CULTURAL DIPLOMACY 2.0: TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE DIGITAL AGE BRAND, AUDIENCE SPECIFICITY, AND NON-FICTION PARTICIPATION: HARNESSING TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING TO BUILD BRIDGES WITH INDUSTRIES AND CULTURES MATTHEW FREEMAN BATH SPA UNIVERSITY Working Paper November 2018 ABSTRACT The transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies across media, film, television, cultural and communication studies across the academy, not to mention the wider creative and cultural industries around the world. Yet the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for understanding transmediality – itself the use of multiple media technologies to tell stories and communicate information – is now the sheer breadth of its interpretation. Though primarily still seen as a commercial practice, this paper sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status of transmediality. By pointing to relevant examples, I demonstrate how, regardless of the type of project, the practice of building transmedia creations can be characterised by three larger concepts: brand; audience specificity; and non-fiction participation. Using these concepts will enable me to present a refined understanding of what transmediality really is, which in turn will provide clearer insights into the how’s and why’s of developing projects transmedially. Introduction Let’s start with a question: what is transmedia? Here, I mean this question not as a lead-in to presenting any kind of rudimentary, oft-cited definition, but rather as a genuine question. The transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies across media, film, television, cultural and communication studies across the academy, not to mention the wider creative and cultural industries around the world. Yet the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for understanding transmediality – itself the use of multiple media technologies to tell stories and communicate information – is now the sheer breadth of its interpretation. Though primarily still seen as a commercial practice, this paper sets out to contextualize, problematize and 2 | Cultural Diplomacy 2.0: Transnational Relations in the Digital Age |November 2018 scrutinize the current status of transmediality. Doing so will enable me to present a refined understanding of what transmediality really is, which in turn will provide clear insights into the how’s and why’s of developing projects transmedially. More specifically, this talk delves into the conceptual nuances that underpin transmediality. As will be demonstrated, transmediality means understanding the deeply intertwined relationships between media texts, industries, technologies, audiences, and cultures, and between evolving practices such as marketing, branding, storytelling, and intertextuality. But how does such a deeply intertwined relationship work in practical terms? Marsha Kinder (1991) first used the term ‘transmedia’ to describe the multiplatform and multi-modal expansion of media content. Henry Jenkins (2006) reintroduced the term within the context of digital change and ‘transmedia storytelling’ has subsequently seen widespread adoption and interrogation. Jenkins’ (2007) definition of transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” has become one of the dominant ways by which the flow of entertainment across media is now understood, especially in a digital and commercial setting where the correlation between transmedia storytelling and the commerce of entertainment has been reinforced in industry. By providing audiences with more and more content, it seems, transmediality – an umbrella term most fundamentally describing ‘the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information … through a range of textual forms’ (Evans 2011, 1) – is characteristically understood as a commercial practice, enabling as it does for multiple revenue streams and engagements. As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, transmediality is ‘a way to get us to consume as many products as possible’ (2013, 384). However, commercial transmedia storytelling is not the end of the story. In fact, Jenkins’ description of transmedia storytelling (of a single narrative that is only truly complete when elements from multiple media forms are brought together into a coherent whole) has arguably rarely materialized in quite the fully-integrated, plot-intertwining fashion that Jenkins envisaged. Further, as a mode of practice, transmedia storytelling is still most closely associated with what Benjamin Birkinbine, Rodrigo Gómez and Janet Wasko refer to as the global media giants – ‘the huge media conglomerates such as Disney and Time-Warner, [which] take advantage of globalization to expand abroad and diversify’ (2017, 15). Outside of the conglomerates, though, transmediality has evolved in other ways, namely into a brand development practice or as a way to support traditional media content through transmedia franchising systems (Johnson 2013), to name its other dominant commercial purposes. But transmediality has equally gained wider relevance as digital screen technologies have multiplied, with the so-called ‘old media’ of film and television now experienced through online transmedia distribution practices (Evans 2015), whereby content becomes integrated with social media and other online platforms. Indeed, transmediality remains an important concept for understanding the fundamental shifts that digital media technologies have wrought on the media industries and their audiences. More than this, it has grown into a distinct subfield of scholarly 3 | Cultural Diplomacy 2.0: Transnational Relations in the Digital Age |November 2018 investigation, one that relates to a range of studies across film, television, social media, marketing, literature, music, journalism, and beyond. Still, the more that transmediality has broadened its definition and its practical use in recent years, the more that it has arguably become something else entirely. Let’s not forget that research has defined transmediality through very different disciplinary lenses, be it in terms of storytelling (Jenkins 2006; Evans 2011; Ryan 2013), marketing (Gray 2010; Grainge and Johnson 2015), journalism (Gambarato and Alzamora 2018), world-building (Wolf 2012); historical culture (Freeman 2016), activism (Scolari, Bertetti and Freeman 2014), literacy (Scolari 2016), and so on. And these different sets of creative and disciplinary lenses should not be underplayed in our understanding of what transmediality is. Mapping the many faces of transmediality is an important task for researchers, for it hints at its multifaceted formations, functions, values, and roles across the wider media and cultural landscape. And yet, despite this inevitable multifaceted sprawl to the nature of transmediality, there are a number of key underpinning conceptions which inform its structure and workings. Elsewhere, Gambarato and myself (2018, 11) have refined the definition of transmediality as ‘the building of experiences across and between the borders where multiple media platforms coalesce’. Characterising this so-called themed storytelling that crosses disciplines and modes of narrative, marketing, technology, culture, and so on – regardless of the type of transmedia project – are three larger concepts: brand; audience specificity; and non-fiction participation. Brand Let’s, then, begin with the first of these concepts. Important to this more commercial line of thinking is the concept of ‘storyworld’, which Dudley Andrew understands to be intertextual structures that persist across multiple texts across media and afford many stories to unfold and many characters to roam: ‘The storyworld of [Charles] Dickens is larger than the particular rendition of it which we call Oliver Twist ... In fact, it is larger than the sum of novels Dickens wrote, existing as a set of paradigms, a global source from which he could draw’ (1984: 55). In some ways, the ability to somehow build a storyworld across multiple media is arguably the root of the perceived complexity or sophistication that lies at the heart of so much scholarly literature on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins has argued that transmedia storytelling – ‘the art of world- building’ (2006, 166) – immerses audiences in a story’s universe, providing a comprehensive experience of a complex story’ (2003). Echoing this idea of a ‘complex’ or vast story structure, Carlos A. Scolari insists that transmedia storytelling’s ‘textual dispersion is one of the most important sources of complexity in contemporary popular culture’ (2009, 587). In essence, and according to Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes, the nature of transmedia storytelling – and thus world-building – is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side’ (Kushner, 2008). And this process is nothing new. Even earlier than The Lord of the Rings, where J. R. R. Tolkien penned entire backstories spanning thousands of years of fictional history for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, early twentieth-century authors such as L. Frank Baum were making use of emerging developments in new printing technologies and modern advertising – such as the related rise of branded comic-strip characters to extend the fictional storyworld of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) across multiple media platforms (Freeman 2016a). Such transmedial world-