Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life

Networked Reception, Social Media, and Fictional Worlds

Susana Tosca, Lisbeth Klastrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138558007
• eBook ISBN: 9781351365321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this pioneering new book, authors Klastrup and Tosca explore the many ways that transmedial worlds are present in people's everyday life, proposing a new theory of (trans)media use for the digital age.

People are not only reading, watching and playing in fictional worlds like never before, but also using them to reflect about their lives through Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other channels, commenting on their marriages or their life at the office, analyzing current news, or reminiscing on the role these worlds played in their childhood. The book's unique methodological approach combines an aesthetic and literary perspective that looks closely at the different fictional universes, with an empirical user perspective that builds upon 15 years of sustained work on transmediality. The result is a theory that covers both the personal, experiential dimension of fictional worlds and the social dimension of sharing with each other.

A fascinating and contemporary examination of media worlds and their communities, this book offers students and scholars of fandom, media, cultural and reception studies a new theoretical and methodological framework, through which to understand the phenomenon of transmedial worlds, and people's engagement with them.

1

INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction

In the winter of 2001, in a cozy Copenhagen underground bar, one of the authors of this book gave the other the One Ring as a birthday present. It shone brightly as we held it up against the dim candlelight, the runes were visible so we could recite their ominous message: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. We covered our ears playfully; the evil words making the red wine taste a bit more intense. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. It almost certainly was not the real One Ring, but it did actually have a lot of power, and still has, because it symbolized a lot of what has brought us together as academic colleagues and friends. When we met each other in the late 1990s, we were young graduate students from two venerable universities¹ with media studies backgrounds firmly anchored in literary theory and the masterpieces of the Western canon. In our PhD projects, we were respectively investigating electronic literature and virtual worlds, and we were part of the rebellious group of people that had moved away from print text and were trying to find out what this new digital medium was and what it meant for audiences to suddenly become interactors, users or navigators. Our research topics were a natural point of contact, but we were as much united by the fact that we shared a love of popular culture and the fictional universes that we would later come to name transmedial worlds, or rich content systems that could be encountered and engaged with on a variety of different platforms (books, films, comics, videogames, board games, etc.). It was good to be able to discuss postmodern literary theory with someone who also thought that the digital medium was worthy of study, but it was even better to be able to do it while cracking Tolkien jokes or grinding together in Everquest. Actually, playing online multi-player videogames marked the beginning of our transmedial journey, as we started to wonder how these games repurposed material from other media (books or films) in order to create a different kind of experience. This led to our first joint article in 2004, “Transmedial Worlds – Rethinking Cyberworld Design”, in which we outlined the basics of our transmedial world model. Our academic friendship story is probably not that notable anymore, because the attitude towards both popular cultural formats and the digital medium has radically changed in academia over the last 20 years, but our objects of interest still occupy a fragile position. During the writing of this book, we have found ourselves more than once having to justify that popular fiction universes can be a legitimate object of study.

Meanwhile, in what some people call the “real” world, the multi-platform fictions that we have called transmedial worlds are no longer a niche entertainment product enjoyed only by a very dedicated group of hardcore fans. Fictional universes such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Game of Thrones have become mainstream entertainment, and on parallel lines the meaning of the word “fan” itself has shifted quite a bit (Gray et al., 2017: 1) to include many different levels of devotion, identity investment or attachment to a specific community (Busse & Gray, 2011). A young student in one of our spring 2019 classes articulated the general change in attitude (today): “a fan can also just be a person who just really likes something”. Moreover, accelerated commodification processes have made the circulation of transmedial media content and its derived merchandise so widespread that it is nearly impossible to go through a regular day without being reminded of them by a themed cereal package, a stranger on the street sporting an epic tattoo or a parodic meme in our social media stream. A lot of this content is manufactured by the big IP-owning corporations, but nearly just as much is purely user-generated material which gets circulated digitally, as regular people use their favourite fictional universes as a source of inspiration and reflection to be shared with their personal network.

This book focuses on the many ways that transmedial worlds are present in our everyday life and how they manifest in our social media activity. People are reading, watching and playing in transmedial worlds like never before. In addition they have developed a meta-consciousness about their own fictional consumption that is mostly manifested in their social media interaction, and in mundane forms of audiencing practices that we have named networked reception. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other channels, we use transmedial worlds-inspired texts to reflect on our marriages or our life at the office, to comment on current news, or to rally our friends in a political protest. In a time where many of the grand narratives have lost their explanatory power and prestige, transmedial worlds remain an unsullied stronghold that people use to connect and make sense of their experience.

Today, transmedial production and transmedial engagement have become entangled in new ways, propelled by the proliferation of cheap and fast internet access and the reduction of prices of mobile devices and consoles. For audiences, it has become easier than ever to follow and build upon an interesting universe across a variety of media platforms. From an industry perspective, producing transmedial content or engaging (with) users of transmedial products on social media has become a survival strategy, employed by high-end TV series and film productions, as well as small independent products. As Jason Mittell notes:

industrial shifts that have shrunk the relative size of any one program’s television audiences and expanded competition across numerous cable and broadcast outlets have encouraged producers to experiment with transmedia as a way to get noticed and to build viewer’s loyality in an increasingly cluttered television schedule. We might characterize this as a shift in norms: in previous decades, it was exceptional for a program to employ a significant transmedia strategy, while today it is more exceptional for a high-profile series not to.

(Mittell, 2015: 293)

And what is true of television is no less true of films and videogames, which are often integrated in multi-platform content packages that get launched in coordination to reach different demographics or offer more integrated experiences to their core audiences. There seem to be fewer and fewer stand-alone content items than ever before, as many mainstream films are based on books, comics or videogames; are part of trilogies, quartets, quintets or sextets; or become significant in relation to sequels, prequels or reboots. As Freeman and Gambarato observe, complex industry connections are key to comprehending the new media landscape:

Transmedia phenomena, as a common ground, involve the richness of multiplatform media—it is (. . .) about a set of relationships across media. Particular media platforms can emerge and disappear, can be in vogue or be ostracized, can change and evolve.

(Freeman & Gambarato, 2018: 3–4)

To understand these connected cultural products, we have been inspired by seriality scholar Jennifer Hayward, as transmedial products share a key attribute with the serial form of media production: that their interdependence ensures that every act of consumption awakes the desire for more, since “it essentially creates the demand it then feeds” (Hayward, 1997: 3). Also, as Hayward herself notes, serial audiences are engaged in many ways beyond the mere consumption of the pre-packaged products, and she advocates for paying attention to “the practices surrounding consumption of serial texts; the functions such texts may serve for the individual and for the community (. . .) the processes of collaborative interpretation, prediction, metacommentary and creation that engage them” (1997: 3). These are a lot of the practices we have attempted to map in this book, here in relation to transmedial mainstream audiences. The best way to get to know audiences is talking to them, and of course digitally eavesdropping on what they talk about with one another. An important contribution of this book is the effort to align the reception perspective originating in the humanities with the interactive audience studies perspective coming from the burgeoning field of digital media studies, which even though clearly related, have most often developed in parallel without really intersecting. To resolve this, we combine the textual/aesthetic perspective (that looks at the fictional universes themselves) with a digital media audience perspective that builds upon more than a decade of collected empirical material through diverse qualitative and quantitative inquiries including ethnography (analogue and digital), interviews, participant observations, focus groups, surveys and diverse modes of social media analysis.

In our theoretical approach, a transmedial world becomes such in the mind of its audiences, and it comes into being only when they recognize the common traits that identify an individual work as belonging to a specific universe. The current enthusiasm of mainstream audiences with complex transmedial worlds can perhaps be related to the success of fantastic fictions in general, which attract us more than ever before. Several scholars have attempted to explain this fascination as a reaction to boredom or the excessive rationalism of our times, notably Susan Napier and Michael Saler, who have both inspired us in our work. Susan Napier has put forward the notion of fantasyscape, as a useful concept to interrogate what she has called a “phenomenology of enjoyment” (2007: 11). Napier has researched the Western fascination with Japanese popular culture and argues that for many people, it fulfils their needs to engage in ludic activity:

In the fantasyscape, play and setting are the two most important elements, creating a plethora of forms of virtual reality such as the densely constructed entertainment worlds of Disneyland and other theme parks, the intense involvements of video or online gaming, or the short-term but highly engaged gatherings of fan conventions. Fantasyscapes are inherently liminal worlds, temporary alternative lifestyles that exist parallel to the mundane, which people enter and exit when they please.

(Napier, 2007: 11)

Many transmedial worlds would fit Napier’s description of a fantasyscape, also because they are deployed across several media, offering different kinds of pleasures and enjoyments. Despite the negative connotations of the idea of escape, Napier’s concept is not meant to be derogatory at all, but is rather proposed as a playful (Japanese) alternative to the alienation of our contemporary world, an opening to the grotesque, the fantastic and an alternative way of engaging with reality (12). We would however like to suggest that fantasyscapes are not completely separated from everyday life, but that they get entangled with it in daily mundane acts that do not necessarily require extensive immersion. The transmedial playfulness that offers a respite from a perhaps depressing reality can also happen in small bursts, such as laughing over a meme or watching and commenting on a short YouTube video.

Napier’s thoughts resonate with the more recent work of Michael Saler, who in his book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality argues that the modern world has become “disenchanted”, mainly as a result of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, in the form of extreme rationalism and the impact of the industrial revolution. The idea of disenchantment was originally put forward by Max Weber, and concerns “the loss of the overarching meanings, animistic connections, magical orientations and spiritual explanations that had characterized the traditional world” (Saler, 2012: 8). If it is true that our world has become disenchanted, it is no wonder that we miss something in our daily lives of mundane effectiveness and seek to “re-enchant” our world through the engagement with fictional worlds. In other words, people are in charge of their own media consumption and steer it so it fulfils their personal needs, here nearly in an existential way.

This view resonates with traditional uses and gratifications theory that identifies the needs and desires that drive media consumption (see for example Blumler & Katz, 1974; McQuail, 1984; Ruddock, 2001). Uses and gratification studies across both new and old media platforms have pointed out that the need for escapism, entertainment, passing time and relaxation are drivers of much media consumption (Sundar & Limperos, 2013). While the uses and gratifications approach did appear to fall from grace for a while, it has recently seen a revival. As Ruggiero argues, with the proliferation of digital media formats and personalized content to choose from, understanding users’ (individual) motivation should be an integral part of modern audience research (Ruggiero, 2000). The uses and gratifications approach has understandably been criticized for being excessively psychological and losing sight of the social, but as we will demonstrate later, the pleasures derived from engaging with transmedial worlds have a very salient social dimension. This resonates well with recent findings by several scholars, who have researched the use of social media from a users and gratifications perspective; and have found that social media both supports and affords general social interaction gratifications as well as new social gratifications, such as social connection (keeping in touch), social browsing and peeking, and the need for recognition (see e.g. Joinson, 2008; Quan-Haase & Young, 2010, Lee et al., 2015; Kim & Kim, 2018). Based on our own studies, this book argues that there has been a movement from the individual to the collective and from the few to the many in terms of who, how and why we engage with transmedial worlds, in more ways than one. What used to be a minority pastime engaged in by cultist fans only 50 years ago has become a mainstream activity in the media-saturated world of today. Going back to Saler and his theory of re-enchantment, which proposes that audiences can recover their sense of wonder by engaging with a certain kind of fiction, we notice that his examples in many ways overlap with our object of study. He traces the genealogy of these enchanted worlds back to the English Aestheticist movement and the “new romance literature” from the end of the nineteenth century, and expands his point by exploring the iconic fantasy worlds of Sherlock Holmes, Tolkien and Lovecraft, which all can be said to be transmedial worlds in their own special way.

Both Napier’s fantasyscape and Saler’s notion of re-enchantment are flexible concepts which encapsulate different kinds of audience engagement, from very dedicated fan investment to more casual entertainment. We need concepts like these which can be used to describe what drives a myriad of engagement formats and widespread enchantment with transmedial worlds. In most academic literature up to now, transmedial audiences have mostly been considered from a fandom perspective, that is, researchers (including ourselves) have mostly paid attention to very invested followers of the fictional universes and their productive activity. Similarly, within industry, the hardcore fans are also considered what ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foundations of Transmedial Worlds
• 3 Methods: Studying Engagement with Transmedial Worlds
• 4 Appropriations
• 5 Connections
• 6 Evaluation
• 7 Lifetimes
• 8 Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index