Transmedia storytelling and audience : memory and market

The exact definition of transmedia storytelling is a subject of contention, but broadly speaking the term describes connected narratives told across multiple media platforms. Such platforms might include, but are not limited to, novels, films, video games, websites, comics, social media, alternate reality games (ARGs) and manifold kinds of user-driven content (UDC). Notable examples of transmedia franchises centre around films such as The Matrix, Tron and Star Wars and television programmes such as Sherlock, 24 and Doctor Who. Transmedia storytelling is characterized by an often complex network of interrelationships involving licence holders and licensees, producers, consumers and prosumers. Such interactions are further complicated by processes of production, distribution and consumption, and by the relationships across specific media platforms utilized by the franchise or project in question. These connectivities are, however, central to transmedia enterprise. Their attributes can both illuminate the specificities of the digital world and illustrate trajectories from the preceding analogue era. In this chapter, I explore the multiple, complex kinds of connectivity existing in transmedia franchises and projects with an emphasis on the interrelationships between analogue and digital modes of production, distribution and consumption. I privilege ideas drawn from memory studies as a means of framing and demarcating the different kinds of connectivities that occur. These may be at the level of user interaction with the diegetic (narrative fictional) world, with regard to the ways in which elements of the transmedia franchise interact, or the audience's relationship with the producers of the franchise, or vice versa. I contend that the analogue world prefigured much of what occurs in the sphere of contemporary transmedia production and that today's modes of production, distribution and consumption remember these analogue precedents. This occurs as the digital often aims to replicate analogue tropes and techniques, as well as production methodologies and even modes of distribution. In outlining these continuities, I identify a number of specific examples from the pre-digital era which anticipate contemporary transmedia activities. I argue that contemporary, electronic modes of connectivity enable other kinds of connectivity to occur, which find their origins in the pre-digital era. I propose the concept of transmedia configuration to describe the multiple forms of engagement transmedia projects seek and sometimes demand of their user-bases, an approach firmly rooted in memory. To achieve this, I build on ideas originally discussed in human–computer interaction and subsequently adopted within the field of game studies. I also draw on Andrew Hoskins' deployment of mediatized memory to describe the interactions between analogue and digital transmedia techniques, and insights from Manuel De Landa regarding the digital's acceleration and intensification of flows of information.