it. If people interact more with the database the better they understand the database and gain profound knowledge of single elements anchored inside the database. This profound understanding, however, only applies to a single element in that database, not about the database as a whole. Storyworlds, as most databases, are shallow depths.
23 Chapter 2: Fans, Casual Audiences and New Media
In Jenkins’ words, the engagement with transmedia stories “asked too much” of the “casual consumer” (Jenkins, 2006: 126). This quote in its own right is exemplary in many respects. What constitutes “too much”, what are “casual consumers” and for whom then is transmedia storytelling if specifically not for casual consumers? Jenkins favors a binary opposition between those that can digest the required engagement and those that cannot; in many ways it’s the binary opposition of the cult fan versus the mainstream audience. Yet consumption patterns often take unexpected turns. Leaving casual consumers out of the equation would be shortsighted. It’s easy to overlook casual audiences and just say it’s not for them. Even those who in Jenkins’ perception are not meant to be targeted find
themselves walking the paths in these transmedia storyworlds. Let’s for a moment assume that with the term casual consumers Jenkins refers to mass or mainstream audiences, mundane viewers, people who—in the words of Frankfurter Schule scholar and critic of popular culture Theodor W. Adorno—feel like entertainment should offer them what they seek foremost in their leisure time: “relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously” (1941: 30). This would go against Matt Hills’ observations that everyday teen audiences have been showing signs of behavior previously thought to be idiosyncratic to cult fans: following their favored television shows across different media, tie-in books, fan fiction and websites. He labels these shows with the seemingly contradictio in terminis of “mainstream cult” (Hills, 2004: 62). Jenkins as well has noticed in the past that the web is rapidly giving ways to new forms of fandom in which cult activities are moving toward the cultural mainstream. A large amount of internet users is or has been engaging in what can be considered fan activities (Jenkins, 2002: 161). Old definitions of mainstream audiences and fandom are hard to persevere in the light of new developments.
This new rise of the mainstream cult is then interdependence between the rise of new media, cultural literacy and the assimilation of fan activities in the mainstream. As Michael Curtin correctly observes in his article “Matrix Media”, these changes have been motivated in part by new competitors and new technologies, but just as much by changing behaviors of audiences that “now navigate a growing universe of entertainment, information and activity” (Curtin, 2009: 19). Whence describing the differences between cult and
everyday activities Hills recounts in “Realizing the Cult Blockbuster” the assumptions of old: The distinction of cult status […] heavily dependent on audience knowledge and activity, whereas the consumption of non-cult, mainstream texts is contrastively
24 represented as not requiring audience skill, knowledge or discrimination”(Hills, 2006: 161)
The following chapter will show the problematic understanding of this binary opposition between fan and casual consumer; two definitions that have become muddy in the digital era and have embraced each other in a new relationship. The terms casual consumer, casual viewers, mundane and mainstream audiences—while having small nuances—will be used as interchangeable terms; just as Matt Hills sees fans and cult fans as interchangeable terms in his book Fan Cultures (2002). These oppositions are not feasible when thinking about how mainstream audiences interact with transmedia storytelling. The following chapter will first work towards a new definition that it will dub the transmedialist. It is a new form of user that cannot be understood merely in the discourse of fandom, nor in that of the discourse of interactivity; they have moved beyond the either-or logic. The transmedialist is—very much so—a new breed of media user that is rooted and operates in different consumption
patterns.
Chapter 2.1: New Media Literacy
Fan activities and new media literacy are two sides of the same coin when looking at the emergence of the transmedialist. There are many available starting points to look at how new technologies are adopted, but in the understanding of their full potential it is best to look upon those who grew up simultaneously with their development: those who have are native to the digital era. When it comes to new technology and audiences Evans points out:
There is clear evidence not only that younger audiences are positioned as the most natural users of new technologies but also that they actually are embracing
innovative technologies more readily that their older counterparts (Evans, 2011: 73) Looking at these young audiences in many respects unveils the attributes of new media. In the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore what it means to those born in the digital era and how it has transformed their lives and how they relate to one another and the world around them. According to them, these youngsters are characterized through their tendency to multitask, to express themselves through media, to access and use information to create new knowledge and art forms, and to remain always connected (2008: 4-5). These are the digital natives who know the ins and outs of new technologies and, most importantly, of the new environment called the internet. As Castells claims in his book The Internet Galaxy (2001) the internet is characterized by a four-layer structure of different cultures, ranging from hacker to
techno-25 meritocratic culture, they are all unified in their apparent construction of an ideology of freedom (Castells, 2001: 37). If anything, freedom has indeed become the credo of the 21st century. These conclusions show that new media and its new audience are calling for a need to redefine old definitions of mainstream audiences and fandom. As said before, the
audiences of the information era are per definition active contrary to passive: there is a lot of interactivity going on between audiences and a medium.
While the term interactivity is heavily disputed by some as an illusion of freedom, in its most basic form as option for decision making it is heralded by most as the harbinger of at least the feeling of freedom. And more often than not, as pointed out by John Dovey in the introduction of Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context, the concept of interactivity is often described as one of the main new qualities these new technologies have brought with them. They give the user the ability “to interact with information and image, to change, reformulate or tailor the data to suit his or her own ends” (Dovey, 1996: xiii). Graham asserts this feeling of freedom as well divulging in the pleasures of a performer performing the actions of the user alone: the user is completely in control of something bigger than them. Next to that the user is not only highly engaged and involved but safe in its domestic space as well, giving a high comfort factor to interactivity (Graham, 1996: 161). Even though interactivity is sometimes used as a pejorative term—as there is a highly predictable way-faring between the varieties of paths and thus only feeds the illusion of creativity— it is not bounded by technology and has long been part of the reader experience.
Nickianne Moody sees several comparisons between the interactivity of games and that of medieval allegories in her essay “Interacting with the Divine Comedy” (1995). The “writer” can in both cases assume an audience to be prepared to take more energetic and demanding activities. There is true activity in both the reader as the player in the sense of interactivity: there is a continuous exchange of information. Similar to a game, their shared fantasy follows a template but one from which it is possible to deviate. They can both affect the attractions of the interactive system: watching scenarios from different angles, focusing on particular points and as the player can navigate down alternative paths, just as the reader follows a template, but one from which can be deviated (Moody, 1996: 62). There are in fact many different viewership positions that one can take while reading a text, looking into it and adjusting it to tailor one’s specific interests. When looking back to transmedia
storytelling, it allows for many viewership positions because one tailors their engagement experience by interacting with the transmedial storyworld through the interface—
accompanied by its own merits and flaws—of their choosing. While one may loathe the series because of its beats and ellipses; despise the game for its lack of depth; or dislike the
