It’s All Transmedia Now

This post is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more.

Our stories are getting more complicated all the time. Not in terms of plot or character, per se, but in how we find them and share them. It’s almost a requirement that the stories we tell now live in multiple places, from social media platforms and little screens to the pages of books and magazines, and then back to big screens for film and television. Even writers of novels and popular nonfiction books perform a carefully calibrated version of authorhood and curate communities of their fans online as assiduously as any other type of “influencer,” from lovingly designed Zoom backgrounds to artfully crafted social media posts and laboriously maintained Substacks. Every middle schooler I know today sees creativity as a tech-infused, multidimensional process that involves making and sharing work across many different tools.

Academics came up with a special word in the 1990s to describe this kind of storytelling: transmedia. It needed a special word because at the time, it still felt unusual to see the deliberate construction of a storyworld, a community of shared imagination, across multiple media. But over the past few decades, everything has become transmedia. How do we think about stories and what it means to imagine a world together when the pathways for telling, sharing, and reacting to those stories are constantly shifting and bleeding into one another? When that shared narrative universe is massively distributed, debated, and collectively infused with the energy and attention of thousands or millions of people?

These are the questions at the heart of our new book Imagining Transmedia, the culmination of over a decade of intensive mucking about in transmedia storytelling at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. I’d like to tell you a story about how we got here.

Origins and Stories

When we launched the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) in 2012 at Arizona State University, there were many uncertainties. Would an outfit with the mission of “inspiring collective imagination for better futures” make any sense at a research university? How would CSI actually advance that mission? And most important of all, how were we going to navigate the issue that while everyone agrees that we need imagination, nobody really knows what it is?

“Participants engage in a recent futures thinking exercise at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination”

But we did know a few things, and arguably the most important was this: storytelling matters. I am a firm believer in the proposition that humans are storytelling animals: that we understand and navigate the world primarily through stories. We tell stories about who we are, about the past and the future, and even stories edited on-the-fly, continually, inside our brains, about what is happening right now. Magicians and politicians know how telling the right story can completely shift one’s experience of reality. And so it follows for CSI that if you want to change the future, you need to change the stories we tell about the future.

We pursued this approach with gusto, bringing together science fiction writers, scientists, engineers, and many other creative and technical experts to collaboratively imagination hopeful, technically grounded futures. Since 2012 we’ve published more than 20 book-length works of speculative fiction and nonfiction, nearly all of them available for free on our site or through open-access editions with publishers like the MIT Press. These projects tend to focus on the areas where our failures and crises of imagination feel most acute: climate change, AI and automation, and the societal consequences of the pandemic, for example.

But amidst these excellent themes arrayed like jewels in the CSI display case, there is one eternal wellspring of imagination, one relentlessly relevant, unstoppable juggernaut of an idea that can’t stop, won’t stop: Frankenstein.

We got into the Frankenstein business ten years ago when my colleague Dave Guston pointed out that the world would soon be celebrating the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s remarkable novel. We worked together to get a planning grant from the National Science Foundation and support from ASU for a graduate researcher. The next thing you know, nearly a hundred scholars, artists, writers, and researchers were brainstorming ways to celebrate the anniversary through performances, books, art-science experiments, and much more.

“Art by Nina Miller”

The deeper I got into Frankenstein, the more I came to realize that Mary Shelley created a transmedia phenomenon two centuries before anyone had any idea what that meant. Think about it: even if you have never read the book, you know this story. You’ve seen it in one or more of the hundreds of screen and stage adaptations, in the endless references in comic books and art, in music videos and live performance, or branded on breakfast cereals and lunch boxes. Most importantly, it’s a story that most people, at least in the global north, think of with a sense of shared ownership. Anyone can lurch around like Boris Karloff in a Halloween costume, or write their own ending to the book.

Frankenstein is a story about creativity and responsibility: taking ownership for your actions, being a good parent, loving your monsters. It’s also a story about storytelling, a meditation on how reading and language shape us. Almost as soon as the book was published in 1818, it was ripped off for stage productions and published in translation around the world. In just a few short years Frankenstein’s monster had become a metaphor that could be deployed in political debates and newspaper cartoons. It was a story you could tell in any and all media. And so it’s fitting that our Frankenstein project has become a never-ending story, a beautiful, shambling creature that continues to disgorge new research papers, theatre projects, and, well, blog posts.

Transmedia Now

So it is a beautiful thing that our Frankenstein Bicentennial Project gave birth to another assemblage of big ideas and bold questions: Imagining Transmedia. This book only has one chapter on Frankenstein itself, but the whole anthology takes on the Pandora’s Box that Mary Shelley opened when she published her amazing novel: how do the stories we tell together shape our reality?

Imagining Transmedia tackles this question at a time when transmedia is no longer an esoteric critical term or a media strategy that only a mega-corporation could afford. Just about every story we tell now is constructed using transmedia logics: played out through multiple platforms and channels, using digital technologies that allow multiple audiences to share a storyspace, an imagination space, and make it their own. Taylor Swift is a transmedia phenomenon, weaving together her personal and professional history, long-term engagements with her fans, easter eggs and double meanings, into a fully immersive experience that plays out across concerts, albums, social media, documentaries, press coverage, the Super Bowl, and a significant fraction of all the brain cells and molecules contained within a sphere of radio waves that began expanding outward from Earth into the universe in 1989.

The book’s not about Taylor Swift either (sorry). But it is about the world in which celebrity like Swift’s is possible, the world in which only this kind of celebrity is possible. We are all transmedia storytellers now, living our lives in the shadow of thousands of digital reflections of ourselves shared intentionally or created through surveillance capitalism. For storytelling animals, stories are the building blocks of reality, and so the turn to ubiquitous transmedia has profound implications for politics, shared culture, even shared reality. Conspiracy theories like QAnon thrive on fluid and ephemeral transmedia storyworlds. We have become so used to the blurred lines between fiction and reality that we are at risk of losing the plot.

I don’t see those blurred lines as a cause for despair, but as an invitation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the zenith of transmedia happened shortly before the arrival of generative AI. The large language models we see today powering ChatGPT and other such tools are deeply rooted in the principles of transmedia: meaning and connections can be found anywhere, from photos to math problems to forum posts. Build a thick enough web of connections and context, and you can create a system that spouts out plausible new connective tissue on the fly. One challenge we will have to grapple with in the years to come is how to differentiate between authentic human-human communication and a world wide web filled with more and more machines talking to one another. Technologists already fret that future generative AI tools will be inadvertently trained on the output of other machines. These systems only work if they are fed real human creative output and fall apart quickly when their own outputs become inputs.

The same could be said for humans, of course, and while the darker sides of contemporary transmedia are indeed scary, I think we’re capable of developing the new literacies we need to navigate a world where stories can live and travel just about anywhere. Ultimately, that’s a question of imagination, and recognizing when other peoples’ stories in the world are trying to colonize our own imaginative minds. Building some resilience and independence into our relationships with media—an imagination immune system, if you will—is one of the most important tasks ahead. I hope our new collection can be a start, by calling out the changing shape and rising stakes of transmedia in a world that is, more than ever, made of stories.

Biography

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. He coedited the books Imagining Transmedia (2024) and Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (2017), and is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (2018). Website:https://edfinn.net