Blog Option #3: Transmedia

Transmedia Extension

Due: Sunday, February 22 by 8pm

Building on our readings and lecture from Week 5 on transmedia storytelling and networked narratives you will research and compose a 350-500 word blog post about a digital narrative extension for a media property of your choosing (a film, TV series, or video game). After selecting your media property, pick one of the following types of transmedia extension as the focus of your blog post:

Webisodes
Character twitter accounts
Character blogs or websites rooted in the fictional “world” of the story
Webcomics
Minigames or Alternate Reality games

A good place to start looking for this content is on the media property’s website (see example from the site for NBC’s Heroes below).

Your analysis of this digital narrative extension should address the content’s narrative connection to the primary text (e.g. how is it networked or “linked,” either narratively or literally, to the film, TV show, or video game), and should be structured around 2-3 of the following concepts from your readings by Henry Jenkins and Janet Murray, which you must define and then apply to your selected transmedia extension:

multiform story
self-reflexivity
hypertext fiction
worldbuilding
negative capability
cultural attractors and cultural activators
additive comprehension
migratory cues

Consider how the specific narrative functions served by the form of digital transmedia extension you’ve selected (a webisode vs. an in-character social media account), and how these extensions help draw audiences from a primary text (tv show or movie) into digital spaces. In addition to hyperlinking to the transmedia extension you’ve chosen somewhere in your post, you must include some visual representation of this content (either embedded videos or images) to support your analysis.

Remember, though this is a blog post, it’s a scholarly blog post, so make sure you’re citing correctly (endnotes and/or parenthetical citations in the body of your post with a works cited list at the bottom. You will be graded according to the blog rubric and the requirements outlined above.