Thinking about adaptations again something in the paper this morning caught my eye: check out The Age‘s list of top-selling books for the past week. It comes back to the commercial benefits of adaptations and the way adaptations aren’t just linear but can be reflexive and come back to the source text.

Four of this week’s top ten best-selling books have film adaptations currently showing

Due to an unfortunately placed public holiday on Monday, media one didn’t have a formal tute yesterday, so I thought I’d change tack a little bit and write a quick post about one of my other elective subjects that’s really fascinating me and still particularly relevant to media: Textual Crossings.

Textual Crossings falls under a literary strand, but it’s all about adaptations. As both a keen reader and  a media studies student, I find it a particularly interesting subject, but I think it’s relevant to a lot of people. I mean after all, who hasn’t spent some time complaining about how “the film wasn’t nearly as good as the book”?

As with everything at university, I’m finding that the course is not only educating me but widening my definitions and the way I think about things. Previously, I’d always thought of adaptations as being the same story told in a different medium (for example, the film versions of Harry Potter), or the re-working of a story with a different context or twist (for example, the setting of the Hamlet story in the African desert to create The Lion King).

However, in Textual Crossings, we look not just at stories but ‘story worlds’. An adaptation is defined not just as a reworking or transmedia production of a story, but anything that uses an element of the original ‘story world’ or diegesis. So if we return to the Harry Potter example, and think of the novels as the original, we can find adaptations not only in the films but also in the video games, the theme park, the merchandise and even the fanfiction. All of these use Harry Potter‘s magical world and its main characters, and so we can call them adaptations.

It’s a really interesting way of looking at adaptation, and I’m looking forward to the next few weeks when I’ll get to my in-depth discussion of a multimedia, ongoing adaptation. Look out for that one; I haven’t settled on a story yet but I’m thinking a certain deer-stalker-wearing detective would be an interesting choice, particularly looking at fanfiction . . .

Actually, fanfiction is one of the most interesting aspects of adaptation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing in my essay. In our lecture, we looked particularly at the interesting phenomenon of ‘sweding’: a short, low-budget fan-made remake of a popular film, primarily for comedy. Have a look at this Steve Seller swede of Jurassic Park for bekindrewind:

So we went on a class excursion today. Sounds more like something for a geology or biology student, right? Seeing things out in the field? Well media too is something that is well worth observing in its natural habitat because like it or not, in our day to day lives we’re bombarded with media.

Now, this may seem like a bit of an exaggeration if your definition of media still aligns with the traditional concept of ‘broadcast media’ as mentioned in my last post – eg. TV, film, print media, etc. However, a better way of defining media, as we learnt in our lectorial yesterday, is with the term ‘mediated communication’. Basically, media can be seen as any form of communication or message that has been ‘mediated’ or crafted in some way or into a specific format.

Keeping this in mind, it’s perhaps unsurprising that when we were sent out to the city to list every piece of media we could, a lot of my results were advertising, from tram stop posters to the logo on the free cup of tea I got at Fed Square (see below). Because of course if we see media as simply ‘mediated communication’, advertising has a lot to benefit from it; instead of just telling me that their product is happy and healthy to my face, Lipton can use bright colours and images of fruit and leaves to let me come to the conclusion myself.

My free Lipton iced tea

But advertising was not the only type of media I found. My forty-item list ranged from art to performing buskers to informative media, such as street signs, tram maps or this info station at Fed Square (see below). It’s amazing just how much ‘mediated communication’ we not only come across but rely on in our daily lives.

An info station at Fed Square

And that’s not all. Going back to last week’s post, we have to think of media not just as ‘broadcast media’ or messages aimed at a wide audience, but also media that we consume personally. Text messages, apps, phone calls, videos and just about everything contained on our personal phone or tablet can be considered media as well. I was highly amused to see the woman pictured below using her trusty selfie stick to grab a panoramic shot of Fed Square. Whether for her own collection or to send to friends, her posed smile was clearly a carefully crafted message communicating her excitement at being in a new city.

An excited tourist uses her selfie stick

We started our lectorial on Tuesday with a look at John Cage’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds, an avant-garde composition that consists entirely of silence. While my tastes are too simple to appreciate the hidden meaning behind music that isn’t music, it sparked an interesting discussion about noticing. The fact that I don’t regularly notice the forty pieces of media I listed after my trip to Fed Square serves to demonstrate just how media-saturated our world has become. Is this a bad thing? I think that’s a post for another day. Suffice to say for now, I’ve got renewed confidence in the relevance of my degree.

So I started my undergraduate degree in media this week, and it’s been all systems go with student cards, books, emails, invoices and the suchlike (hence the singular post this week instead of what will hopefully be a usual three). We started Media One with a lectorial (lecture/tutorial), followed by a workshop. Mostly, we were doing exactly what all uni students were doing this week – icebreakers, going over course guides, setting up the relevant tech – which is all very exciting, but the thing that really inspired my blog post was our reading for this week, a 2010 blog post from William Merrin (http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/studying-me-dia-problem-of-method-in.html).

Merrin talks from the perspective of a media researcher, and discusses the problems associated with studying media created in new media formats, such as on smartphones or on social media. It really got me thinking about what would seem a pretty fundamental question for a media student but not one I’d really thought of before: What is media?

I did a unit of new media at high school, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the idea that some of the more recent technological developments such as YouTube or smartphone apps can be considered media as well. But in this article, Merrin goes one step further, suggesting that personal media such as photos (selfies included) and home videos should be studied by media professionals alongside already recognised formats. This isn’t even the core contention of the article; it’s merely an assumption upon which he bases his discussion of the difficulties of media research.

Merrin’s article made me realise that although I’d understood new media to be a part of the media landscape, my definition of media was limited to what he calls ‘broadcast media’: formats such as TV, film or print that aim to appeal to a mass audience. It had simply never occurred to me to qualify products I made for personal use as being ‘media’ as well.

Which brings us back to the increasingly blurred line between media producers and consumers. In past generations, I would have been solely a consumer, watching my TV and reading my newspaper. But now, armed with my smartphone, I’m a creator as well, whether I leave my home videos on my computer or upload them to my blog or YouTube channel. Considering I’ve just realised I’m a media student who’s not entirely confident on what ‘the media’ really is, already being able to call myself a ‘creator’ is a comforting thought.