Transmedia Camp 101

Excerpt from the Jan. 28, 2011 interview:

HJ: “You draw a range of comparisons here to older, even pre-20th century forms of storytelling — from Daniel Dafoe to Charles Dickens. What continuities and changes do you see between deep media and older forms of serialized fictions?

FR: That’s a question I became increasingly intrigued with as I worked on the book. Collective entertainment may be new, but there’s nothing new about entertainment that’s participatory and immersive. In fact, every new medium from the printing press on has been considered dangerously immersive at first. TV, movies, books–Don Quixote went tilting at windmills because he’d lost his mind from reading too much. And in order to gain acceptance, each new medium has tried to pass itself off at first as something familiar. In his preface to Robinson Crusoe, which is generally considered the first novel in the English language, Defoe declared the entire story to be fact. Fiction was considered an inferior branch of history that had the glaring defect of not being true, so when Robinson Crusoe came out in 1719, it had to be passed off as autobiography. Nearly a hundred years passed before the novel became a generally accepted literary form in England. And then when Dickens came along in the 1830s and his publishers started putting out his novels in monthly installments, critics decried that as dangerously immersive. Bad enough that people were reading novels when they could have been engaged in social pursuits, like conversation or backgammon–but now they were going to be losing themselves in a fictional world for months on end.
But the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible–and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as “a sense of immediate audience participation….”

Read the full interview on Henry Jenkins’ blog:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/01/deep_media_transmedia_whats_th_1.html

Excerpt from the Jan. 26, 2011 interview:

HJ: “You write in the book about what you call “deep media.” What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?

FR: To me it’s mainly a question of emphasis. Are we focusing on the process or the goal? Transmedia, or crossmedia, puts the emphasis on a new process of storytelling: How do you tell a story across a variety of different media? Deep media puts the focus on the goal: To enable members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to immerse themselves in it. Not that this was fully thought out when I started–the term was suggested by a friend in late 2008 as a name for my blog, and when I looked it up online I saw that it had been used by people like Nigel Hollis, the chief analyst at Millward Brown, so I adopted it.
That said, I think the terms are more or less interchangeable. I certainly subscribe to the seven core concepts of transmedia as you’ve laid them out. I also think we’re at an incredibly transitional point in our culture, and terms like “deep media” and “transmedia” are needed to describe a still-evolving way of telling stories. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if both terms disappeared in 15-20 years as this form of storytelling becomes ubiquitous and ultimately taken for granted….”

Read the full interview on Henry Jenkins’ blog:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/01/deep_media_transmedia_whats_th.html

Legal scholars declare that “virtual” property must be divided or reimbursed in divorce proceedings.

Article by CHRISTOPHER MIMS 01/24/2011

Read the full post on MIT Technology Review

Just up on the Pixel Report!

“One of the first native transmedia experiences in France, backed by Orange, followed a videoblogger’s encounters with the supernatural

By Rosie Lavan, January 26, 2011

PROJECT TITLE: FAITS DIVERS PARANORMAUX (Supernatural Oddities)

SHORT STORY SYNOPSIS: Multi-platform immersive project which took a humorous look at the paranormal. Spurred on by the mysterious disappearance of his brother Fred, JC records his interest in the paranormal on his videoblog. A TV series follows the attempts of JC, his wife Muriel, and mother-in-law Simone to make sense of supernatural occurrences, while users interacted and contributed to the fiction online, with the project culminating in an ARG, Finding Fred….”

Read the full report

http://thepixelreport.org/2011/01/26/fdp/

Great insights from David Varela

Excerpt:

“Taking a transmedia production from a local market to a global audience isn’t just a matter of dealing with bigger numbers. As David Varela, transmedia writer & producer has discovered, going global brings challenges that go beyond mere scale.

Most of the biggest transmedia productions in recent history have been born in the United States. This isn’t necessarily because they have a more advanced media industry or a more adventurous approach to entertainment. Indeed, American corporate culture can be very conservative – the number of lawyers between the creative idea and the audience stifles many an adventurous idea before it sees the light of day.

No, the reason transmedia has thrived in the US is that many of the largest transmedia productions have been forms of marketing, and the United States is one very large market. More particularly, it is a sizeable, affluent market united by a common language…”

Read the full list on Lina Srivastava’s blog: Context | Culture | Collaboration

http://linasrivastava.blogspot.com/2010/12/looking-ahead-to-2011-ive-been-thi…