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.

Books Meet New Media Part One

With the arrival of the Internet and the Kindle, and other mobile readers, many feared for the fate of the novel. What would happen to good ol' fashioned paper books once the Internet became the primary way for people to read? Happily, books did not disappear--better yet, they started to incorporate the Internet in their writing style, as in the Young Adult series, Internet Girls, (ttyl, ttfn, and l8r, g8r). Nowadays, we see this move a step further as books begin not only to include references to the modern era, but begin to incorporate multimedia and transmedia aspects into their story telling world. Some do this more so than others, and for that reason we will explore three different ways books have evolved into a form of multimedia storytelling.

A Song of Ice and Fire and "Game of Thrones"

We'll start off with George R.R. Martin's incredibly popular, A Song of Ice and Fire series. Within the novel themselves, they don't delve much into multimedia and transmedia, beyond companion novels, maps, role playing table top games, and other fairly traditional expansion souvenirs. Where the series gets interesting is in the television series based on it, "Game of Thrones" (not to say that the show is better than the books, which would be ludicrous.) In order to advertise both the books and the show, HBO has developed many multimedia methods to increase awareness and interest in the series, from both newbies and fans alike. 

For instance, there is a Facebook game application that lets you explore the narrative of "A Song of Ice and Fire" as your own character, deciding which house and characters to serve (I can attest, it's super fun, although when I played it had a few problems, but those have since been now fixed). Released on Youtube and the BluRays, are the histories of Westeros and Essos, animated events and tales narrated by characters from the show, to expand upon what the show could not include from the novel. Just today, HBO and several hip hop and rap artists released a rap album all based on the events from seasons 1 to 3, all for free on Soundcloud here. It's very, very good (I'm listening to it right now and my favorite song so far is definitely "Mother of Dragons," but I'm definitely biased...), and captures both the dramatic world George R.R. Martin has set up, and the modern sex appeal that the HBO show has tried to add. 

If one were to trust the rumors, the simultaneous existence of the television show and the unfinished novel series help to advertise one another, in an interesting marketing twist on transmedia. Supposedly, after this upcoming season (which for those who have read the books know will be the most exciting one yet), George R.R. Martin will pull a Beyoncé and release the highly anticipated sixth book of the series, The Winds of Winter. 

Riding the wave of the excitement generated by season four of "Game of Thrones", sales for The Winds of Winter will be explosive. A similar move was done for the previous novel of the series, A Dance with Dragons and the first season of the show. Fans of both worry about "Game of Thrones" surpassing the novels in content, as George R.R. Martin is a notoriously slow writer and the show is moving through the existing novels fast. Thus this would be an intelligent move by both Martin and HBO, to prevent the television show from eclipsing the novels. Not to mention, it will generate a multimedia profit gain for all parties involved.

Also, Winds of Winter should definitely come out this summer. Just sayin'.


But that's only one way to look at the intersection of books and new media. A very financially successful way, but there are other, more artistically driven ways, that are just as important and fascinating to look at.

We'll be looking at House of Leaves and Cathy's Book next time, and how within the very pages of the novel, both of these books play with multimedia aspects, and force readers to engage with the very act of physically participating in the story.

Until then, thank you for reading! :)