Transmedia Storytelling in East Asia

The Age of Digital Media

Dal Yong Jin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000063455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context.

An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market.

Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.

1 East Asian transmedia storytelling in the age of digital media—introduction

Dal Yong Jin

Transmedia storytelling is not new. At the dawn of the 1940s, the U.S. film industry had already exploited other media in order to maintain firm control of the products that were appealing to audiences (Freeman, 2015). Since then, transmedia storytelling has rapidly grown. In the early 21st century, major elements in the cultural industries have changed; however, transmedia storytelling has continued to play a key role in producing contemporary cultural products for major Hollywood studios and small local cultural producers.

Transmedia storytelling has become one of the hottest media practices in recent years, as the transmedia phenomenon—which is a remediation of one particular cultural form as original to other cultural forms—has become a very significant media trend in the global cultural industries (Freeman, 2015; Jin, 2019). The rise of each new medium—print, film, radio, television, and smartphone—introduced new forms of media and entertainment, which triggered the development of the adaptation of media content based on novels and manhwas. Furthermore, the current multichannel and digital platform era gave rise to a new form of storytelling dubbed transmedia, which unfolds a narrative across multiple media channels (Knowledge@Wharton, 2012).

In the 21st century, East Asia has become a major hub for transmedia storytelling due to Japanese manga, animation, and light novels, and later Korean webtoons (web comics) as well as Chinese novels. In Japan, many cultural forms like films and digital games have relied on manga and/or anime, and several Asian countries have utilized these cultural forms to develop their own films and television programs. South Korea (hereafter Korea) has especially developed a new type of transmedia storytelling as webtoons have gained popularity. Several movies, such as Secretly, Greatly (2013), Misaeng Prequel (2013), Inside Men (2015), Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017), and Cheese in the Trap (2018), which were transformed from webtoons, achieved huge success, and many film directors and television producers are energetically developing webtoon-based cultural products. Tencent—a Chinese Internet-based technology and cultural enterprise—is also increasingly involved in the production of webtoons and has funded the production of webtoon-based digital games and animation. Japan has long prided itself on being a manga powerhouse; however, due to Korean webtoon’s popularity in Asia, many Japanese people have witnessed that Korean webtoons make “forays into Japan, where they have quickly carved out a fan base among digital native youth who are increasingly shunning the traditional print formats in favor of titles read on apps” (Osaki, 2019).

Analyzing the explosion of transmedia storytelling based on several Asia-based cultural materials, including Korean webtoons and Japanese manga/anime, this book focuses on the emergence of East Asian transmedia storytelling. The chapters included in this volume commonly attempt to investigate the recent surge of East Asian popular culture like webtoons and manga/anime as the sources of transmedia storytelling for the creation of popular culture. The primary purpose of this book is to explore whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take on a major role as the primary local cultural product in the East Asian cultural market and beyond in the 21st century. Some chapters also historicize the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the continuity and change of the manhwa industry, now focusing on webtoons, over the past 15 years. Therefore, as the foundational basis for the chapters in the volume, this introductory chapter discusses the major characteristics of transmedia storytelling. The major aim here is to provide several key dimensions of webtoon and anime- or manga-based transmedia storytelling to help readers understand the nature of the emerging transmedia practices as a new trend.

Transmedia storytelling and media convergence

As transmedia storytelling has heavily relied on media convergence, cultural production and consumption have depended on digital technologies. Contemporary transmedia storytelling is especially based on digital storytelling, referring to “a two-to-four-minute multimedia story in which photographs, film and drawings are used to convey a personal story, personally narrated by the storyteller” (Hancox, 2017, p. 53). For example, webtoons, which are major sources of big screen culture, such as television dramas, digital games, and films, are deeply interconnected with the increasing role of digital storytelling, and therefore, it is crucial to understand transmedia storytelling in conjunction with media convergence.

While there are several different characteristics, media convergence is about the mixing of digital technologies and content to achieve endless transformation to maximize the benefits to both users (in a new way of convenience) and developers (in a new way of capital accumulation) in the digital media era (Jenkins, 2006; Jin, 2013). Several scholars have continued to emphasize the nexus of media convergence and transmedia storytelling in the age of digital technologies.

To begin with, transmedia as a combination of “trans” and “media” implies that contents from several media forms, including film, broadcasting, manga, animation, webtoon, and game, converge beyond their independent medium boundaries (Cho, 2018, p. 310). As Evans (2011, p. 1) points out, “transmediality describes the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms.” In particular,

transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. From a production standpoint, transmedia storytelling involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives.

(Ram, 2016)

Freeman (2017, p. 32) also points out that

at the present moment, therefore, it is digital platforms that most emphatically and most frequently build fictional story worlds across media; online promoters exploit digital tools like social media and film websites to plant in-universe artefacts about a given story world.

As Freeman (2015, p. 215) argues, “transmedia storytelling is perhaps the most aesthetically theorized component of media convergence, and one that has gained significant academic presence over the last decade.” As Mikos (2016) and Jenkins (2006, pp. 2–3) address, one of the major characteristics of media convergence is “the flow of content across multiple media platforms,” and the flow has been actualized through transmedia storytelling in the 2010s. In this regard, Evans (2011, pp. 1–2) explains, “it may relate to practices such as franchising, merchandising, adaptations, spin-offs, sequels and marketing.”

More specifically, transmedia storytelling is a popular technique in cultural production as “doing transmedia means to make the project’s contents available on different technological platforms, without causing any overlaps or interferences, while managing the story experienced by different audiences” (Giovagnoli, 2011, p. 8). Transmedia, and therefore, transmedia storytelling “has promise as a democratizing force,” offering new opportunities for increased diversity and meaningful participation in media and communication (Baker & Schak, 2019, p. 202) as:

(1) New tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content. (2) A range of subcultures promote do-it-yourself media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies. (3) Economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship.

(Jenkins 2014, p. 269)

However, transmedia storytelling needs to be understood not only as the flow of story from the original text to several different platforms, but also as the expansion and/or compression of the original story to fit into platforms’ unique attributes. As Jenkins (2011) himself later argues, the media industry has rapidly changed; thus, “the current configuration of the entertainment industry makes transmedia expansion an economic imperative, yet the most gifted transmedia artists also surf these marketplace pressures to create a more expansive and immersive story than would have been possible otherwise.” Transmedia storytelling as stories told across multiple media “is not just an adaptation from one media to another: it is a narrative expansion” (Scolari, n.d.). This does not mean that all transmedia experiences are expansive. As Scolari (2013) clarifies, “many audiovisual contents, rather than expanding the story, reduce it to a minimum expression, like in trailers and recapitulations.” In the snack culture era, the collision of old and new media produces a large number of textual splinters (Miller, 2007), and therefore, sometimes, compression occurs throughout transmedia storytelling.

Meanwhile, transmedia storytelling involves not only text but also characters (Shige, 2019; Steinberg, 2012) and visual images; therefore, the current focus on the adaptation of textual story is limited, nor does it reflect the contemporary emphasis on visual images. This means that it is critical to comprehend that transmedia storytelling is not a simple adaptati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 East Asian transmedia storytelling in the age of digital media—introduction
• Part I Asian culture and transmedia
• Part II Digital media and storytelling
• Part III Platform politics and media convergence
• Index