‘Transmedia Engagement: Participatory Culture to Activism’

The following is a talk I gave June 1 in Toronto which sprang from my ongoing interest in The Hunger Games as a transmedia campaign. I wrote an earlier blog post, ‘Why The Hunger Games is Not Harry Potter, and Why You Should Care,’ in response to finishing the novels, which were far more disturbing than I had expected. Further mulling on Geoffrey Long’s How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism and Jeff Gomez & Fabian Niciezo’s “6 Reasons Why ‘the Avengers’ is Crushing it at the Box Office” resulted in this case study on ‘Transmedia Engagement: Participatory Culture to Activism.’ Your thoughts are welcome! clearly, this campaign is getting a lot of attention & I'll post links to other current posts & articles in coming days - Henry Jenkins, April Arrglington notably, and many others.

 

 

 

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Why The Hunger Games is not Harry Potter, & Why We Should Care « Transmedia Camp 101

Warning: Spoilers – lots & lots of Spoilers from the Trilogy. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Have you read it? The Hunger Games? the full series? been on the Facebook Capitol PN or District pages lately? Dipped into the Twitter feed #LookYourBest?

If you have, you may have noticed something really odd. If you’ve read the first book (now in theaters near you &amp; soon to be released in IMAX!), then you know that Katniss Everdeen volunteers to be a tribute to save her sister, Prim, from certain death.</p><p>In the first novel, we see the poverty of District 12, learn about the uprising of the 12 Districts against the Capitol, the ensuing annihilation of District 13, the brutal subjugation of the remaining 12 Districts and the founding of the Hunger Games as a reminder of the destruction that rebellion and civil war lead to.</p><div></div> <p>

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ story exemplifies what I have come to see as the moral core of children’s literature, which I have taught roughly twice a year for 10 years now. The power &amp; the truth of children’s lit lies in the valuing of a child’s pov, which in the ‘real’ world, we adults view as immature, naive, ignorant, etc etc, in contrast to the more mature, nuanced &amp; complex understanding adults have as a result of experience and more time spent on earth.

The moral core of good children’s lit is the absolute assertion of the value of the individual relationship against arguments of sacrificing one or many for the greater good. You see this in Huckleberry Finn, where Huck cannot betray the immediacy of his friendship with Jim, even though he believes helping a runaway slave is wrong & will land him in hell. It’s there in The Golden Compass where Lyra always commits to helping those who are being victimized, and she consistently positions herself against the adults in power who kill the weak for the greater good: the children at Bolvangar, Roger… Philip Pullman makes this contrast explicit in Mrs. Coulter’s and Lord Asriel’s complete lack of empathy for those they torture & use respectively.

This moral core is fundamental to Rowling’s Harry Potter series, as Harry, Hermione, Ron & Dumbledore’s Army consistently chose to fight Voldemort’s totalitarian regime. And most importantly, what Rowling makes absolutely clear is that her characters assert their love for one another, and that those bonds exist as an aspect of identity and community that are worth self-sacrifice, as Harry shows us in the final book, but never the sacrifice of others as symbolic or token substitutes.

So, if you’ve only read The Hunger Games, the first novel seems to hew closely to this model. The Hunger Games are an annual sacrifice of two youths for the greater good, Katniss’ volunteering for her sister is a self-sacrifice that saves her sister from experiencing a horrible death played out as spectacle for the entertainment of the Capitol and which the Districts are obligated to witness....

Read my full post here:

via transmediacamp101.wordpress.com

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Mark Harris on The Lost Children & Multi-Faceted Storytelling | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog

The IFP’s Cross-Media ForumNYC is coming up April 19, and, as it approaches, several of its participants will be blogging for Filmmaker. Today’s first post is from Mark Harris, who will be presenting his new project, The Lost Children, at the event. Click on the link above for more info and tickets.

One of the things that excites me the most about “Cross-media,” “Transmedia” or whatever it is, is the idea of telling a story in many different ways. I know this may not fit into a lot of peoples’ definitions of these terms, but it’s an opportunity, I think.

The "Face" on Mars

When I say telling a story in many different ways, I mean using Stanslavsky’s “magic if” in a slightly different way. For instance, the feature film THE LOST CHILDREN, treats the story of Evelyn Hamilton as a documentary. The events in the film are told as if they may all be in the protagonist’s head, and they may not. The “found footage” model is perfect for a case like this, where we want to audience to interpret what they’re seeing on screen. This is what makes things like UFOs, the “Face” on Mars, “Nessy” so exciting to us. These images that are not clearly distinguishable, so our imaginations go to work and build stories around them. That’s what I wanted in the feature film of THE LOST CHILDREN. I wanted to meet the audience half-way, and ask them to bring their imaginations to the table.

So the feature film makes certain assumptions about the universe the story is set in. But, what excites me about ”Cross-media,” “Transmedia” or whatever is that the other platforms you tell a story on, are under no obligation to conform to that universe. One of the things I will talk about at the Cross media forum on April 19th is how we’re going to try having other platforms make entirely different assumptions about the universe of the story. So one platform might assume that it’s all real. Another platform might assume it’s all in people’s heads.

via filmmakermagazine.com

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this one!

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Great Recap of Andrea Phillips' SXSW Talk: Cautionary Tales in Transmedia Storytelling | Wired

via wired.com

Read the full Michael Anderson recap on Wired.com, March 30, 2011

Excerpt:

"Rabbit Holes

Phillips touched briefly and humorously on the subject of rabbit holes and starting points. Many games begin with anonymous mailings to people who have posted their addresses in places like Unfiction, hoping to receive trailheads or swag. She pointed out that transmedia people are not the only people who like to send anonymous packages, punctuating this statement with a picture of Ted Kaczynski. She added that anonymity does not give people incentive to participate; in fact, it is easier to reach an audience and generate greater interest by being upfront about the origin of a campaign..."

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SXSW Report » Transmedia Storytelling: Concise overview from Barbara Vance

via sxsw.kozlen.com

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Grazie Henry Jenkins!: "Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part Two)

via henryjenkins.org

Excerpt from the Jan. 28, 2011 interview:

HJ: "You draw a range of comparisons here to older, even pre-20th century forms of storytelling -- from Daniel Dafoe to Charles Dickens. What continuities and changes do you see between deep media and older forms of serialized fictions?

FR: That's a question I became increasingly intrigued with as I worked on the book. Collective entertainment may be new, but there's nothing new about entertainment that's participatory and immersive. In fact, every new medium from the printing press on has been considered dangerously immersive at first. TV, movies, books--Don Quixote went tilting at windmills because he'd lost his mind from reading too much. And in order to gain acceptance, each new medium has tried to pass itself off at first as something familiar. In his preface to Robinson Crusoe, which is generally considered the first novel in the English language, Defoe declared the entire story to be fact. Fiction was considered an inferior branch of history that had the glaring defect of not being true, so when Robinson Crusoe came out in 1719, it had to be passed off as autobiography. Nearly a hundred years passed before the novel became a generally accepted literary form in England. And then when Dickens came along in the 1830s and his publishers started putting out his novels in monthly installments, critics decried that as dangerously immersive. Bad enough that people were reading novels when they could have been engaged in social pursuits, like conversation or backgammon--but now they were going to be losing themselves in a fictional world for months on end.
But the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible--and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as "a sense of immediate audience participation...."

Read the full interview on Henry Jenkins' blog:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/01/deep_media_transmedia_whats_th_1.html

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