Transmedia archaeologies in North and South America: "the clue to reconciliation in our country"

Freeman, M (2016) Transmedia archaeologies in North and South America: "the clue to reconciliation in our country". In: Culture, Communication and Media Research Seminars, 30 November 2016, MediaCityUK, University of Salford, UK.

Abstract

Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in popular universes across cinema, the Web, and more. This transmedia storytelling phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with ideas of digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality has come to mean so much to so many different people, operating around the world as so much more than contemporary movie franchises. This talk explores some of the alternative formations and functions of transmedia storytelling, both historically and globally. I consider how different cultures and nations around the world are now making new uses of transmediality, applying alternative modes of transmediality to the needs and structures of a given nation or re-thinking this phenomenon by reapplying it to cultural projects as a political and social strategy for informing and unifying communities. In particular, this talk focuses on the direct influence of political media regulation on transmedia storytelling in war-torn 1940s US, while also showing how the idea of transmediality has taken hold as a university-funded political system in historical and contemporary Colombia, understood and implemented as a tool for social change, one that can help Colombians reconstruct local communities after more than 50 years of armed conflict. Ultimately, I argue for the need to better understand the multiplicities and localities of how transmediality is funded in order to gauge its roles as a cultural, socio-political and industrial phenomenon.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Divisions: Bath School of Art, Film and Media
Date Deposited: 08 Dec 2016 15:59
Last Modified: 05 Jan 2022 15:22
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/8609
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