This week we looked at remix culture, as well as the role of audience participation in the crafting of narrative.

As a writer, it is heartening and relieving to hear that there are no wholly original stories.  It takes the pressure off a little.  The elements, motifs and basic ‘creative language’ that are used to construct stories are well-established, having been around (and having constantly evolved) for thousands of years.

Originality is still a noble and achievable goal for creatives, through the fresh and original collation of familiar elements.  Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), for instance, takes familiar tropes of amnesia and noir-ish elements (including a hard-bitten protagonist) and presents these in a fresh new way by playing with chronology.  Similarly, Pulp Fiction (1994) assembles classic characters and scenarios of bygone American genre films and music in a modern setting with a nifty re-structured chronology to keep viewers hooked.

Daniel also raised the question in class of whether language is necessary for storytelling.  My answer is an emphatic yes.  The language doesn’t necessarily need to be spoken or written; the language may be symbols; providing that as a medium, they encode the author(s)’ meaning and can be decoded by the audience.

Sometimes that decoding is quite straightforward (as in the case of genre narratives, like Frankenstein (1930) and many more), while at other times the message or theme presented is far more abstract and requires greater (and far more subjective) interpretation on the part of the audience, which was the case for the short film we watched in class.

It’s very useful to deconstruct what story is and to examine its mandatory components; which, like good stories, are open for discussion.

For me, a story conveys a message (or theme); it intends to affect the audience in a deliberate way.  Nowadays, with the explosion of interactive media, the intention of the author might be to engage audience members in crafting the narrative and the meaning they derive from the experience.

I have always preferred traditional narratives, particularly film, rather than transmedia because, to my mind, being immersed in a single medium facilitates the suspension of disbelief (which is something I want when seeking out entertainment).  In comparison, a transmedia project draws more attention to its form by prompting participants to switch between media.

Nevertheless, transmedia works  successfully capture contemporary life in a way that a single medium (such as a film, tv show, or computer game) cannot.  For instance, on any given day most of us switch between several different platforms – smart phone, laptop, tv, tablet, etc.  Transmedia projects thus capture the essence of 21st century life by spreading across these various platforms; they capture the freneticism and fragmentation (and arguably, overstimulation) that have come to define the modern techno era.

I am interested in learning about transmedia firstly for pragmatic reasons, since any media practitioner practicing nowadays must have some degree of cross platform applications to remain viable and competitive.  Secondly, should I want to capture and communicate the aforementioned freneticism of the contemporary era, transmedia seems like the most fitting outlet – echoing the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s sentiment that the medium (or media) is the message.

I am confident that traditional, single platform narratives can exist harmoniously alongside multi-platform projects, since – in their best forms – films and television offer a carefully structured, ‘uninterrupted’ emotional catharsis that audiences still crave, and which I believe is not offered by transmedia projects.