Transmedia Storytelling Systems
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Suzanne Scott The Trouble with Transmediation: Fandom’s Negotiation of Transmedia Storytelling Systems Transmedia storytelling, defined by Henry Jenkins is their implicit promise to decentralize authorship in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media and promote collaboration, both between creators Collide as a narrative that “unfolds across multiple in different mediums and creators and fans. While media platforms, with each new text making a Jenkins stresses the decentralized or collaborative distinct and valuable contribution to the whole,” model of authorship these systems foster,3 he has been rapidly adopted as a content model and offers an important qualification that “the most cross-promotional device for media properties successful transmedia franchises have emerged with fannish appeal.1 Jenkins, accordingly, makes when a single creator or creative unit maintains a compelling argument for why transmedia control,”4 thus problematizing a reading of these storytelling systems hold allure and creative systems as democratizing creative ownership. potential for fans. Invoking Pierre Lévy’s definition Borrowing Roberta Pearson’s language, this is of texts that function as cultural attractors, creating “the Jekyll and Hyde of transmedia storytelling.”5 a circuit of expression where the activity of creators For all of the rich encyclopedic and elaborative and interpreters mutually sustains each other, narrative potential that transmedia stories offer Jenkins extends Levy’s terminology to discuss creators and fans, the commercial imperative how transmedia texts are both cultural attractors that underlies their creation and the consumptive and “cultural activator[s], setting into motion demands and creative strictures they place on fans their decipherment, speculation and elaboration.”2 has received little scholarly attention. This has This desire to decipher, speculate, and expand has resulted in a conflict between those who claim always been affiliated with fans’ textual play and that transmedia storytelling systems offer fans production, filling in narrative gaps and exploring sophisticated webs of content to explore and textual excesses through the creation of fanfiction, enhance and those that see these webs as precisely fanart, vids and role-playing games (RPGs). that: a mode of confining and regulating fannish Consequently, we can argue that a text doesn’t analysis and textual production. need to be conceptualized as a transmedia story to The goal of this project is to abandon function as a cultural activator, as fans have been momentarily the utopian readings of transmedia unofficially unfolding narratives across multiple storytelling as “Jekyll” and begin to articulate a media platforms for generations. number of reasons that audiences and fans could What does distinguish commercial transmedia construct transmedia storytelling as “Hyde.” narratives from their unofficial, fan-created counterparts Specifically, I’m interested in how emerging 30 Translating Media Chera Kee, editor, Spectator 30:1 (Spring 2010) 30-34. SCOTT comic books and webcomics, re-watching episodes online alongside commentary with the creators and cast, exploring a choose-your-own adventure style branching narrative steeped in the show’s mythology, reading a tie-in novel, poring over the official Heroes wiki, exploring websites for the fictional Pinehearst Company or Primatech Paper (among others), creating a character to be potentially featured in Heroes webisodes, and so on.7 Thus, while a narrative nugget of information dispatched in any of these forms could prove inspirational for fans, the creative window of opportunity for them to play within the ever-evolving transmedia narrative has shrunken considerably. Fans who wish to explore the narrative gaps in the canon through transmedia storytelling systems and “authorized” the creation of their own fan texts find them either or “official” ancillary content, such as podcasts and already filled in by the show’s creators or difficult webisodes, reinforces the textual authority of a to develop before another piece of the transmedia limited few, even as the text itself expands. This narrative overwrites or negates it. concurrent narrative expansion and constriction We can read this shrinking window of time of textual authority leads to what Roberta Pearson for fans to textually engage with an unfolding identifies as the central paradox of transmedia canonical narrative as an exacerbated form of what 8 storytelling and convergence culture at large: “that Matt Hills’ calls “just-in-time fandom.” Placing the very digital media that have been hailed as Hills’ claim that “practices of fandom have become blurring lines between producers and consumers increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and 9 and creating a more participatory culture instead temporalities of broadcasting,” in a convergence reinforce cultural hierarchies.”6 These hierarchies context, I share Hills’ anxiety that a simplistic are, unsurprisingly, strictly gendered, an issue I reading of this trend as “a techno-evolution point to briefly below but one that deserves further towards fuller ‘interactivity’ neglects the extent analysis. to which this eradication of the [analog fanzine] This critique adopts Pearson’s Jekyll/ ‘time lag’ works ever more insistently to discipline Hyde dichotomy precisely because I don’t view and regulate the opportunities for temporally- transmedia storytelling, its proponents, or the licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the 10 commercial nature of these systems as inherently fan experience.” Transmedia storytelling strives nefarious. That said, deeply embedded within to eradicate these time lags altogether, formulating transmedia storytelling’s creative potential is a a new “just-in-time fandom” that is defined by presumed consumption and comprehension of all an increased rate of consumption and canonical of the cross-media narrative elements, a fannish mastery, rather than fannish analysis and textual mastery of an ever-expanding canon. It is the time production. and labor that goes into mediating the various Consequently, we might view this adoption of flows of a transmedia story, and how those flows transmedia storytelling techniques and ancillary in turn mediate fan consumption and production, content models as a two-pronged industrial attack that is of central concern to me. on the current drive towards time shifting. While 11 The creative constraints transmedia storytelling we can assume that fannish rhythms of reception systems place on fans comes in a series of interrelated ensure that a new installment of a text will be forms: first, there is the temporal control of consumed on (or shortly after) its original airdate intensified consumption that transmedia narratives or release date, positioning a series within a web encourage. For example, a fan of Heroes in any given of transmedia content that has direct bearing on week could be consuming a television episode, print the unfolding serial narrative offers fans incentives TRANSLATING MEDIA 31 THE TROUBLE WITH TRANSMEDIATION to eradicate time shifting, thus maximizing ratings certain ideas, don’t become too rebellious, too and downloads. Moreover, this ancillary content pornographic, don’t read too much against the is routinely located on the series’ official website, grain.”15 The “certain groups of fans” Busse is offering alternative revenue streams for the referring to, those too “pornographic,” those who network as they concurrently promote the show “read too much against the grain,” are likely the and make strides towards upgrading television’s writers and readers of slash fiction, the creators failing commercial model. and consumers of slash art and vids. Historically Moving beyond the temporal demands celebrated in the first wave of fan studies in transmedia models potentially place on fans, we the early 1990s for their subversive reading of arrive at a second issue: in transmedia’s efforts to heteronormative popular culture texts, slash as create a “unified and coordinated entertainment a form of fan production has been dominated experience,”12 a unification of interpretive meaning by female authors and readers. Consequently, is frequently a byproduct. This unifier of meaning, while Busse’s concerns might be directed towards tasked with keeping the fictional world that is slash fans specifically, they’re directed generally being built in order, is frequently a male author- at female fans, their reading practices, and their god. Jenkins uses The Matrix’s Wachowski Brothers gradual exclusion as “legitimate fans” in this for his test case,13 but contemporary examples of convergence model. transmedia fanboy author-gods abound: George This concern is compounded by the fact that Lucas, Ron Moore, Joss Whedon, Eric Kripke, transmedia stories present an opportunity to push Josh Schwartz, J.J. Abrams, Tim Kring, and the queer readings or queer characters to the periphery list goes on. These masculine voices of authority, of the narrative, allowing for a concurrent referred to as “The Powers That Be” (or TPTB) in acknowledgment of the homoerotic subtext fan communities, are implicitly invoked in their that inspires slash fiction and a ghettoization of role as continuity watchdogs and vocally and such readings, isolating them from the primary visibly confirmed as the creative authority over the commercial text the fandom revolves around. text through acknowledgements and interviews. Two recent examples16 would be Buffy’s lesbian For example, Ron