Almost a decade ago, I was smitten when I discovered transmedia storytelling. My deep fascination continues to this day. I’m a writer at heart — I’ve done it professionally for more than 40 years — but I have also been a photographer for the same length of time. The integration of text and images to tell stories has always fascinated me and with the emergence of transmedia storytelling, that fascination has continued to grow.
The term “transmedia” is decades old, but it was Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, published in 2006, that popularized the term. More than a decade and a half after Jenkins began writing about the convergence of media, we still see both a lack of understanding of what transmedia storytelling is among great swaths of the media and entertainment industry and ongoing arguments in academia and among writers, film makers, artists, and others about the precise meaning of the term.
These arguments are not particularly helpful in fostering an understanding of what transmedia storytelling is and how to go about doing it. And for all the hoopla around definitions, we are starting to hear chatter that the term “transmedia” is no longer relevant as new terms are tossed about.
Transmedia storytelling can be hard to define because it can take so many different forms across so many different media platforms. When I first began studying the structure and design of transmedia narrative more than a decade ago, the definition I found most useful was that transmedia is “one or more related stories told across two or more forms of media”.
While adequate, I was never entirely comfortable with that definition. Recently, I ran across a definition that does a much better job of capturing what transmedia storytelling is.
Both transmedia and multimedia projects offer various artistic and technological methods to encourage audiences to interact with a story. However, transmedia steps up the game by focusing on different aspects of the story and offering a variety of pathways into the project that engage users with different interests and perspectives.
Maryanne Culpepper, Former President of National Geographic Studios
Back in the mid-2010s, I suggested that people stop fussing so much about defining a word and spend more time and effort on producing transmedia stories. Since then, we have seen the continued emergence of transmedia storytelling but still we seem to get mired in the game of trying to define just what transmedia means.
My suggestion…adopt Culpepper’s definition and description and move on. We don’t really need to spend another decade struggling over the fine points of a definition while the rest of the world passes us by as it moves on to the next new thing.