‘Transmedia Engagement: Participatory Culture to Activism’

The following is a talk I gave June 1 in Toronto which sprang from my ongoing interest in The Hunger Games as a transmedia campaign. I wrote an earlier blog post, ‘Why The Hunger Games is Not Harry Potter, and Why You Should Care,’ in response to finishing the novels, which were far more disturbing than I had expected. Further mulling on Geoffrey Long’s How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism and Jeff Gomez & Fabian Niciezo’s “6 Reasons Why ‘the Avengers’ is Crushing it at the Box Office” resulted in this case study on ‘Transmedia Engagement: Participatory Culture to Activism.’ Your thoughts are welcome! clearly, this campaign is getting a lot of attention & I'll post links to other current posts & articles in coming days - Henry Jenkins, April Arrglington notably, and many others.

 

 

 

Broken City Lab Launch Drift. An App to Help You Lose Yourself in the City. Debord would be pleased - The Atlantic Cities

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Excerpt:

"Drift will offer you a random series of creative cues to guide you on your own “psychogeographic walk” through the city. Maybe it’ll ask you to head two blocks to the west, then look for a crack in the sidewalk, then head in the opposite direction until you stumble across something terrible. The app invites you to photograph your findings – something "undervalued," something "warm," something "out of the ordinary" – to upload into a group photostream that Broken City Lab plans to curate on its website. The directions are all meant to be broadly interpreted (“Find an exchange”? This may mean to one person an exchange of glances on the sidewalk, or to another an exchange of cash at a hot-dog stand.)

All of these idiosyncratic directions won't literally make you “lost.” Drift is trying to use that word playfully...."

Simon Staffans at Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious on: Transmedia tools – Conducttr Mobile and Weavr

"It’s been a while – a year or more – since I last wrote something about possible tools to use for transmedia storytelling. In the meanwhile, so many new opportunities, products and tools have come up. What prompted me to write this post was two tools that are out there now and that represent quite different spectras of the transmedia field; both could be very useful for a given project, and I’d love to try them both out within the scope of a project. Basically, everything and anything that makes it easier for me to get my stories to the desired audience in a logical and engaging and compelling and immersive way, I’m all for it, and these two services might just fit the bill.

First there is Conducttr Mobile, launched at the Transmedia Living Lab in Madrid the other day by Rob Pratten. Now, Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms – online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile...."

Read the full post on Simon's blog

Cognitive Maps in Transmedia Storytelling - Transmedia Digest - PETER VON STACKELBERG

Good post - I entirely agree - design for cognitive mapping is key:

"Cognitive maps are the result of a type of mental processing in which a user acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about things of interest in their environment. When used in the navigation of transmedia narratives, cognitive maps allow the “mind’s eye” to visualize the relative location of and links between different elements of the narrative, substantially reducing the user’s cognitive load while enhancing the recall of information.

Facilitating the creation of the user’s cognitive map of the transmedia narrative (and ideally the entire storyworld) makes it significantly easier for the user to navigate between story elements and maintain the continuity of the overall narrative. As a result, the cognitive load on the user is substantially reduced when having to make decisions during the user interaction cycle....."

LudInc and Berlin Police bring #transmedia gaming to road safety - LudInc.

Excerpt:

"LudInc has joined forces (no pun intended) with the Berlin Police Department to create a completely new kind traffic safety experience for children. In spite of the rain, everybody had a lot of fun shooting this latest episode of Professor S.

Thanks to Commissioner Haase, a road safety adviser with the Berlin Police, we got to play with bikes and police cars all day!

For the first time, a transmedia game is being used to help children navigate the perils of city traffic. In this episode, our hero Professor S. faces a dangerous challenge: Aliens have abducted his assistant Jeanette and the time laboratory has been damaged...."

Nice post from David Armano: Logic+Emotion: How To Think And Communicate Visually

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Excerpt:

"Visual storytelling is nothing new. We only need to look to the earliest signs of humanity for proof—simple paintings on the walls of caves tell the story that people are a visual tribe. Today, it seems, communications must be visual in order to be compelling, as well as to compete with the massive amount of information available to us at any given moment (even Google acknowledged this in 2001 by introducing image search). Whether it’s a web video, infographic, or illustration, visual assets can communicate a wealth of information rapidly, and in ways that our brains process differently than other, more traditional mediums.

The secret to producing these compelling, yet bite-sized morsels of information is having “visual literacy,” or being able to think in pictures. Don’t confuse this with being an artist or designer. Anyone can think visually—or learn to look at the world through this type of lens—and then work with a visual communicator (a designer or producer) to craft a digestible visual deliverable, which earns our time, attention and encourages us to take action...."