Transmedia and Public Representation


Book Description

This book investigates how contemporary media represent transgender and gender non-conforming people. Authors in this edited collection analyze the most popular films and television shows of all times and find how much (and how little) media portrayals of trans folks have changed or remained stagnant in the past 20 years.




Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age


Book Description

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.




The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies


Book Description

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.




Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling, Audience Engagement, and Business Strategies


Book Description

As media evolves with technological improvement, communication changes alongside it. In particular, storytelling and narrative structure have adapted to the new digital landscape, allowing creators to weave immersive and enticing experiences that captivate viewers. These experiences have great potential in marketing and advertising, but the medium’s methods are so young that their potential and effectiveness is not yet fully understood. Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling, Audience Engagement, and Business Strategies is a collection of innovative research that explores transmedia storytelling and digital marketing strategies in relation to audience engagement. Highlighting a wide range of topics including promotion strategies, business models, and prosumers and influencers, this book is ideally designed for digital creators, advertisers, marketers, consumer analysts, media professionals, entrepreneurs, managers, executives, researchers, academicians, and students.




The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres


Book Description

Due to the increase in transgender characters in scripted television and film in the 2010s, trans visibility has been presented as a relatively new phenomenon that has positively shifted the cis society’s acceptance of the trans community. This book counters this claim to assert that such representations actually present limited and harmful characterizations, as they have for decades. To do so, this book analyzes transgender narratives in scripted visual media from the 1960s to 2010s across a variety of genres, including independent and mainstream films and television dramatic series and sitcoms, judging not the veracity of such representations per se but dissecting their transphobia as a constant despite relevant shifts that have improved their veracity and variety. Already ingrained with their own ideological expectations, genres shift the framing of the trans character, particularly the relevance of their gender difference for cisgender characters and society. The popularity of trans characters within certain genres also provides a historical lineage that is examined against the progression of transgender rights activism and corresponding transphobic falsehoods, concluding that this popular medium continues to offer a limited and narrow conception of gender, the variability of the transgender experience, and the range of transgender identities.




Public Interests


Book Description

Winner of the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) Nearly as soon as television began to enter American homes in the late 1940s, social activists recognized that it was a powerful tool for shaping the nation’s views. By targeting broadcast regulations and laws, both liberal and conservative activist groups have sought to influence what America sees on the small screen. Public Interests describes the impressive battles that these media activists fought and charts how they tried to change the face of American television. Allison Perlman looks behind the scenes to track the strategies employed by several key groups of media reformers, from civil rights organizations like the NAACP to conservative groups like the Parents Television Council. While some of these campaigns were designed to improve the representation of certain marginalized groups in television programming, as Perlman reveals, they all strove for more systemic reforms, from early efforts to create educational channels to more recent attempts to preserve a space for Spanish-language broadcasting. Public Interests fills in a key piece of the history of American social reform movements, revealing pressure groups’ deep investments in influencing both television programming and broadcasting policy. Vividly illustrating the resilience, flexibility, and diversity of media activist campaigns from the 1950s onward, the book offers valuable lessons that can be applied to current battles over the airwaves.




Transmedia Storytelling and the New Era of Media Convergence in Higher Education


Book Description

Stories, whether they are fact or fiction, popular or not, are a proven method of pedagogy. In the age of media convergence and with the advancement of technology, stories have morphed into new forms; however, their core purpose remains the same, which is to pass on knowledge and information. The internet, with its inherent interactivity, and story, with its inherent capacity to engage, can lead to innovative and transformative learning experiences in media-rich environments. This book focuses on web-based Transmedia Storytelling Edutainment (TmSE) as an andragogical practice in higher education. Story is at the forefront of this investigation because narrative is the basis for developing entertainment media franchise that can be incorporated into pedagogical practice. The propulsion of this analysis consists of practice-based research through narrative inquiry and an e-module case study presented on multimedia storytelling in the classroom. A Transmedia Storytelling Framework is provided for creating screenplays for cross-media projects and for analyzing their appropriateness in education. Additionally, a hypertext screenplay, which allowed students to dig deeper into the story word and to build more knowledge, is evaluated for its use in higher education. Since screenplays are by nature writing for the screen, it is believed that the more visual the input, the more likely it is to be memorized and recalled. A link to The Goddess Within screenplay is available for download on the right hand side of this page.




Transmedia Storytelling


Book Description

Transmedia Storytelling explores the theories and describes the use of the imagery and techniques shared by producers, authors and audiences of the entertainment, information and brand communication industries as they create and develop their stories in this new, interactive ecosystem.




Transmedia Selves


Book Description

This book examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media. Across an international roster of essays, this book establishes a transdisciplinary theory for the ‘transmedia self’, exploring how technological ubiquity and digital self-determination combine with themes and disciplines such as celebrity culture, fandom, play, politics, and ultimately broader self-conception and projection to inform the creation of transmedia identities in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the book repositions transmediality as key to understanding the formation of identity in a post-digital media culture and transmedia age, where our lives are interlaced, intermingled, and narrativised across a range of media platforms and interfaces. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, and politics.




Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling


Book Description

Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies' projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world's most profitable transmedia franchise.