Netprovs: Another Emerging Artform

http://memeraze.tumblr.com/post/83888889771/cheese-ill-never-forget-the-nervous-excitement

Recently, my class engaged in a netprov project called Memeraze. Netprovs are essentially utilizing social media platforms to play an improvisational story game with participants and anyone who is curious. In our class, we had a story to play to, created characters, and made a tumblr to participate in the game.

The story of the game was this:

Imagine the scenario of losing all your belongings to a house fire, flood, or other disaster. All your photographs from days gone by, of family members and friends, are gone. Now imagine this scenario applied to the Internet. In this day and age, we have a Titanic-like belief in the safety of the Internet as a file safekeeping device. Everything is backed up somewhere, so we can't lose anything we put on the Cloud, Dropbox, or any other kind of sharing device. But what if a disaster did occur. What if the back ups, the assurances, were all gone, and thus, so were all your memories you saved online.

That is the central conceit of our project. Our classes divied up into separate families, and had to recreate with inanimate objects, the memories that we had lost, culminating in a wedding for the end. It worked out pretty well, with some fun, clever, creative, and beautiful photographs taken throughout, such as these:

http://memeraze.tumblr.com/post/83351894073/mine-and-sebastians-last-trip-to-aspen-together

http://memeraze.tumblr.com/post/83848398818/ahh-thats-better-i-want-to-cry-just-looking-at

http://memeraze.tumblr.com/post/83130568489/wedding-party-throwing-the-bouquet-omg-i-cant

From a personal experience, the project was fun. It was creatively challenging to come up with both realistic looking photos that were somewhat aesthetically pleasing, while keeping in mind the skill of your character as a photographer. It was fun playing a character who went through a bit of growth (my character was the Crazy Aunt, Ursula Boozer, from Family 2, and she found her long lost daughter) and it was fun to play off of others and their pictures as well. I thought maybe we could have organized more of our plans outside of class together, but I did talk with some of my other classmates and come up with ideas that we then implemented, and it worked out nicely. With so many different families, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of them all without proper tagging, but in the end there were a lot of interesting threads to follow and fun characters. (I personally very much enjoyed the Mussolino Family and seeing their antics!)

But now that we've seen a bit of what one Netprov project can look like, let's talk about them more generally.

For a better, more definition of what a netprov is, we can look to Rob Wittig (who helped organize the project we worked on in our class)'s definition on his website:

Netprov (networked improv narrative) is an emerging art form that creates written stories that are networked, collaborative and improvised in real time.

Other examples of netprovs include The Ballad of Workstudy Seth and Tempspence, both utilizing fake characters' twitter accounts to interact with real people. In the case of Tempspence, a character created by Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino utilized the real person Spencer Pratt's twitter account to play with Pratt's twitter followers and confuse those who follow Pratt's famous persona. Pratt, famous for being the typical spoiled frat boy "lost" his phone which was then picked up by an obscure poet, who began playing word games with Pratt's followers, asking them often for romantic advice. People played along and enjoyed the strangeness of it, but when Pratt, Marino, and Wittig tried another project with "The Speidi Show" creating a fake show that only existed in the twitter and blog updates about the show, there was some controversy, as addressed on the website of "The Speidi Show."

Other netprovs done by Wittig and Marino include the Center of Twitzease Control, and The LA Flood Project, which are different from the first two in that they did not necessarily involve created characters. These were simply games that many could participate in however they chose to see fit. The Center of Twitzease Control created a new twitter disease outbreak, such a baconitis, following participants to tweet as though they succumbed to the disease, and thus had to bacon as though every bacon was bacon. Similarly, the LA Flood Project included mapping areas of LA in which this fictitious flood had over taken in google maps, and tweeting these maps, pictures, and stories. A new event would take place every day, and all the participants would respond in kind to the given event.

Clearly, there is a variety of ways to play these netprov games, whether with set characters, interactions with people who are not in on the joke, word games, or set events that everyone must respond to. The project that my class worked on combined several of these concepts in that we all had to have families, and a wedding had to occur for each of our families at the end of the story. We had the choice to be new characters, and most everyone took up that choice, and then we were free to do as we pleased, as long as we built off of one another and followed the main tenants. It was in all honesty, a lot of fun. I would be eager to participate in a similar project in the future, but I think the one that sounds the most fun is The LA Flood project-- it combines aspects of Alternate Reality games and GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen) with reality. Alternate Reality games try to put the game in a real world space, often telling you places to go and things to do in those spaces. GISHWHES does much the same, but you must upload the videos of yourself doing certain things in certain places or mail in what you find in an elaborate scavenger hunt. The LA Flood Project improves on this in that you can make the experience what you want. It is a creative exercise as opposed to a physical one. Should you decide to make it physical, you can, but it is up to you how you want to participate, allowing for a wide range of creativity, while still interacting with known physical spaces on a textual level.

Another aspect of netprovs that is always unavoidable, but I wish could be configured somehow, is having time to fully participate. As a kid, on roleplay forums that you could explore on the web, or even playing table top roleplaying games in real time with your friends, you had time on weekends or after school to fully invest in your characters, plot lines, and plan with your friends. Perhaps that's just a flaw in my own nature (something that I'm working on) that I need to plan things with people to be able to really enjoy the playing and improvisation that comes after. But I do think that there is some difficulty in being a college aged student and only having a week to participate in the netprov. I would have really enjoyed being able to build something over the course of the semester, plan something out with my classmates, and see what came out of that very basic outline, but nobody has time for very much more than a week. Even then, it was a stretch for myself and many of my classmates.

I don't think that negatively affected our netprov though. I think that the short amount of time we were given pushed us to think on our feet and create new aspects and relationships for our characters quickly, but sometimes given the varying knowledge of how to use tumblr, things could get lost in the posts. Overall though, netprovs are an exciting medium to participate in, especially in how open they are to everyone. It makes one think what other things could be considered netprovs that exist online now, but are not categorized with this word. It seems so open, and encompassing, and many things seem similar, but are defined differently.

The core of new media on the web is that it is always evolving. The internet is young, and so it is still trying to define all of its many, many works, methods, and artistic movements. It in and of itself is an improvisation, and thus it is important to show and establish such an aspect in a medium like netprov.

Homestuck, Structure, Fandom, and Branching Out

Let me tell you about Homestuck.

Homestuck is the most recent web comic in Andrew Hussie's MsPaintAdventures series. The style of MsPaintAdventures is to create comics that look like they were made on Microsoft Paint, that have the text based adventure format of old video games, to combine reader interaction, multiple mediums, and irreverent silliness all with a massive, improvisational story. Homestuck fits that style to a t, and has taken it beyond.

I'm going to admit something for a second. I am a crazy, huge, Homestuck fan. I love the comic, I'm so excited for the upcoming video game based on the comic, I draw fan art, and I would cosplay if I had that kind of talent, money, bravery, and patience. But, while I don't have any of that, I do have analysis, and luckily, my favorite part of Homestuck is the analysis of it. I have somehow managed to sneak in Homestuck into most of my college papers (when it was applicable, and I can make it applicable.) What's wonderful about this comic series is that many, if not most, of the fans feel very similarly. While it has its detractors, most who come into contact with Homestuck cannot deny that it is an impressive feat. At last count, it was over 6000 pages long, and though ending this year, it still has much more to go.

Within the confines of those 6000 plus pages are comic panels, text (read and written like IM chat logs), gifs, animations spanning 14 minutes long (it was so epic), video games, and links to other comics, jokes, etc. that all help move the story along. It is the very definition of a transmedia narrative. Previous MsPaintAdventure stories included forums in which the audience could give suggestions as to what the next command (a part of the text based adventure game style of the story, which essentially turns the page and continues the action) would be, and while Homestuck started in such a fashion, it quickly departed from this method of interactivity to tell a more realized story. It made up for this in making many aspects of the game interactive, with clues to find and discuss, in-jokes between the creator and fans, and other exploratory features.

All of this makes sense for a story that Hussie himself described as a story about the internet:

So yeah, a story about kids on the internet, that is told in a way that is like, made of pure internet, is something arrived at pretty organically and not something I can say I envisioned before starting all at once. Making something that really feels like it belongs on the internet, something that seems to actually understand it exists on the internet, involves doing quite a lot of things. The media exploration is part of it, but also the self aware elements I think, where the connection between the reader/fandom and the story is always alive and palpable.

Read More: ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Guy Interviews ‘Homestuck’ Guy: Bryan Lee O’Malley On Andrew Hussie | http://comicsalliance.com/homestuck-interview-andrew-hussie-bryan-lee-omalley-ms-paint-adventures/?trackback=tsmclip

The exciting thing about Homestuck now as it is reaching its end is truly its future. A Kickstarter for a video game spin off reached its goal in record time. As much of the series is based on classic adventure games, it made sense to fans and to Hussie to extend this game into a real one. Hussie describes it as "a more formal exercise in interactive storytelling" on the Kickstarter page.  It was a natural progression. But this collaboration between fans and creator is extending further in Hussie's newest project, Paradox Space.

Paradox Space is another comics site completely for the fans. The nature of Homestuck's narrative deals with a lot of time travel, paradoxes, and alternate timelines that the characters must deal with and face, and thus, Hussie saw an opportunity for fans to create their own stories within the Homestuck narrative and keep what would originally fan fiction, canon. Within the Paradox Space website are stories written by and drawn by fans who wished to explore alternate endings, events, and plotlines for the characters. Due to the canon rule that alternate timelines always end in death, we know that though these stories canonically happened in an alternate timeline, they do not necessarily interfere with the current canon storyline, as all alternate timelines end in death to avoid paradox. So they are canon while not being precisely canon. Confusing, but pretty cool!

This allows for a great deal of play between creator and fan. Hussie has stated in the mission statement of Paradox Space's website that when he has the time between finishing the main comic and the video game, he too might create storylines for Paradox Space, haven written the page's first comic. Currently, the system in place for Paradox Space does not allow for just anyone to submit a story. The admins of the webpage usually approach those that they are interested in working with to create stories for the page. There may be future plans to accept submissions, but they are not in the works right now.

Personally, I understand that in managing a website, that it would be incredibly difficult to sort through submissions. With the huge fanbase that Homestuck has, such an endeavor would be nearly impossible. But I definitely think that it is something that should be looked into for the future. A huge part of the popularity of Homestuck and MsPaintAdventures is the aspect of interactivity. I believe that they will pursue that line of thinking in the future, but for now it makes sense to keep it a little more manageable as it is just getting started.

The end is looming for Homestuck, and with that end there is much potential for further growth and exploration of such a transmedia heavy story. There are difficulties and questions to mire through, and as with the very nature of transmedia, it is all very experimental. But Hussie and his crew are working towards big things for the future of this comic, and I think if anyone ever needs a crash course in what exactly the potential of a transmedia narrative can be, they need only to look to Homestuck.

Trifecta

Hiya, folks!

Perhaps you are wondering, who is this person? What in the world is transmedia? New Media? Who cares?

Well, probably if you asked that last one, this isn't the place for you, but I have answers to all those questions and more!

My name is Sarah, and for a brief introduction, I am a college student, studying Narrative Studies (basically English and Creative Writing combined) and Animation, and working hard to consume as much as I possibly can about narrative, media, and storytelling from both my education and the Internet.

I too, am interested in exploring these questions on the nature of transmedia and new media and how they are utilized to tell stories in the modern age. Why? Well, I want to tell stories too. I've always been very interested in multimedia storytelling, never quite being able to pick one way to write the stories in my brain over another, and so clearly the best answer was to combine them all. I've done a few projects, personal and class related, some of which are done and some of which are not (I'd link to it, but like I said, it's not done. Sorry). But my main interest in transmedia and new media storytelling is to learn from the examples I see around me, and to hone my own creative craft. I hope we can hone our abilities together!

To do this? We’re going to look at transmedia, Internet folklore, video games, web comics, fan fiction, and everything in between.

Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.

At the same time, we’ll be looking at traditional mediums, such as novels, comic books, film, and animation, and explore how these things are being brought into this new age (both in ways that succeed and fail). We’ll also explore the benefit of this medium, and how it can be a force for change in the world.

Narrative does a lot of things, and so this topic will occasionally be very broad. But we will ground our discussions on transmedia and its capabilities with real world examples and analysis on how they do the things they do. For example, coming up will be an exploration of popular web comics and their differing styles; netprovs, alternate reality games, and transmedia storytelling; and more! :) Thanks for stopping by! I look forward to hearing your thoughts!



Luckily, I’m not the only one interested in this topic. For further reading, you should definitely check out these bloggers:

• This is the web blog of assistant professor of English at Rockford University, Kyle Stedman, who specializes in studying transmedia storytelling and how people are interconnected through the Internet.
• Another professor, here at USC, Henry Jenkins can be found here. He specializes in studying fandom culture and is a prominent member of the Project New Media Literacies group, looking into transmedia and multimedia projects.
• Another student studying very similar things to what this blog will be talking about, and with real world experience and research done.
• This blog is run by two writers looking to not only analyze online novels, webfiction, and other online content, but they write it themselves, as well as accept submissions of work, both analytical and fictional.
• Jay Bushman worked with Hank Green of vlogbrothers fame on their first venture into fictional video blog accounts, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a partially interactive, transmedia story. This is his Tumblr blog in which he posts things he is interested in, working on, transmedia work opportunities, and his thoughts on transmedia.

                                                              ****-----****

Hey all!

Today, I'm going to profile for you one of the blogs that I've been reading to learn more about transmedia and how people are studying, creating, and interacting with it.

This particular blog is called "The Future of Storytelling and Transmedia Thesis Blog". It tracks the progress of a young Masters Candidate for Interactive Design. He doesn't give his name, but it's a lovely look into his life in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania, and his studies. It focuses on how he brought together all of the work he studied in his educational career to come up with a presentation on Interactive Design and Narrative Systems Engineering.

Unfortunately, the blog seems to be inactive, with the last post occurring two years ago. However, I still feel that this is a good read for those interested in studying transmedia, and how those in academia are viewing what can be done with this new narrative form. It's also a nice look into the "amateur" side of transmedia (amateur only in that he was studying to become a professional. Very likely he is one now.)

What's really wonderful about this blog is it takes you behind the scenes of all the different aspects of transmedia. As a student studying the ways in which transmedia narratives and interactive fiction can be constructed, the blog writer has a lot of insight into many different fields, and many different parts of the process. In this post, he talks about how in his studies he has read:

from digital storytelling to interactive fiction to sceneography, to spectatorship vs. participant theory, to comics and now to storytelling in theater. I’ve read the Hollywood perspective on storytelling, the design perspective (via U practices), the game designer perspective, the NGO perspective…and there are tons more. 

which are all words and concepts that I am now excited to delve into and read more about myself!

In the same post he talks about "immersion" and how this is the key to transmedia and interactive fiction, as we saw in my previous post on Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and the young adult series, Cathy's Book. I agree that this is the key to this new form of story telling, and all forms, truly. What really keeps readers interested is feeling entirely a part of the world, whether that be emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically, or all of the above.

I like this blog because it's scholarly, but also accessible. This is clearly the voice of a young, passionate student and storyteller, much like how I view myself. I can connect to his enthusiasm, and I can learn from what he has previously studied.

His voice tends to the creative writing side, often talking about his daily life and work and how he is experiencing the study of this medium, which in and of itself is an interesting choice. He defines some things, but most of what he talks about he assumes the reader knows, or will go discover for themselves. He assumes his audience is well versed in the transmedia discussion, whether they too are students or professionals.  Wonderfully though, he thoughtfully provides a reading list on the side of his blog to aid in this research. Sometimes not knowing the in depth details of the essays he talks about can be frustrating, but for myself as reader, it only inspires me to go read these things for myself, which I think was the blog writer's intention.

I think this post in particular sums up what I like about this blog. In a paragraph he defines what transmedia is, and why it is important. Even more so, he explains that its importance lies not with the technology, but the immersive experience that it provides, asking the question:

Basing the future of storytelling on the fads of today is a recipe for disaster. It takes a good storyteller, with a great story to tell, to engage people deeply enough such that fumbling from one site to a social media outlet is desired.  No, the future of storytelling rests with the storyteller, and not the technologists. The technology we will be using in 5 or 10 years isn’t the technology of today, so why design something for the future based on technology today that is already on the decline?

The questions he asks, and the passion he has for telling immersive, multimedia stories reminds me precisely of my own drive. His studies are more structured in research, reading, and academic based work, while my own are personally driven, and gleaned from what I can learn in my academic classes that relates back to this subject. For myself, my look into transmedia focuses mostly on the part that I am familiar with, and that is the artistic side. I appreciate that his focus is on the academic side, but can incorporate the artistic side so easily. I feel definitely that that is something I can work on in my own exploration.

For now though, I am excited to read the work he has graciously shared on his reading list. Overall, I'm very excited to learn more, thanks to his studies!

****-----****

Hey guys!

Today, our class's assignment is to analyze a blog for its use of voice. So, we'll be analyzing a transmedia blog I really enjoy for its use of voice in particular:

TransmediaMe is a blog by Kyle Stedman, who is interested in writing and transmedia art forms, especially with regards to music and remixes. As someone who is not particularly well-versed in the music world (my musical tastes don't venture far from musical theatre soundtracks and Bruce Springsteen), it's enlightening to see this side of Transmedia. Music is just as an important part of the human experience as narrative, and the ways in which transmedia and music intersect are just as varied and creative.

Overall, the voice in each of his posts is very teacherly, but personal. He is an adept educator, but also knows how to reach to an audience of his peers. Through his personal anecdotes and musings, he explores and teaches the bigger concepts that he wishes to share with his readers.

This is especially evident in this post, "Wrestling with Authorial Control". A major issue with transmedia and new mediums is this question of authorship and who receives credit and payment under copyright laws. Many transmedia artists wish to be above such an issue, but by sharing with us his own personal grapplings with the mixed feelings that come with creating something and letting others use it, Stedman is able to show why copyright and authorship are such major, complex issues in the first place.

He starts off his post with a fairly confessional stance to illustrate precisely these conflicting feelings as a transmedia remix artists and an academic:

So it’s been interesting in the last few days wrestling with feelings of authorial control that, academically, part of me felt I had somehow transcended. Here’s what happened:

He keeps things colloquial with phrases like "it's been interesting" and "here's what happened" while still discussing a highly intellectual topic such as authorial control. In our class discussions on voice, I've noticed that my peers and I struggle to find such a balance between what is our voice and academic writing, and here in this sentence, Stedman achieves that balance effortlessly.

This same post even goes into the importance of voice and how it relates to authorship. A frustrating encounter he had with editors of a textbook illustrated how and when he feels the need to extort authorial control and prevent changes and edits added to his writing--it diminishes his voice.

Here’s an example: after telling a story of someone whose Facebook posts made her seem rhetorically unsophisticated, I expressed my frustration at that sort of thing with this section-closing line:

Why study rhetoric? Because so many people so often seem to have no no no idea about how to communicate well.

In context, my hope was for the line to express the emotional level of my frustration, my punctuation-less “no no no” emphasizing the rhythms of speech more than the dictates of “proper” mechanics. But the edited version deleted the story that came before it and used this line instead:

Why study rhetoric? Because, communication is difficult, and even more difficult if we are not rhetorically aware.

Style-wise, the new line (to my ear) lacks the stylistic umph I was going for throughout the piece, and it lacks the rhythms of spoken speech. 

Within this very description of voice, he uses voice techniques such as italics (for the umph, which is also a colloquial onomatopoeia utilized here to create sensory weight to his argument), paranthetical asides, sarcastic "quotation marks" and speech rhythms all to hit home his emotional frustration and the strangeness of the new line. It makes sense that a blog about music, remixes, and writing would pay special attention to the very rhythmic nature of language itself in its rhetoric.

In other posts, he utilizes screenshots of twitter conversations and links to discussions he has had with his peers to highlight the communitarian nature of transmedia. In his post, "Computers and Writing: Communities 2013", he discusses his experience at the 2013 Computers and Writing Convention (referred to throughout the post as cwcon). The post starts with a self reference to this practice of his conference write ups and the ritual he goes through to write these kinds of posts:

Conference wrap-up posts are getting harder for me to write. I open my notes in Evernote, I open the Twitter feed in Tweetdeck, I open the conference website, and I sit there, looking for a theme, wondering what I’ll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years.

I think I’m going to follow the style of my presentation, then: bounce from here to there as memories come, expecting my audience to fill meaning into the gaps. Because, you know, that’s what audiences do anyway.

*

He talks about why writing these posts are important to him, despite being difficult: he wonders "what I'll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years" which is speculative, and incredibly intimate.

It begs the question, why do we do the things that we do? What will stick with us when all is said and done? This sort of an introspective question in the midst of all these technological methods of keeping up to date remind us that such technologies are at once useful to our memory and not nearly as important as we might think. On one hand, we can jot down and converse with one another on many different topics that seem important in the moment. Through social media and technology, we can save these forever, even if we might not be able to recall them to memory swiftly ourselves.

On the other hand, we might remember a single event that sticks with us forever, and be surprised to see it not in our notes. It offers a conversations with the past and present and future all at once that is very emotional. That emotion fits incredibly well with the theme of the rest of the post: why do things matter?

Continuing on this quote, he offers us the opportunity to create meaning with him or without him, filling in our own ideas and our tangents (sort of like I just did with his "five of fifteen years" comment) on his experience and feelings that might relate back to our own ideas, experiences, and feelings.

The star as a marker indicates that we will have breaks in memory and in communication notes. They are in a way the blanks the audience can fill. Or just plainly, a way to break up what would otherwise be a long wall of text.

He continues this exploration by sharing with us his ultimate question:

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

Again, there is the rhythm of language present in his writing. This sentence is definitely grammatically a run-on sentence. But the building of this feeling of questioning is structurally felt by running-on the sentence. Tension is created through the commas, the multiple questions within one sentence, and utilizing "so" in the beginning, immediately pushing us into a situation.

The quote continues to show another line break, acting almost like a scene break indicating a change of space, time, and a beat in the emotion. After the asterisk, we see the beginnings of the answers to Stedman's question of community and conferences.

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

*

At dinner on Saturday night, Merideth and I talked about Star Trek films along with the other folks at our table. It didn’t take long to realize that we had a shared vocabulary, a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice.

Within this section after the asterisk, he creates an anecdotal and narrative description of community, followed by a colloquial version of the dictionary definition of community: "a shared vocabulary" and then the connotation of community: "a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice." This descriptive passage builds in the audience that feeling in a much more concrete way than one of these sentences alone could have done. An anecdote could have described community well, but it might have alienated those who did not understand this community. An abstract, dictionary definition coupled with a more colloquial connotation would have let us understood how the author felt and the abstract feelings associated with community, but we would have no grounding. Both together properly create a sense of belonging that Stedman is trying to understand, and throughout his posts, his talent with creative writing helps to ground his academic discussion of many abstract concepts associated with transmedia.

For myself, I feel like I can learn a lot from Stedman's style of academic writing. His easy vernacular coupled with key concepts create an environment that does not talk down to the reader. His audience is definitely one who should be somewhat familiar with most of these concepts, but because of his descriptive, intimate, and straight-forward manner, anyone could sit down with these posts and understand easily what he is talking about and trying to convey.

Like my classmates, I've struggled with finding that perfect balance between academic writing and voice driven posts. I've found in writing this blog, some topics lend themselves easily to one, the other, or both. My goal in continuing forth will definitely be to try and blend an academic style with my natural voice more easily, so that all my posts can come across as accessible as Mr. Kyle Stedman's wonderful blog.

Bo Burnham: Transmedia Comedian and the Natural Progression of Things

So this wasn't ever a post that I had planned on writing, mostly because (while like every human on the planet, I like comedy) I would not consider myself someone who really studies comedy. As a writer and creator myself, I like throwing jokes around every once and awhile, but I'm by no means an expert, so it never occurred to me that even in the realm of stand up comedy, transmedia is making itself known.

That's pretty cool in and of itself that even in places we don't often think of, people are experimenting with new media, technology, and social media to better get their points across. One of the most well known and popular comedians doing just that is Bo Burnham.

Bo Burnham's biography is succinctly (and much more funnily) described on the about page for his book of poetry, Eggheads:

Bo Burnham was a precocious  teenager living in his parents' attic when he started posting material on Youtube. 100 million people viewed those videos, turning Bo into an online sensation with a huge and dedicated following. Bo taped his first two Comedy Central specials four days after his 18th birthday, making him the youngest to do so in the channel's history. Now Bo is a rising star in the comedy world, revered for his utterly original and intelligent voice. And, he can SIIIIIIIIING!

His success as a comedian stemmed very naturally from his work on youtube. Now, Burnham has a vine channel, an instagram, a book, and a comedy special available for free on youtube and on Netflix--his comedy spans easily over many mediums, and that is how he would have it.

The natural progression from youtube star to mainstream star is becoming an increasing trend. Many of our celebrities nowadays had their start on youtube or other video sharing platforms, and gained their audience through the web, such as authors, Cassandra Clare, and David Wong; cartoons like "Adventure Time", "The Adventures of Bee and Puppycat", and"Bravest Warriors"; and musicians, like Jonathan Coulton and various mash up artists. I mean, if you need any other examples of the power of youtube, one simply has to look at Justin Bieber, another youngster who got their start by simply sharing and building an audience. What's interesting about this is that it has become natural. Many older celebrities have to cultivate an online presence in addition to their media celebrity. But with young people, online was always the way to go.

Alisa Rivera, a blogger, reporter, and writer, recently published an article on her blog entitled: "Transmedia is a word for old people". In it, she explains that for the younger generation (which is a weird thing to type, seeing as I consider myself part of that still...) they

don’t need a word to describe transmedia because this is how they live every day. The narrative of their own lives unfolds across different social media platforms and they consciously create identities for themselves depending on where, what, how and with whom they share information.

Reading this, I thought that perhaps we don't need a word, but it is exciting that there is a study of that form of narrative, and that a form of narrative is now reflecting our lives and how we live them.  Certain aspects of older stories no longer ring true to us because we have access to one another instantaneously. There are more reasons to communicate and thus, we communicate more. Jokes about waiting three days to hear a boy call, only for your mother to be using the phone are no longer as funny, as jokes about how there are so many more ways for a boy not to call nowadays, a la "30 Rock".

The core of the article really understood why transmedia is the natural habit of our young generation. For us, we have always consumed media on multiple channels. For us, as Rivera puts it, we are and we see ourselves as "collaborators in creating a shared experience". And this is the environment which creates the comedian that encapsulates our generation, Bo Burnham.


What Bo Burnham does is play with media, quite literally. He plays with language, he plays with editing, and he plays with expectations. In his stand up special "what" (which is what inspired me to write this post), he goes from darkly introspective, vulnerable, and laugh out loud funny not just within milliseconds, but all within the same moment. He explores what it means to him to be a comedian, and what his journey has been in being such a young comedian and trying to do such new and different things with his comedy. For him though, it's not necessarily different--he's using the tools at his disposal. He is a silly person, interested in magic, music, and making people laugh. He is a young person, with social media, digital editing software, and a camera all tools that he uses to achieve his goal of making people laugh and enjoy the comedic narrative and persona he weaves.

(Trigger Warning for Homophobic Slurs. He uses them to make fun of those who use them to demean others, but just in case.)

One could probably see the natural progression from the old vaudeville acts, to SNL, to today's Vine Comedian crowd quite easily, if they were to sit down and study the history of comedy. Just as one could see how easily and naturally we have slipped as a culture into transmedia lifestyles and thus, transmedia narratives. The multiplicity and variation that the internet allows for simply is the same thing as we once defined folklore. Everyone can share their story, or their version of a story now, and that is simply something we take for granted because that is the way the world is. That very notion is why it is worth studying and analyzing, so that we might have a deeper understanding of ourselves, and our own narratives and personas that we weave.

Voice Analysis

Today, our class's assignment is to analyze a blog for its use of voice. So, we'll be analyzing a transmedia blog I really enjoy for its use of voice. TransmediaMe is a blog by Kyle Stedman, who is interested in writing and transmedia art forms, especially with regards to music and remixes. As someone who is not particularly well-versed in the music world, it's very interesting and enlightening to see this side of Transmedia. Music is just as an important part of the human experience as narrative, and the ways in which transmedia and music intersect are just as varied and creative.

Overall, the voice in each of his posts is very teacherly, but personal. He is an adept educator, but also knows how to reach to an audience of his peers. Through his personal anecdotes and musings, he explores and teaches the bigger concepts that he wishes to share with his readers. This is especially evident in this post, "Wrestling with Authorial Control". A major issue with transmedia and new mediums is this question of authorship and who receives credit and payment under copyright laws. Many transmedia artists wish to be above such an issue, but by sharing with us his own personal grapplings with the mixed feelings that come with creating something and letting others use it, Stedman is able to show why copyright and authorship are such major, complex issues in the first place.

He starts off his post with a fairly confessional stance to illustrate precisely these conflicting feelings as a transmedia remix artists and an academic:

So it’s been interesting in the last few days wrestling with feelings of authorial control that, academically, part of me felt I had somehow transcended. Here’s what happened:

He keeps things colloquial with phrases like "it's been interesting" and "here's what happened" while still discussing a highly intellectual topic such as authorial control. In our class discussions on voice, I've noticed that my peers and I struggle to find such a balance between what is our voice and academic writing, and here in this sentence, Stedman achieves that balance effortlessly.

This particular post even goes into the importance of voice and how it relates to authorship. A frustrating encounter he had with editors of a textbook illustrated how and when he feels the need to extort authorial control and prevent changes and edits added to his writing--it diminishes his voice.

Here’s an example: after telling a story of someone whose Facebook posts made her seem rhetorically unsophisticated, I expressed my frustration at that sort of thing with this section-closing line:

Why study rhetoric? Because so many people so often seem to have no no no idea about how to communicate well.

In context, my hope was for the line to express the emotional level of my frustration, my punctuation-less “no no no” emphasizing the rhythms of speech more than the dictates of “proper” mechanics. But the edited version deleted the story that came before it and used this line instead:

Why study rhetoric? Because, communication is difficult, and even more difficult if we are not rhetorically aware.

Style-wise, the new line (to my ear) lacks the stylistic umph I was going for throughout the piece, and it lacks the rhythms of spoken speech. 

Within this very description of voice, he uses voice techniques such as italics (for the umph, which is also a colloquial onomatopoeia utilized here to create sensory weight to his argument), paranthetical asides, sarcastic "quotation marks" and speech rhythms all to hit home his emotional frustration and the strangeness of the new line. It makes sense that a blog about music, remixes, and writing would pay special attention to the very rhythmic nature of language itself in its rhetoric.

In other posts, he utilizes screenshots of twitter conversations and links to discussions he has had with his peers to highlight the communitarian nature of transmedia. In his post, "Computers and Writing: Communities 2013", he discusses his experience at the 2013 Computers and Writing Convention, referred to throughout the post as cwcon. The post starts with a self reference to this practice of his conference write ups and the ritual he goes through to write these kinds of posts:

Conference wrap-up posts are getting harder for me to write. I open my notes in Evernote, I open the Twitter feed in Tweetdeck, I open the conference website, and I sit there, looking for a theme, wondering what I’ll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years.

I think I’m going to follow the style of my presentation, then: bounce from here to there as memories come, expecting my audience to fill meaning into the gaps. Because, you know, that’s what audiences do anyway.

*

He talks about why writing these posts are important to him, despite difficult: he wonders "what I'll remember about this conference in five or fifteen years" which is speculative, and incredibly intimate. It begs the question, why do we do the things that we do? What will stick with us when all is said and done? This sort of an introspective question in the midst of all these technological methods of keeping up to date remind us that such technologies are at once useful to our memory and not nearly as important as we might think. On one hand, we can jot down and converse with one another on many different topics that seem important in the moment, and through social media and technology we can save these forever, even if we might not be able to recall them to memory swiftly ourselves. On the other hand, we might remember a single even that sticks with us forever, and be surprised to see it not in our notes, or pleased to note that we thought that it was significant enough to write down. It offers a conversations with the past and present and future all at once that is very emotional. That emotion fits incredibly well with the theme of the rest of the post.

Continuing on this quote, he offers us the opportunity to create meaning with him or without him, filling in our own ideas (sort of like I just did with that one "five of fifteen years" comment) on his experience and feelings that might relate back to our own ideas, experiences, and feelings.

The star as a marker indicates that we will have breaks in memory and in communication notes. They are in a way the blanks the audience can fill. Or just plainly, a way to break up what would otherwise be a long wall of text.

He continues this exploration by sharing with us his ultimate question:

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

Again, there is the rhythm of language present in his writing. This sentence is definitely grammatically a run-on sentence. But the building of this feeling of questioning is structurally felt by running-on the sentence. Tension is created through the commas, the multiple questions within one sentence, and utilizing "so" in the beginning, immediately pushing us into a situation.

The quote continues to show another line break, acting almost like a scene break indicating a change of space, time, and a beat in the emotion. After the asterisk, we see the beginnings of the answers to Stedman's question of community and conferences.

So I entered the conference itself wondering what community was and what it wasn’t, and when I “felt” like I was in community and how that applied to my teaching and scholarship.

*

At dinner on Saturday night, Merideth and I talked about Star Trek films along with the other folks at our table. It didn’t take long to realize that we had a shared vocabulary, a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice.

Within this section after the asterisk, he creates an anecdotal and narrative description of community, followed by a colloquial version of the dictionary definition of community: "a shared vocabulary" and then the connotation of community: "a sort of lingering underbelly of fannish community that we could rely on. It was nice." This descriptive passage builds in the audience that feeling in a much more concrete way than one of these sentences alone could have done. An anecdote could have described community well, but it might have alienated those who did not understand this community. An abstract, dictionary definition coupled with a more colloquial connotation would have let us understood how the author felt and the abstract feelings associated with community, but we would have no grounding. Both together properly create a sense of belonging that Stedman is trying to understand, and throughout his posts, his talent with creative writing helps to ground his academic discussion of many abstract concepts associated with transmedia.

For myself, I feel like I can learn a lot from Stedman's style of academic writing. His easy vernacular coupled with key concepts create an environment that does not talk down to the reader. His audience is definitely one who should be somewhat familiar with most of these concepts, but because of his descriptive, intimate, and straight-forward manner, anyone could sit down with these posts and understand easily what he is talking about and trying to convey.

Like my classmates, I've struggled with finding that perfect balance between academic writing and voice driven posts. I've found in writing this blog, some topics lend themselves easily to one, the other, or both. My goal in continuing forth will definitely be to try and blend an academic style with my natural voice more easily, so that all my posts can come across as accessible as Mr. Kyle Stedman's wonderful blog.

Blogger Profile!

Today, I'm going to profile one of the blogs that I've been reading to learn more about transmedia and how people are studying, creating, and interacting with it.

This particular blog is called "The Future of Storytelling and Transmedia Thesis Blog" and it tracks the progress of a young Masters Candidate for Interactive Design. He doesn't give his name, but it's a lovely look into his life in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania, and how he brought together all of the work he studied in his educational career to come up with a presentation on Interactive Design and Narrative Systems Engineering. Unfortunately, the blog seems to be inactive, with the last post occurring two years ago. But I still feel that this is a good read for those interest in studying transmedia, and how those academia are viewing what can be done with this new narrative form. It's also a nice look into the "amateur" side of transmedia (amateur only in that he was studying to become a professional. Very likely he is one now.)

What's really wonderful about this blog is it takes you behind the scenes of all the different aspects of Transmedia. As a student studying the ways in which transmedia narratives and interactive fiction can be constructed, the blog writer has a lot of insight into many different fields, and many different parts of the process. In this post, he talks about how in his studies he has read

 from digital storytelling to interactive fiction to sceneography, to spectatorship vs. participant theory, to comics and now to storytelling in theater. I’ve read the Hollywood perspective on storytelling, the design perspective (via U practices), the game designer perspective, the NGO perspective…and there are tons more. 

which are all words and concepts that I am now excited to delve into and read more about myself. In the same post he talks about "immersion" and how this is the key to transmedia and interactive fiction, as we saw in my previous post on Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and the young adult series, Cathy's Book. I agree that this is the key to this new form of story telling, and all forms, truly. What really keeps readers interested is feeling entirely a part of the world, whether that be emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically, or all of the above.

I like this blog because it's scholarly, but also accessible. This is clearly the voice of a young, passionate student and storyteller, much like how I view myself. I can connect to his enthusiasm, and I can learn from what he has previously studied. His voice tends to the creative writing side, often talking about his daily life and work and how he is experiencing the study of this medium, which in and of itself is an interesting choice. He defines some things, but most of what he talks about he assumes the reader knows, or will go discover for themselves. He assumes his audience is well versed in the transmedia discussion, whether they too are students or professionals. He provides a reading list though on the side of his blog to aid in this research, which I think is a very nice touch. Sometimes not knowing the in depth details of the essays he talks about can be frustrating, but for myself as reader, it only inspires me to go read these things for myself, which I think was the blog writer's intention.

I think this post in particular sums up why I like this blog. In a paragraph he defines what transmedia is, and why it is important. But even more so, he explains that its importance lies not with the technology, but the immersive experience that it provides, asking the question:

Basing the future of storytelling on the fads of today is a recipe for disaster. It takes a good storyteller, with a great story to tell, to engage people deeply enough such that fumbling from one site to a social media outlet is desired.  No, the future of storytelling rests with the storyteller, and not the technologists. The technology we will be using in 5 or 10 years isn’t the technology of today, so why design something for the future based on technology today that is already on the decline?

The questions he asks, and the passion he has for telling immersive, multimedia stories reminds me precisely of my own drive. His studies are more structured in research, reading, and academic based work, while my own are personally driven, and gleaned from what I can learn in my academic classes that relates back to this subject.  I find it fascinating to know there is a more structured academic side to this exploration of transmedia and other new mediums, but I myself enjoy the freedom of taking bits and pieces from all aspects of my life and stringing them together. I am excited to read the work he has graciously shared on his reading list, and to learn what the academic side is like. I appreciate too, that there is an artistic part to his studies. But for myself, my look into transmedia focuses mostly on the part that I am familiar with, and that is the artistic side. I very much appreciate all aspects of this discussion, and even though its no longer updated, this blog is definitely worth a read for all of you who are similarly intrigued.

Books Meet New Media Part Two

Last time we talked about how "Game of Thrones" the television series and A Song of Ice and Fire worked together to create a transmedia experience to help market and sell both products. Books have and can use transmedia for this purpose, and this is the most popular transmedia method that novels and other traditional media, such as film and television, has utilized.

But there are more artistic ways that books have begun to use transmedia to their advantage. Some authors have begun to play with the multimedia aspects of today's society within the pages of their books, to different ends.

For example, we have Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman's Cathy's Book and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, both of which use multimedia and transmedia within their narratives to very different results.

Cathy's Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233

Cathy's Book is a wonderful Young Adult series of novels, including the first, Cathy's Book, and its two sequels, Cathy's Key, and Cathy's Ring. These novels center on Cathy, a young woman who likes to draw (especially to draw young people as older), and falls in love with a mysterious young man. The plot is the typical Young Adult fantasy yarn, but what makes this series stand out is all the added things within the novel's pages. 

Cathy's Book is not just Cathy's story, but her sketchbook. Pages are littered with sketches and comics drawn by Cathy the character, and illustrated in real life by Cathy Briggs. Accompanying the sketches are notes to herself about what happens in the text about the text, phone numbers to call and check the voicemail of, and urls to important websites that Cathy too is looking at. All these added illustration, phone numbers, and urls serve to move the plot forward. One can read the story straight through without these bonuses, but when a reader calls a number, they can hear a character's voice, and experience a separate point of view from Cathy's, just for a moment. 

This book is special to me in that it started my journey with transmedia. It made me curious about all the different ways you could tell stories, and what all those different methods did to a story. What was the effect of hearing the characters' voices in voicemails left in the margins of the text? What did seeing her sketches and notes do to my understanding of Cathy? For me, it created a very intimate, exciting, and personal journey that the plot itself would not have given me. I got to know Cathy through the messages she left the readers and the messages her friends and lovers and enemies left her. While her story was like many other Young Adult novels, the things within it were brand new and endeared her to me instantly. My curiosity was peaked, and I suspect, the same happened for many readers. 

Cathy's Book also has a promotional website, found here, that serves a very similar purpose to the transmedia marketing we saw with "Game of Thrones" and A Song of Ice and Fire. On the website you can age yourself up using an app that takes a photograph of you and simulates age, like Cathy's drawings. You can find other fans in the forums, look at clues, and discover the story together. It takes you to the series' facebook, youtube, and flickr pages all from there. Cathy's Book's promotional team nailed it with the website, but what really engages readers and makes them excited to participate in the book is the transmedia storytelling within it. That's what sells, and that is the primary focus of its promotional site as well, as it details precisely what is in store for readers when they pick up this book. 

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, on the other hand, is a whole different ball game. So different, in fact, that I'm certain there is nothing quite like it.

House of Leaves is a horror novel structured in such a way that it is several novels within one. The multimedia and transmedia aspects of the story are arguably within the text itself, as the text is built of winding roads of footnotes, important additional materials of drawings, charts, poetry, all contained within the back, and a soundtrack made by the author's sister's band, Poe. It is perhaps harder to argue that it is transmedia, as we tend to think of transmedia as two separate mediums or more expanding a storyline  (typically with ties to the internet as well). It certainly contains multiple mediums, mostly print, and multiple story lines that all build off of one another. Each storyline, however, is important to the narrative, rather than simply expanding upon it. The companion novel, The Whalestoe Letters, expands what is already within the novels in the appendices. A little spoiler here, so read with caution, but the band that wrote the soundtrack for the novel, Poe, appears at the end of the novel, a fact that doesn't seem that revelatory until one knows about Poe and that the soundtrack even exists. 

It's tricky little details like that that truly makes House of Leaves a transmedia story, in my mind. So much of the story is hidden in the details, and one learns through multiple readings more and more of these details. The author has on his website, a forum specifically for discussing the novel, and helping others find these tricks and features that make the experience of reading House of Leaves come alive. Fans help one another, making it a community experience as well, as all over the world people discuss new theories and explanations.

The experience of reading the novel itself is fairly interactive. Similarly to Cathy's Book, House of Leaves pulls you into the narrative, directly speaking to the readers at times, utilizing the free-flowing and strange structure of pages to create the delusional and horrific feeling that the characters within the narrative are experiencing. The novel creates a physical space around itself that the reader is a part of by forcing the reader to turn pages, search through appendices, research to understand references, and take special note of language, words, and all their double meanings. For instance, leaves can also be leaves of paper, and what is a book but a house of leaves? (See what I, well Mark Z. Danielewski, did there?) If anything, transmedia is experimenting with multimedia and how different mediums affect how we engage with stories. House of Leaves, to its very core, does just that.

It can be argued that this is simply a very experimental narrative, but still traditionally a narrative. But I feel that in its experimentation that House of Leaves subtlely utilizes modern sensibilities and frames of mind that come with the Internet and transmedia storytelling. In that way, it truly grasps hold of its readers, and makes them even more frightened of the monster that is inside (or simply is) the book.


Both novels explore different ways, influenced by the web, on how to tell stories, utilizing different mediums to pull readers into the world of their narrative and believe that world. That is the goal of transmedia storytelling for many writers out there: to make the worlds of their narratives more believable. With A Song of Ice and Fire and "Game of Thrones" we saw how transmedia can help market traditional mediums, but here with Cathy's Book and House of Leaves we see how transmedia is slowly and steadily seeping its way into traditional media. Through these books we can see the artistic purposes that transmedia can serve-- it creates a fuller, more real world that can enrapture audiences. What's even more wonderful is that this is simply the start. There are many more ways to experiment with traditional media and transmedia narratives. There is no real gap between the two as very naturally they will come together. It is simply in our nature as storytellers to use the best tools at our disposal for our stories.