Page 71 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014devices—led to further fragmentation in the field of communication. Time spent on Twitter, Facebook or playing FIFA 2014 is time stolen from television, cinema or reading books. Perhaps the term “fragmentation” is no longer sufficient and we should instead be talking about the “atomisation” of the audience.The atomisation of the audience and the experience of media consumption is not simply a cultural phenomenon. It implies an attack that goes to the heart of the cultural industries’ business model. The television and cinema industries worked because millions of people consumed their products. If these consumers now spend their time experiencing media reception in different ways, how is the market to be maintained? Transmedia storytelling, in this context, presents itself as a possible solution, and surely not the only one, for confronting audience atomisation. As has already been said, transmedia storytellingscientific, religious and educational discourse is also becoming transmediated. In this article we shall review some of the transmedia productions and strategies that might be considered paradigmatic in the Spanish market. Like the Mona Lisa for the Louvre or Las Meninas for the Prado, here we present some of the transmedia jewels in the Museum of Storytelling.TRANSMEDIA FICTIONWhen talking about transmedia storytelling, some works always crop up, as examples which, undeniably, the researcher or producer must cite, namely: Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Lost, The Walking Dead, and so on. That is to say, we can already say there is a canon of transmedia work. All these works have something in common: they all tell a story that expands from one medium to another and their fans actively participate in this expansion. As can be seen, a transmedia world can be born from a book such as Harry Potter, a feature film like Star Wars or The Matrix, a TV series such as Star Trek or Lost, a comic like The Walking Dead or an attraction in a theme park such as Pirates of the Caribbean. Any text has the potential to become the subject of transmedia storytelling.User participation in this expansion is such that it is impossible to know where a transmedia story ends. For example, the official story of Harry Potter—the canon—is over. However, there are hundreds of thousands of stories written by fans that are circulating on the networks and which are expanding the Harry Potter universe, through fandom. You know where a transmedia narrative world begins, but never where it might end.What is the situation with transmedia production in Spain? The results of a study carried out in Barcelona (Scolari et al., 2012) might, to a large extent, be extrapolated to Spain as a whole. Amongst the main conclusions of this study we might mention the fact that Spanish transmedia productions are nascent and limited, especially if weproposes a common experience that encompasses various media and devices, all united by a narrative link. (Scolari, 2013).In transmedia storytelling the story expands from one medium to another and can count on active user participationWe are unlikely ever to return to the days of millions of TV viewers all watching the same programme at the same time. This form of broadcasting will probably be limited to events with a planetary reach such as the final of the football World Cup or the election of a new Pope. But transmedia storytelling makes it possible to regroup the audience around a story. If audiences were previously media‐centred, now they tend to be narrative‐centred.Transmedia storytelling is spreading from one end of the media ecosystem to the other, taking old and new media in its stride. And it also spans different types of communication so there is transmedia storytelling in fiction, in journalism, in documentaries and in advertising. Political,AC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 6: TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING: NEW WAYS OF COMMUNICATING IN THE DIGITAL AGECURRENT PAGE...71