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.

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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!

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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.