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.

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.