Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Benjamin Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa (Part One)

Over the last few installments, I've been sharing an interview with Matthew Freeman, the author of a new book which takes us into the history/prehistory of Transmedia entertainment. Today I will introduce a second interview also focused on current research which revises our understanding of the concept of Transmedia entertainment – Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, editors of The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities, which was published late last year. This is a rich collection which includes new essays by some of my favorite thinkers about all things transmedia, including Louisa Ellen Stein, Geoffrey Long, Matt Hills,Aaron Delwiche,  Paul Booth, Sam Ford, and yours truly. My contribution explores what it means to locate transmedia production within particular media ecologies and economies, asking for example whether transmedia looks different in a public service based media economy as opposed to a commercial economy. The book's primary contribution and provocation is to broaden the category of transmedia storytelling to include works produced by the audience and in particular by fans. For me, this is been a somewhat vexing question. Early on, what drew me to transmedia entertainment was the degree to which producers were replicating forms of extensions that I previously only seen in fan fiction and other fan works. Fans had long demonstrated a fascination with back story for example or with fleshing out secondary characters or exploring uncharted corners of a fictional world. Heck, in Textual Poachers, I noted that fans were pushing for a more serialized form of storytelling at a time when network television was still highly episodic. So initially, what seemed important about transmedia storytellingg was that these fan reading practices are being recognized and replicated within the official Canon. So in that sense, transmedia and fan works operate in parallel with the difference that one is authorized and the other is not.

That said, if we think of transmedia stories less in terms of continuity and more in terms of multiplicity, then it is hard to argue for a sharp distinction between fan works and other kinds of transmedia extensions. More and more, transmedia entertainment has become a sprawling inter-textual system which includes text that are not easily located within a master plan for the unfolding franchise. When readers encounter the franchise online, their experience of say Star Trek includes both authorized and unauthorized works.

Building on our observation, The Rise of Transtexts ask us to consider this new category – transtext – which can be used to discuss the relationship between the two. Many of the contributors here are making a strong case for factoring audience produced text into our consideration of the transmedia system as a whole. I'm going to be very curious to see how people respond to this argument. My hunch is that the new concept is more likely to be embraced by academics and active fans rather than industry insiders and creative practitioners.

Regardless of how you fall down on that particular question, The Rise of Transtexts represents an important next contribution to the growing literature around transmedia entertainment. One could not reduce its contributions to the question of fan works, since it has much to say about the history of transmedia practices, the genre categories in which transmedia production operates, the industrial context that yields transmedia entertainment, and much much more.

This interview with the books editors opens up a wide range of such topics and offers some preview of the challenges and opportunities the books title describes. I will be running it over the next three installments of my blog.

Let’s start with some core concepts from the book’s title. What do you mean by Transtexts? What does this concept include that might normally be excluded from our understanding of transmedia storytelling?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: Ok, let’s go. First, thank you for inviting us to do this interview, it is a pleasure to be featured here. The questions were challenging (as they should) and enjoyable to answer, and so very relevant in this day and age when talking about transmedia and transtexts.

The term Transtexts first appeared in 2012, for a study proposal I had made (with the same title / subtitle of the book, and of which this book would be a spin-off, if you pardon me the TV-pun), as I felt it a necessary step to build on, or rethink the existing concept of Transmedia by reinserting the agency of power of engaged audiences within the concept (which, incidentally, is very much the purpose of this collection. The term ‘transtexts’, in fact, could be seen as an ‘acronym’ / abbreviation for ‘transmedia storytelling and fan-produced texts’. Because, of course, two types of transmedia texts can be identified (and were thus addressed in the book).

Firstly, industrial transmedia texts, produced by supposedly authoritative authors or entities (we go back to canon and what is seen as ‘authority’ in this interview and in the book), and directed at active audiences, in order (hopefully) to foster engagement. Secondly, there are fan-made transmedia texts, which are made by the very engaged audiences which are targeted by transmedia strategies. Fans are, therefore, making and spreading original texts across various media (and social media platforms) which, in turn, expand the content and presence of this narrative universe. As such, as explained by several of the book’s contributors (especially Louisa Stein), such fan-made texts could / should be considered as transmedia narratives, on the same level as industrial transtexts.

This new concept was introduced to provide a category where they can both fit, and giving equal attention to the audience’s texts. Since the concept of transmedia storytelling, as generally understood, mostly positions itself on the side of institutional transmedia practices and thus leaves little place for fan-produced transmedia narratives, using the same expression while widening its scope would not be enough (due to this inherent industrial connotation). It thus seemed that a term encompassing both notions at once could be of use.

Finally, Hélène Laurichesse argued in this collection that it was this twofold nature of transtexts (industrial and fan-produced), rather than transmedia storytelling alone, that constituted the foundation of a text-brand’ identity, while Aaron Delwiche provided a fourfold typology of transtexts. Nothing is ‘lost’, therefore, by this new terminology, which simultaneously allows the study of wider-ranging phenomena than were usually studied, and encourages the search for more precision through in-depth analyses or case studies.

There’s a productive tension running through the book. On the one hand, you discuss transmedia or transtexts as something that urgently must be addressed because it is exerting such a strong influence on the contemporary entertainment industry. On the other hand, many of your authors seek to situate today’s transmedia in relation to a much broader history of telling stories across media. Given this tension, how much weight should we place on the idea of “the rise of transtexts” as opposed to the persistence of transtexts? What factors contribute to the increased visibility of such practices at the current moment?

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: I think this point is a key one. As explained in the introduction, the term rise does not refers to a supposedly new start of the phenomenon, as transtexts must be understood through a complex framework involving a history and development of this form and use, a recent one, and a much older one (as demonstrated by Denzell Richards, for instance), since we can find examples throughout history dating back even to Biblical times and state propaganda in Ancient History; this rise of transtexts refers to its incredible expansion over the past few years.

As stated in the introduction, and further in Melanie’s chapter, it is the combination of these three revolutions, I believe, which has fostered, and continued to encourage, this increased visibility – but also development in use (which is undeniably becoming increasingly widespread) – of transtexts.

M. Bourdaa: Of course, the art of extending narrative universes existed before what we are witnessing today with such pieces as Star Wars and even before that with the Disney Universe, the Wizard of Oz or the Marvel and DC stories, with ancillary contents spread across radio shows, novels, cartoons, comic books and comic strips. A history and archaeology of Transmedia strategies is needed to understand why and how they have been evolving, as Matthew Freeman proposes in his more recent book or as Denzell Richards publishes here in this collection.

I agree with Benjamin on the evolutions of the media landscape. As I have stated in my article on The Hunger Games in this book, I think that three mutations paved the way for a more systematic use of Transmedia strategies in the entertainment industry, bringing awareness on a rise of Transmedia and transtexts.

First, we have witnessed the implementation of technologies in production strategies, mixing traditional media with new ones, leading to what Jennifer Gillian calls “must-click TV”, and to stories spread across multiple media platforms.

Then, narrations have evolved into a complex system and more seriality, developing cliffhangers and negative spaces, where fans could fill the gaps with their own productions and creations.

Finally, fans and audiences are more and more engaged in narrative universes, leaning on a convergence and participatory culture. They work together, share, discuss, create, organize in their communities and often productions rely on these fans’ works to promote their shows, as it is the case with Game of Thrones, Orange in the New Black or Hannibal when they ask fans to create artworks that would later be used to advertise seasons of the show.

So of course, transmedia and transtexts are not new strategies in the entertainment industries, but there are definitively factors and mutations that are leading to a more visibility and acceptance of these practices and tactics.

 In his Foreword, Toby Miller raises some ethical considerations about transtexts: “In moving rapidly between platforms, genres, and sites in order to tell stories, how good and how well-informed are those stories and those involved in telling and reading them?” Up until now, the focus has been on identifying models and practices associated with transmedia. Transmedia has been read as something like a talking dog -- who cares what it says. But at some point, we need to be asking the kinds of evaluative questions Miller is pointing us toward. What criteria might we use to evaluate whether a given transtext is good or more importantly whether the shift towards transtexts is good for the society?

M. Bourdaa: The question of evaluating transmedia strategies, especially around audiovisual contents such as TV series or blockbusters, has been a problem since the beginning because it implies economical and marketing issues. How many people follow the strategy? What are the rates of engagement?

The only way to measure that is to look at the number of likes on a Facebook page or the number of people following a Twitter account and that is not very reliable, because people can like a page and never come back on it or have no interaction with the content.

Transtexts are focused on creating storyworlds both by the production teams, thus deploying stories that are canon, and by the fans themselves, expanding the universe in a fannish approach. One criterion to evaluate transmedia projects could be the degree of engagement by fans, and by that I mean what fans do with the media text, how do they re-work it, what meaning do they produce with it. Fans are the target audience of transmedia projects, because they are the expert audience and because they will share the canon content within their communities and via social networks. But they will also create new content, using fan fictions, viding, fan arts, discussion boards, games.

Louisa Stein gives a good example, when she analyzes the way Jane Austen’s fans re-worked the stories in a more contemporary setting and produced the webseries The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, focused on the iconic character of Pride and Prejudice. Fans can also resist the marketing aspect of the transmedia strategies and organize themselves to produce transmedia activism, as it was the case with fans of Hunger Games.

Geoffrey Long in this collection offers a framework to analyze such successes by evaluating the negative spaces left in the storyworlds, spaces that will later be filled by fans’ productions. He sums it up here: “the key lesson is that successful vast transmedia storyworlds find a balance between saying what they say in a unique fashion, such as in the unique franchise characteristics at both the storyworld and character levels, and in strategically not saying everything there is to say, both inviting audiences in to imagine who they themselves would be in these storyworlds and filling in the negative spaces in the storyworld with their own imaginations”.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Three)

Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power introduced the concept of “transmedia” in relation to characters and not stories, characters that travel between texts without necessarily carrying large amount of backstory with them. Her examples were Mario Brothers, Ninja Turtles, and Muppet Babies. Is the same true for the earlier examples you discuss? Does a more character-centered notion of transmedia allow for a looser set of relations between texts and less dependence on audiences “catching them all,” seeing every installment in order to make sense of the connections between them? Might this suggest that what was distinctive about more contemporary forms of transmedia is precisely the tighter integration of story enabled by new networked forms of production, distribution, and reception?  

I don’t think so. I would argue that there has been a tendency in some of the earlier work on transmedia storytelling to perhaps over-emphasise the ‘complexity’ of contemporary transmedia, suggesting – directly or indirectly – that the new era of digital convergence is somehow more effective at producing tight integrations of networked plots across platforms.

For me, such an assumption is to greatly undermine and to underestimate the storytelling prowess of the past. It’s true that characters are an important part of a story that transcends multiple media – if nothing else, they help to ‘link’ different texts together in the eyes of audiences. But that’s not to assume that the tight integration of interconnected storytelling across platforms wasn’t going on in the past, albeit in ways informed by largely different strategies and practices.

Here’s a nice example to show just how integrated and ‘complex’ the transmedia storytelling was in the past. Even in the face of industry experts that warned authors of the 1930s not to produce media stories across multiple platforms on account of the perceived risks that one version might compete against another versions, Edgar Rice Burroughs was especially detailed in his weaving of plot details across multiple media for his Tarzan adventures.

In one case, the words ‘red star’ were used to link a pulp magazine with a later novel, pointing readers across both texts. The novel then gave readers some added insight into how and why the pulp story’s plot occurred as it did. So the novel incorporated a new kidnap sequence, which explained how a particular map was attained by characters in the pulp story, whose own narrative began after the map had been stolen. New characters were added into the novel – one that was revealed to have kidnapped Magra, a character rescued by Tarzan in the pulp story. This story then continued over into the newspaper comic strip and the radio serial, which, crucially, were published and broadcast almost concurrently to one another. Thus in the first edition of the comic strip, readers were told that Tarzan had travelled to hold a meeting on the outskirts of Bobolo, a town on the Congo River hundreds of miles inland. But readers were not told where Tarzan had actually travelled from – until, that is, the broadcast date of the radio serial, when exactly four weeks later listeners were informed that Tarzan had in fact travelled from the village of Loango, a town which lies one hundred miles downstream the Congo River from Bobolo, thus interconnecting the tales of comic strip Tarzan and the radio Tarzan simultaneously.

All of which is my way of highlighting just how complex and ‘involved’ transmedia storytelling could be in the past. In this case, after all, Burroughs had crafted a quest narrative comprising of a large number of supporting characters, each in rival expeditions with hidden agendas, and with the audience’s careful following of small details of plot across pulps, novels, comics and radio all being crucial to the story.

You argue that of all the media, cinema proved most resistant to transmedia practices. Why? How might today’s “mothership” model of transmedia reflect the desire of contemporary transmedia producers to work around or work with the resistances of the film industry to a transmedia model?

Ah yes, the ‘trouble with the cinema’. Whereas some media forms – namely, comics – greatly afforded transmedia storytelling in the past, the cinema almost consistently militated against the telling of stories across multiple media. The problem with the cinema was not inherent to the medium itself and its mode of telling stories, but was instead related either to its cultural distinction from other media around the turn of the twentieth century or to the mode of vertical integration that had come to typify Hollywood by the 1930s.

With regards to my first comment, what’s important is that directing certain audiences to the cinema in the 1900s and 1910s was often difficult, since the audience composition that built up novels and Broadway was so different to that which made up the cinema’s audience: Whereas novels and Broadway belonged to the rising middle class, the cinema was still mostly associated with its lower class nickelodeon origins. And this lower-class perception was reflected in the price of buying a novel or attending a Broadway play compared to the cost of seeing a film: A nickelodeon entry admission was around five cents, whereas a novel cost around $1.50 and the average admission price to see a Broadway show was $1 to $2.

And in later decades, secondly, the system of vertical integration that came to characterise the major Hollywood studios meant that these studios occupied a producer-distributor-exhibitor model and had therefore grown accustomed to working internally. Without a regulatory influence forcing different media industries to work together, it was much more difficult for creative personnel to author storyworlds that crossed in and out of the cinema. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, but it’s certainly interesting to see that Burroughs’ Tarzan films were arguably the least transmedial of all of his Tarzan ventures in the sense that many of these films failed to connect with the plots occurring in other media, while DC Comics later resorted to producing many of their Superman films with relatively minor-status companies so that they could manage screenplays whose plots weaved closely into the plots of their comics.

Your conclusion makes some provocative suggestions about planned obsolescence in today’s transmedia as compared to the long-standing franchises from the early 20th century. Oz, Tarzan and Superman are still present in our culture in a way that The Matrix is not. How might you account for this shift in the life span of intellectual properties?

Interestingly, there’s a case to be made that the transmedia storytelling of the past century centered on a more individualistic notion of authorship compared to the more corporate ideas of authorship now associated with the franchised transmedia worlds of the contemporary era – and for me this difference is key to answering this question.

Today’s convergent media culture has certainly allowed transmedia storytelling to gain urgency as producers now make use of a host of internal corporate connections so to craft stories across media. But there’s a sense that the corporate scale of today’s industrial convergences breeds a form of ‘departmental’ authorship as transmedia storyworlds now pass through the hands of so many creative personnel, working across many sub-divisions and subsidiaries (and often farmed out to many different transmedia consultancy companies such as Starlight Runner Entertainment). As such, many of today’s transmedia franchises tend to be short-lived projects that come with a high turnover rate. We are perhaps more accustomed to the idea of the ‘reboot’ in today’s Hollywood cinema and popular culture than we’ve ever been before.

By way of comparison, my own exemplars of historical transmedia storytelling (Oz, Tarzan and Superman, all of which are still part of today’s culture of course) continued to be built for a substantially longer period of time – for twenty years in some cases. These historical cases, and unlike the conglomerate-produced cases of today, were typically produced by one author, or at least by a smaller number of creative personnel working together across media. For example, it’s quite remarkable to note that, with the exception of one instance, the basic story told in each and every Land of Oz text produced across novels, comics, theatre and films between 1900 and 1918 came from the imagination and the pen of L. Frank Baum. Though the same cannot be said of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the many Tarzan stories that emerged between 1918 and 1938, there is the sense that the most effective transmedia storytelling strategies to emerge during that period came when Burroughs carefully managed his various licensing contracts himself. And this was also true of DC Comics and their Superman stories between 1938 and 1958. Here, only a very small handful of creative personnel worked on Superman across multiple media forms.

Importantly, across my three cases of Oz, Tarzan and indeed Superman, almost all of the authors and creative personnel that brought these storyworlds to life often relied on the continued transmedial growth of their storyworld to make a living, with the need to find new revenue streams driving the desire to expand the story. What’s more, the fact that these authors depended so heavily on their respective storyworlds growing partly explains why many of the strategies used to tell stories across media in the past were so varied – revolving around everything from colour-coding to spectacle, from comic-strip characters to printed maps, from posters and reviews to licensing and franchising, from merchandising and sponsorship to propaganda.

The main reason for this more ad-hoc formation of transmedia storytelling in the past – in turn spanning such a diverse range of industrial and technological strategies – is quite simply because many of the strategies that underpinned how stories were told across media in the past were themselves emergent in nature, with the likes of Baum, Burroughs and DC Comics reacting to new developments as and when they arose.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds was published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part Two)

To continue with questions you pose yourself, “what does it actually mean to understand the industrial contingencies and practices of historical transmedia practices”? To break this down further, what does it mean to focus on shifting industrial conditions as opposed to say the technological affordances of media, the constitution of audiences and the conditions of reception, or the thematic and narrative conventions of the period, each of which might also help to explain transmedia practices?  

For me, only by understanding longer histories of production and consumption can we begin to make sense of the contingencies and the affordances of our contemporary transmedia landscape. In that sense, the model of transmedia storytelling today is not the only one; past builders of fictional storyworlds employed many different strategies that showcase just how many possibilities there really are for telling tales across multiple media. In other words, understanding the workings of transmedia storytelling in the past means exploring the shifting industrial conditions and the technological affordances of media and the constitution of audiences and reception and the thematic and narrative conventions of the period. All of these factors had important and often overlapping influences on the ways by which a story expanded across media.

Allow me to point to an example to explain what I mean. Elaborating on the ideas of advertising I mentioned previously, we can trace the links between advertising at the dawn of the twentieth century and the strategies of transmedia storytelling that it afforded via the case study of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz.

Here, we can detect the importance of colour, spectacle, comic-strip characters and also posters and reviews as key promotional mechanisms for building storyworlds across media at that time. While colour and spectacle allowed audiences to see that some stories in one medium belonged, as it were, to stories in another medium, comic-strip characters and posters worked to point audiences directly to other media where new pieces of that story were told, meaning that the adventures of Oz and its characters existed not solely within the actual texts (novels, stage plays, films, etc.), but also folded across multiple sites of media paratext (printed maps, posters, reviews, competitions, faux newspapers, etc.).

All of these outputs were based on industrial conditions and technological affordances. But on the other hand, the concept of the media-migrating audience was very different to its status today, and much of this cross-platform activity stemmed from the rather middle-class culture of consumerism and shopping that came to define the early twentieth century. Audiences were by now absorbed in the so-called ‘society of the spectacle’, with images that pointed them to other images and across to other sites of (media) consumption a characteristic of the period. In other words, gauging the manoeuvrability of audiences across multiple platforms at that time means understanding the wider historical culture, just as exploring the associated patterns of narrativity of each of that period’s media forms can shed new light into why particular media of the era tended to specialise in particular parts of a given transmedia tale.

If we broaden transmedia to incorporate earlier media and industrial practices, how does this shift our definition of the concept? Some fear that transmedia has already become so elastic that it describes anything and everything. Does this historical expansion of the concept make the problem worse or does it help us to identify something particular that links these various practices together?

This is a very important question. I, for one, agree with some of the criticisms of that say that transmedia, as a term, is becoming too elastic. Since I argue throughout the book that both the industry strategies and wider cultural contingencies informing transmedia storytelling have varied substantially over time, I believe that it is even more important to theorise a different conceptual model for examining transmedia storytelling as part of the industrial-cultural configurations of the past, rather than simply trying to apply its present model to the industrial-cultural configurations of the past.

However, as you imply in your question, this archaeological approach does raise one notable problem: If transmedia storytelling is indeed closely linked to twenty-first century media culture and its industrial or technological configurations, then how can one go about classifying earlier forms of media culture and divergent industrial configurations as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully really means understanding transmedia storytelling according to a few general characteristics that can be seen in both the media of the past and of the present, with only the industrial configurations informing those characteristics varying one from period to another.

So, in so far as it must ultimately work to expand established fictional storyworlds and extend the arcs of characters and plots across multiple media platforms, I would argue that transmedia storytelling can be understood in terms of the following three general characteristics: (1) Character-building; (2) World-building; and (3) Authorship. Most basically, if character-building is a smaller aspect of world-building, then authorship is crucial for achieving both of the former.

Thinking along these lines allowed me to explore historical cases of transmedia storytelling by focusing on how each of these three general characteristics were determined by particular industrial workings in the past. And I show that the strategies for holding the past’s transmedia storyworlds together and indeed for pointing audiences across those multiple media were informed largely by different determinants and configurations from case to another, from one era to another.

For instance, looking through the lens of world-building, we can understand the Land of Oz in the early 1900s as a playground of fantasy where systems of advertising across novels, magazines, newspapers, reviews, etc. afforded a host of characters to roam free and for different adventures to be told transmedially. Later on in the 1920s and 30s, analysing the empire surrounding Tarzan in terms of authorship lends itself to correlating the affordances of corporate practices such as merchandising and sponsorship to the interlinking of Tarzan’s stories across the likes of pulp magazines, radio serials, movies and toys. And, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, analysing the iconic red cape of Superman in terms of character-building across comics, radio, cinema, etc. really led to a very clear understanding of how practices of propaganda, war cinema and B-movie production throughout the 1940s and 1950s ultimately gave way to forms of transmedia storytelling as a response to the Second World War.

In other words, each of these cases serve as a demonstration of how very different industrial configurations in the past led to the same transmedial results. In revealing how differently structured media industries still had very strong impulses towards what is now called transmedia storytelling, I like to think that my work serves as an important example of how contemporary developments can actually re-focus the ways in which we think about the past, and indeed the ways in which bygone historical perspectives can in turn reframe current scholarly debates of, in this case, transmedia.

You note that your emphasis on American developments in transmedia are not intended to reflect “any kind of general explanation” of transmedia’s industrial history, but it seems to me that your account tends to assume that transmedia is an extension of commercial or market logics that dominate the American entertainment system but do not necessarily shape other media ecologies. Would transmedia have necessarily emerged in cases where there is a much stronger emphasis on public service broadcasting or state funding for the arts? Or would transmedia at least have taken a different shape if storytelling was kept separate from marketing and promotional practices?

Absolutely, I very much believe that, at least in the context of US history, transmedia storytelling emerged out of large-scale commercial and market logics driven by industrialisation and consumer culture, with modes of storytelling across media coming out of certain industrial and culture needs to reproduce and distribute media products for the mass-market.

Yet, be that as it may, I also don’t think that my conclusions are globally applicable. What I realised is that when you examine transmedia in its present context compared to its historical contexts, it is totally different – even if it’s in the same country. In my eyes it’s much more useful to think about context specificity – that is, that different things at different moments in different cultures for different reasons inform transmedia in different ways. It would be wrong to say that the commercial or market-based ideas that I propose of transmedia’s past in the US can be used to explain transmedia in other countries. Instead, it is much more accurate to start again, as it were, and to look at the specific country, its cultures, industries, society, etc. and ask: What role is (or was) transmedia playing here? And what are the specific mechanisms informing it?

A perfect example of this would be Colombia, which I’ve started researching lately. Colombians very passionately reject the idea that transmedia is commercial. Some Colombian researchers actively oppose the link between transmedia and Hollywood, say, or transmedia and branding or franchising. Instead, in Colombia transmedia is a long-standing social tool, a way to unite a dispersed Colombian nation – people who have gone through terrible social ordeals and violent conflicts in the past.

I’m also currently working with others who affirm similar ideas about the specificity of transmedia in different countries: Melanie Bourdaa, for example, argues that transmedia occupies a role of cultural heritage in France, while Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojamaa explore the dual role of transmedia in Estonia as both a mechanism for supporting cultural heterogeneity and for enforcing coherence and stability in culture via maintaining the relevance of historical media texts. Marie-Eve Carignan, too, is doing very interesting research that analyses the media coverage of terrorist attacks in Canada to show the key role of transmedia in the radicalisation of that country.

Not to simplify things, but in each of these cases it is documentary that seems to have shaped the form of transmedia. And because of this, in a country like Colombia transmedia is now fundamentally perceived not as a tool for brand-building but rather for community-building, with the spreading of content across multiple media serving to re-create lost cultural memories and to re-build broken societies.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds is published on December 6, 2016:

https://www.routledge.com/Historicising-Transmedia-Storytelling-Early-Twentieth-Century-Transmedia/Freeman/p/book/9781138217690

Yes, Transmedia HAS a History!: An Interview with Matthew Freeman (Part One)

From the start, there have been competing claims about the origins of Transmedia storytelling. Many read my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture as indicating that transmedia was a new phenomenon emerging from networked culture. Transmedia in that account lay where old and new media collide. Indeed, at the time I wrote Convergence Culture, I was excited about the prospect of a new storytelling paradigm which I was trying to piece together from the glimpses provided by a range of contemporary projects -- from Dawson's Desktop and The Blair Witch Project to the early ARGS to The Matrix. So my understanding of Transmedia in Convergence Culture reflected a sense that something new was happening here. Yet, if you look closely at my discussion of "The Art of World Building", you will see references throughout two Homeric epic, Joseph Campbell, and the Christian church in the Middle Ages, as points of comparisons to the world building and extra-textual references found in contemporary Transmedia storytelling. I was certainly not arguing for a total break with the past, and I was hinting that people have been using every available media to tell stories fora long, long time. Derek Johnson in his own book, Media Franchising: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Culture Industries and through his contribution to Spreadable Media has consistently made the case that today's Transmedia is simply a reconfiguration of much older industry practices. Similarly Avie Santos has used the example of the Lone Ranger to make the case for earlier forms of product licensing as prefiguring Transmedia. See his recent book Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Other contemporary books such as The Rise of Transtexts explores a range of historical analogies. I will be sharing more insights from that boo'ks editors in a subsequent interview in this blog.

But to date, the most thorough and convincing exploration of the prehistory of transmedia has emerged from the pen of British media scholar Matthew Freeman. Freeman recently released the book Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling: Early 20th century Transmedia Story Worlds which represents the state-of-the-art in terms of exploring historical antecedents. Across this book Friedman develops case studies of the Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman as significant media franchises of the early 20th century. In each case, fictional characters and worlds were extended across a range of contemporary media platforms. For example, L Frank Baum, the "Royal Historian of Oz", wrote not only books but also comic strips, stage plays, films, games, and other print ephemera, each of which told us something we didn't know before about his magical realm. Within the first few years of Superman's existence, the character was appearing in both comic books and comic strips, animated shorts, live-action serials, and radio dramas. Each of these platforms contributed significantly to the development of Superman as we understand him today and of the superhero genre more generally. Freeman explores why each of these producers were willing to take a chance on a new genre and a previously unexplored audience. There were not necessarily the same strong links on a narrative level across these different versions, but there certainly were examples of additive comprehension as sophisticated as anything found in today's Transmedia franchises.

Freeman's book must be regarded as a essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how the modern sense Transmedia emerged and what forms it might've taken in earlier eras. Freeman is deft in his ability to move between contemporary theoretical and critical accounts of Transmedia and detailed historical accounts of earlier media practices. I was honored to serve as an outside reader on Freeman's dissertation and have watched with great interest as he's translated that document into the current book. I was delighted when he agreed to conduct an interview for the blog in which he explores a range of issues concerning both contemporary and historical forms of Transmedia entertainment. I will be sharing his insights over the next three installations of my blog. Enjoy!

Let’s begin with the question which frames your first chapter -- why “historicize” the study of transmedia? What has been lost by keeping the focus of discussions of transmedia on the current moment, on an emerging or evolving set of practices within the entertainment industry?

Most pointedly, I have attempted to show in Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that there is far more to transmedia storytelling than meets the eye. It may well be a practice of industrial convergence that affords media content to spread across the subsidiaries of a conglomerate. It may also be a system of technological convergence that grants audiences the power to themselves spread stories across a web of digitally connected media platforms. But transmedia storytelling is also a form of historical production, distribution and even regulation, and one that had a very important role to play in historical media culture long before such modern convergences existed.

That said, I do agree with those who claim that transmedia storytelling is the future. The concept and practice of transmedia has really come to define the workings of today’s (commercial) media industries, speaking as it does to the ways that the spread of content across platforms comes to encapsulate the networks and convergences at the core of today’s media.

And yet the perceived newness of transmedia storytelling – or rather the perceived importance of newer convergences on the rise of transmedia storytelling – has indeed left a sizable gap in our understanding of this practice and its importance across the face of history. Derek Johnson once remarked that ‘one of the newest dimensions of contemporary transmedia entertainment is our recognition of it as such’, and the practice of telling tales across media has not only fed into the workings of media industries over the past hundred years or so, but transmedia storytelling can actually be used as a lens through which to make better sense of some of the biggest industrial, cultural, social and even political developments characterising the fin-de-siècle, the rise of modern advertising and Hollywood.

For example, I explore modern advertising at the turn of the twentieth century, itself a fast-developing industry and system of cultural and commercial communication. That period’s advertising can provide us with a source of early industrialised transmedia storytelling. At that time, new trends in modern advertising invited authors to apply promotional techniques based on branding, collectivity, colour printing technologies, etc. to their storytelling practices. In essence, everything from the giant billboards on the side of buildings and the artistic arrangements in shop windows to the promotional forms of newspaper comic strips served to attract an audience’s attention with content (characters, images, spectacle, etc.) before steering them elsewhere, often across platforms to other related content in media texts and consumer products in an overtly transmedial fashion. In this instance, only via the process of historicisation can we more fully understand transmedia as itself the industrialised slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters and brands across platforms well over a hundred years ago.

In mostly conceptualising transmedia storytelling as part of digital or industrial convergences, it is fair to say that many scholars have thus far had a tendency to neglect such workings of the past – thus leaving us all with a limited and narrow understanding of what is actually a far longer, far broader and far more complex historical development. In other words, only by looking to the past can we fully see the contingencies of the present, and by searching for historical precedents it can force us to be far more nuanced in describing what is truly specific to our present media moment. To be clear, my work is in no way a ‘corrective’ to any particular scholarly understandings of transmedia storytelling. Simply, it is an expansion of those understandings, adding new information, insights and perspectives that enhance the characteristics of this important phenomenon as it evolved across history.

If we are historicizing transmedia, why should our focus start with the dawn of the 20th century? Set the stage for us in terms of what conditions were emerging then which would push storytelling in a more transmedial direction.

There’s no denying that the notion of stories that span multiple platforms pre-dates the dawn of the twentieth century. Derek Johnson and Roberta Pearson, in particular, point to the mythological narratives of Ancient Greece and to the cross-platform narrative architecture surrounding the figure of Jesus Christ as possible (almost pre-historical) forms of transmedia storytelling. Mark J. P. Wolf also points to things like Homer’s Odyssey as a storyworld that exists transmedially and trans-historically.

And so while identifying ‘the first’ transmedia stories is surely well and truly beyond our abilities as researchers, there were nevertheless some major and fundamental transformations associated with the United States circa 1900 that became intrinsically tied to the rise of transmedia storytelling on an industrial scale. Most broadly, two of these key transformations were industrialisation and consumer.

I should probably explain that statement a little. In many ways, telling stories across media is not really about stories converging as it is about stories building – rather like a series of extensions that are added to a building to form a larger and ever-expanding house. This analogy of a house hints at a central point: The industrial strategies of the past century that became most significant to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling were all practices or developments that afforded a way to build and to spread that which was built. Industrialisation was all about building and spreading. Just as media convergence allows content to flow across multiple media platforms, so did industrialisation, albeit in different ways.

Of particular importance were the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture. At the turn of the twentieth century in the US, indeed, larger cultural factors concerned transformations that saw a predominantly rural-farming economy eventually develop into an emerging urban-manufacturing landscape. It may have only fully characterised particular cities such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, but this period unquestionably witnessed the full force of industrialisation and became characterised by related developments to do with new models of mass production, fresh industrialised systems of modern advertising, and evolving developments in methods of mass communication.

What is important to stress is that, come the turn of the twentieth century, new forms of mass production technology, which led to a new and characteristically American form of manufacture, emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century. And this American form of mass production was vital to transmedia storytelling at this time.

Consider the era’s new archetypal model of industrialised mass production – the assembly line. The assembly line’s significance on what is now called transmedia storytelling ties most straightforwardly to the fact that production fast became a reproducible system of adjoining interchangeable parts during this particular time.

If imagined only from a strictly manufacturing perspective, transmedia storytelling is similarly about the reproduction of many media texts as much as it is about the creative expansion of fictional storyworlds and the migration of audiences. If the entire process of transmedia storytelling is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side,’ as Heroes’ Tim Kring once put it, then those additional ‘rocket ships’ are essentially interchangeable extension parts. And it is for this reason that the assembly line – this quintessentially American form of mass production – is so crucial to comprehending the industrial context through which transmedia storytelling emerged as an industrialised practice.

After all, in the same way that transmedia storytelling is the integration of multiple forms, or a process where elements of a larger product work like components of a unified experience, so too was the model of early-twentieth-century mass production: The assembly line was a process whereby one component was produced according to its relationship with others, which in turn was designed to be joined with another component, and with each of these adjoining components eventually all coming together to form one larger product. Conceptually, the assembly line and transmedia storytelling both work on the basis that separate product-pieces are each added one by one to form a larger product, like individual bricks building a proverbial house. In short, mass production afforded the sheer reproducibility of fiction as multipliable products for the industrial age.

From there, we then reached a phase in US history where consumer culture emerged, and this too was crucial. Economically, transmedia storytelling operates on the basis that audiences will gain both a richer and fuller understanding of a given story if they consume more of its media texts. Any attempt to historicise transmedia storytelling must therefore account for consumer culture as a broad contextual backdrop; the consumerist ideology ingrained into many current definitions of transmedia storytelling suggests that its history is closely related to the rise of consumer culture.

Specifically, the rise of consumer culture around the early twentieth century was important to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling for two reasons. First, the new models of mass production described above would lead to increased mass distribution, spreading the array of new products across media and audiences whilst further intensifying the importance of standardised differentiation on the production of products. Second, this mass distribution gave rise to the business of a number of interconnected licensing practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function, and in turn transmedia storytelling became corporatised. Put simply: If industrialisation afforded ways to build media on an industrial scale, then consumer culture afforded the means to spread and market that media across platforms.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.