User:MLBinker/Transmedia storytelling

This section lacks sources. It could be pared down considerably to comments on education and creditably sourced.

Educational uses[edit]
Transmedia storytelling mimics daily life, making it a strong constructivist pedagogical tool for educational uses. The level of engagement offered by transmedia storytelling is essential to the Me or Millennial Generation as no single media satisfy curiosity. Schools have been slow to adopt the emergence of this new culture which shifts the spotlight of literacy from being one of individual expression to one of community. Whether we see it or not, Jenkins notes that we live in a globally connected world in which we use multiple platforms to connect and communicate. Using transmedia storytelling as a pedagogical tool, wherein students interact with platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr permits students' viewpoints, experiences, and resources to establish a shared collective intelligence that is enticing, engaging, and immersive, catching the millennial learners' attention, ensuring learners a stake in the experience. Transmedia storytelling offers the educator the ability to lead students to think critically, identify with the material and gain knowledge, offering valuable framework for the constructivist educational pedagogy that supports student centered learning. Transmedia storytelling allows for the interpretation of the story from the individual perspective, making way for personalized meaning-making - and in the case of fully participatory projects - allows participants to become co-creators of the story.

In "The Better Mousetrap: Brand Invention in a Media Democracy" (2012), Pont explains, "Transmedia thinking anchors itself to the world of story, the ambition principally being one of how you can 'bring story to life' in different places, in a non-linear fashion. The marketing of movies is the most obvious applications of thie concept. Transmedia maintains that there's a 'bigger picture opportunity' to punting a big picture to additional platforms. Transmedia theory, applied to a movie launch, is all about promoting the story, not the 'premiere date of a movie starring...' In an industry built on the conventions of 'stars sell movies', where their name sits above the film's title, transmedia thinking is anti-conventional and boldly purist."

Transmedia storytelling is also used by companies like Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark to train employees and managers. Gronstedt and Ramos argues: "At the core of every training challenge is a good story waiting to be told. More and more, these stories are being told across a multitude of devices and screens, where they can reach learners more widely, and engage with them more deeply."

However, transmedia storytelling isn't used much at lower education levels. Children would thrive using transmedia storytelling worlds in their learning, but many of these worlds have copyrights linked to them. Transmedia storytelling has yet to tackle learning and educating children, but there have been a few transmedia worlds that have begun to show up with education, mostly by Disney.

Transmedia storytelling is apparent in comics, films, print media, radio, and now social media. The story is told different depending on the medium. With social media, the story is told differently depending on which social media platform someone uses (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) The scale in which the impact each medium has differs from medium to medium. Before social media, radio and print media were the primary medium to connect with an audience. With the advancements in technology, social media has become the go-to medium to reach a large group of people in a fast amount of time. In the ideal form of TS, “each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa.”

For the purpose of studying transmedia storytelling and how information becomes spreadable across multiple media platforms, we can look at four strategies for expanding the narrative world of media texts. First is the creation of interstitial microstories. Examples of these are video games, online clips, or comics. Next is the creation of parallel stories. Here, the idea is to create another story that unfolds at the same time as the macrostory. Scolari uses the example of the episode "24: Conspiracy". Third, the creation of peripheral stories is considered spin-offs from the original stories. The example of 24 novels is used to show how texts have a weak relationship to the macrostory, but still connected to it. The final strategy is user-generated content platforms like blogs or wikis. These environments are open source story-creation machines that allow users to add to the fictional world. This could also be called fan fiction.

Each medium reaches a different audience. Traditional mediums such as radio, print media, and film, garner older audiences because of the familiarity of that generation with those specific mediums. Scolari uses the example of Shrek.[citation needed] It is a film for kids, but some of the dialogue contains jokes that are meant for adults. Thus, the same text is creating at least two groups of consumers - children and adults or parents. The millennial generation uses a combination of mediums because there awareness of traditional media and the advancements of social media. The Gen Z audience is drawn to the social media medium similar to the reason to the Gen X audience is drawn to traditional mediums, because of the familiarity of the medium.

Lead
Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.

From a production standpoint, transmedia storytelling involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly), but are in narrative synchronization with each other.

Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using contemporary technologies.

From a production standpoint in digital age, transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of digital media in order to deliver unique pieces of content in each channel. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together (overtly or subtly) but are in narrative synchronization with each other.