Transmedia Worlds: A new story structure for all or a few?

In this chapter of Convergence Culture – "Searching for the Origami Unicorn" – Jenkins examines The Matrix franchise to describe transmedia storytelling. He explains that The Matrix, which expresses itself through comics, animated shorts, video games, and films, borrows the "media mix" culture of Japan. This strategy "disperses content across broadcast media, portable technologies... and location-based entertainment centers" (112). Rather than acting as self-contained narratives, the Matrix films assume viewers have engaged with other parts of the story outside of the movie theater. For example, "The Second Renaissance" by Mahiro Maeda "provides the timeline for the Matrix universe, giving context for events... that are mentioned in other Matrix texts" (119). A person who hasn't seen this animated short might feel left out during dialogue about B116ER, the first machine murderer, or the darkening of the skies.

Stories are moving away from focusing on a single plot and moving towards creating entire worlds that fans can explore through different media. "[S]torytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium," Jenkins describes (116). He encourages suspicion for claims that these changes mark the collapse of storytelling. More accurately, storytelling is evolving with the development of new story structures, which "create complexity by expanding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end." Albeit movies might feel a bit disjointed or incomplete, but these fragments allow consumers to make links "on their own time and in their own ways" (121).

I'm skeptical of transmedia stories. A person needs to connect the dots across multiple platforms but the plot lacks a clear beginning; where do you start? EA's Neil Young explains,

"The more layers you put on something, the smaller the market. You are requiring people to intentionally invest more time... Maybe it starts with a game and then a film and then television. You are building a relationship with the world rather than trying to put it all out there at once" (130).

In my opinion, Young is right to worry that some people, including myself, will reject such a massive time commitment. Can the transmedia format catch on when it demands so much from consumers?
Jenkins cites plenty of examples that show the disadvantages of transmedia stories. Movie critics who, unaware of Niobe's character in the game Enter the Matrix, disapprove of Niobe's prominent role in The Matrix Revolutions. High school students who struggle to glean meaning from The Odyssey. Parents and grandparents who watch X-Men with confused faces. The pool of people who show devotion to the narrative dramatically shrinks for transmedia stories, which warrants the question: is it even possible for someone to fully appreciate a transmedia story? Jenkins himself relied on the collective intelligence of Matrix fans in writing this chapter. He admits that a single person cannot contain all the knowledge surrounding the Matrix, or any transmedia world for that matter; I can't decide, is this a good or bad thing? I recognize that the the story is deeper and the intellectual or emotional pay-off is greater, but I simply don't care enough to take time away from my family, friends, academics, or hobbies to put towards becoming a hardcore Matrix fan. I wonder, do the rest of you agree or am I missing out on an enriching cultural experience?

Choices for Cybersubculture project

Last.fm & The Hype Machine

Last.fm compiles users' musical tastes from their personal music players, Internet radio stations, and their input through the Last.fm site itself.

The Hype Machine is a hybrid between music blogging and music streaming/discovery. The site features a directory of blogs individuals can subscribe to. Users can listen to songs and "love" them, adding them to a personal music stream.

Skepticism: An Integral Part of Collective Intelligence

In his book, "Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide," Henry Jenkins discusses how collective intelligence has manifested itself with regard to the television program Survivor. He explains the workings of a community of "spoilers," intensely avid fans who work cooperatively to try and discover facts of the show. Jenkins examines the case of a controversial spoiler and how the activities of spoilers raise an array of philosophical implications. The issue that piques my interest the most is the necessary skepticism that goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence.

From the start, Jenkins sheds light on the underlying thread of skepticism that characterizes the spoilers. He describes how ChillOne – the aforementioned user who caused an upset among hardcore online Survivor fans – posted "information on the Internet and lived through months of intense grilling by the spoiling community to defend his reputation" (26). The onslaught began with ChillOne's rather bold initial post of claims, eliciting questions of his credibility in a mere three minutes. One longtime spoiler expresses the almost blanket rule of distrust for new participants, explaining that "[y]ou don't trust first time people. You have to wonder why NOW of all the times they could have posted... once that person is found to be lying, they are never trusted again and they are pretty much blacklisted" (35). I find this blatantly paradoxical: the success of the spoiler community relies on gathering information from different users, but the community is suspicious of new intelligence and relies on a reserve of dependable veterans. Over time, ChillOne managed to gain more credibility but against great resistance. Clearly, the theoretical underpinnings of collective intelligence as a democratic model for knowledge can fail to hold true in reality.

Jenkins continues to detail the extent of cynicism among spoilers. He recounts how a gambling operation in Las Vegas dropped betting on Survivor results because a few CBS employees were placing bets allegedly based on insider information. Their bets coincided with ChillOne's assertions, supporting the validity of his claims. The same factual token, however, can also be used against ChillOne. Jenkins notes that some people recognized that those CBS employees could have based their bets not on insider tips but ChillOne himself, which would do nothing to prove or discredit his leads. This would not be the first time someone exploited the vast resources and deep devotion of the online spoiling community. As Jenkins tells, "[i]t had happened before when the [spoilers] had trusted some consistently accurate predictions from a Boston newspaper backing up their inside information on Survivor: The Australian Outback until it was clear that the reporter was just writing his column based on stuff he learned from the online discussions" (45). Albeit a powerful sign of a participatory culture, this flawed, recursive flow of information between consumers and producers forces communities like the spoilers to interpret everything with a fistful, rather than a grain, of salt, from groundless lies to legitimately reliable truths.

Wikipedia constitutes another example of doubt underscoring a system of collective intelligence. Just as Pierre Lévy argues, Wikipedia represents "the sum total of information held individually by the members of [a] group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Anyone – from a brain surgeon with ten years of real-world experience to a freshman high school student in their first biology class – can contribute. The problem is clear: this creates a more democratic catalogue of information but at the cost of validity. My concern is over discretion; where do we draw the line for skepticism? Personally, I have become so pessimistic about finding truth from any outlet to the point of frustration. I think the more we mature as an information society, the more people will be bombarded with information from a multitude of sources, both credible and not. In order for future systems of collective intelligence to be even more useful, society needs a tailored amount of suspicion.

Hello world

Testing, testing, 1-2-3