My journey begins: The Convergent audience , Audience participation through transmedial narrative.

This is my second blog on transmedial narrative , and once again I am creating it as part of my MA into digital media and transmedial narrative! 

This time and I preparing to undertake my dissertation, which right now has a working title of The convergent audience understanding audience participation within a transmedial environment. This may change ( it already has a number of times over the last wk) but I certainly feel I have the right elements in forcing on audience participation.

This is where my journey into Transmedial narrative and audience participation begins! I punched Transmedia narrative / audience participation into google and amongst the first things thrown up was a recent lecture by Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins is one of the fathers of transmedia theory.  It was upon his ideas that I based my first transmedial project the SEER and  I thought it would be fun to see what HJ was saying now on audience participation i a transmedial reality. 

In a recent lecture Henry Jenkins outlined his current thinking on transmedia and the audience.

WIthin this lecture HJ identifies 5 logics of engagement which he suggests  go some way to understanding the explosion in fan participation.

In Jenkins’ view, five logics are contributing to the emergence of transmedia and the phenomenon of increased fan participation (‘fandom’):

-    The logic of entertainment, as evidenced by the presence in the US TV schedules of TV series and reality shows;
-    The logic of social connection, highlighted by votes and discussions on social networking sites;
-    The logic of experts, symbolised by the collective intelligence (Levy, 1994true) brought to bear by fans for the purposes of creation, production and discussion. Henry Jenkins cites the examples of the creation of Twin Peaks fan sites and the Lost Wiki (Lostpedia), which both collate articles written by fans to offer greater insight into both series;
-    The logic of immersion, which encourages participation. For example, on Oscars night fans could use a number of interactive tools to immerse themselves in the ceremony and form a community;
-    The logic of identification, which enables fans to establish an identity depending on what they watch.

http://www.transmedialab.org/en/events/henry-jenkins-explains-his-vision-of-transmedia-and-audience-engagement/

Extract taken from reports on lecture by Henry Jenkins on Friday 25 May 2012 on Transmedia Storytelling entitled “Engagement, participation, play: the value and meaning of Transmedia audiences”.

Henry Jenkins explains his vision of transmedia and audience engagement

Logics of engagement:

In Jenkins’ view, five logics are contributing to the emergence of transmedia and the phenomenon of increased fan participation (‘fandom’):

-    The logic of entertainment, as evidenced by the presence in the US TV schedules of TV series and reality shows;
-    The logic of social connection, highlighted by votes and discussions on social networking sites;
-    The logic of experts, symbolised by the collective intelligence (Levy, 1994true) brought to bear by fans for the purposes of creation, production and discussion. Henry Jenkins cites the examples of the creation of Twin Peaks fan sites and the Lost Wiki (Lostpedia), which both collate articles written by fans to offer greater insight into both series;
-    The logic of immersion, which encourages participation. For example, on Oscars night fans could use a number of interactive tools to immerse themselves in the ceremony and form a community;
-    The logic of identification, which enables fans to establish an identity depending on what they watch.

THE DEFINITION OF TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

Henry Jenkins then returned to his definition of Transmedia Storytelling, which he proposed for the first time in a 2003 analysis of the augmented universe of the Matrix film franchise, published in Technological Review.

Taking this definition as a starting point, he suggested examples to illustrate the concept, both in terms of production strategies and fan extensions. For instance, Jenkins highlighted the narrative universe of The Wizard of Oz (musicals, cartoon series, books, comic strips) to illustrate the idea that, in his opinion, Transmedia strategies were in place well before the term was coined and defined, and certainly well before the rapid rise of digital media. He emphasised this idea by explaining that Transmedia Storytelling is perfectly viable without using new technologies, and that the latter have mainly been used as facilitators by the modern creators of transmedia universes.

The researcher at USC’s Annenberg Lab then moved on to more contemporary examples, such as the creation of the Tru Blood drink as a direct spin-off of the TV products, the posting of “no aliens” stickers on benches specially designed for humans to symbolise the racial segregation depicted in the film District 9, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books created by Joss Whedon, which added an eighth non-televised season to the series.

Fans, immersed in a wide-ranging narrative universe, strive to produce their own transmedia extensions, in an example of what Jenkins calls the logic of performance. For example, fans of Lost have managed to create a map of the island which is not shown in the series, enabling them to map locations and characters’ movements. Glee fans, meanwhile, perform songs and dance routines from episodes of the show and then post and share them on platforms like YouTube. Finally, fans of Star Wars have made Star Wars Uncut, a series of sequences filmed by them and stitched together to recreate the whole film.

Jenkins also noted that some fan extensions precede the cultural industries’ transmedia creations. He cited the example of Pottermore, the official transmedia extension created by the author of the Harry Potter books. This website offers functions such as the Sorting Hat Ceremony, which determines which of the four school Houses each new Hogwarts student is assigned to. Yet this ceremony had already been developed by fans themselves ten years before, leading Jenkins to note that the cultural industries are lagging ten years behind!