transmedia lab

In a recent article, Dominique Boullier posits the emergence of a new mode of “attention production” which, he tells us, “is gaining considerable prominence in our culture”. This new approach to promoting media attachment finds its most obvious expression in video games, which in our day are the only systems capable of generating particularly long attention spans while sustaining an exceptionally high level of experiential intensity. He calls this new semiotic format “immersive”. Its chief characteristic is it fuses two pre-existing models of media attachment into a new perceptual framework whose main axes are duration and intensity.

One well-known attention system is that of customer loyalty, which depends on the duration, repetition and stability of audience-media ties to provide stable and lasting perceptual conventions. The subscription is the most obvious variety of this approach. In our digital age, loyalty-retention strategies are tailored to individual tastes, habits, uses etc. and based on increasingly sophisticated personalization capabilities designed to keep users within a narrowly circumscribed area of consumption. However, this loyalty-retention model seems to be somewhat undermined by the rise of “opportunistic attractions” and a channel-hopping ideology that bids fair to become a veritable “‘way of being’, spreading from television to interpersonal relations or the job market, to the point of becoming a virtue called ‘flexibility’”.

Loyalty-based strategies are becoming to a certain extent obsolete, making way for a media relationship model based more on the intensity of emotions and stimulations. This is what Dominique Boullier calls the “alert regime”, typical of the trading floors, where multiple screens broadcasting nonstop news take up the semiotic composition of bright colours, scrolling text bars, time codes etc.: “The news itself becomes commercials, like the global stock price listings. […] Attention here is constant excitation and maximum focalization without any reflexivity. It organizes selectivity by eliminating context (and, consequently, habits as well) in order to generate controlled, active attention.” From beeps signaling the arrival of an e-mail or connection to an MSN correspondent, to the “buzz” on the web and ultra-short TV programs, a great many media formats nowadays engage us in this state of “news and communication emergency” comprising alarms, disruptions and invitations to “pollen-gathering”.

Immersion is said to be the new model of attention-getting, of which the nascent genre of video games constitutes the archetype: “Gamers spend a far greater number of hours at their computers or consoles than people spend watching television or using any other digital medium, especially when it comes to massively multi-player online games. Enduring universes enable us to immerse ourselves in a world we make happen through our actions.” The aesthetic of the universe in question, the narrative approach to the action, playability, sound design, inter-gamer relations and reward systems etc. are important ingredients of immersion, but above all “it is through activity that the world is built up and perceived”. Action, transformative and creative, is in fact the core aspect of the immersive approach.

Video games succeed in combining the dimensions of “alert” and audience retention that had otherwise become “mutually contradictory and warped into generalized channel-hopping or a habit of distraction.” It seems clear that one of the challenges facing transmedia will be precisely to find a way, modeled on the immersion model of video games, to invent socio-semiotic conventions that will permit varied and flexible media involvement with plenty of room for playful creativity.

To delve further: Boullier, Dominique: “Les industries de l’attention : fidélisation, alerte ou immersion” in Réseaux, No. 154, pp. 231–246.

http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_REVUE=RES&ID_NUMPUBLIE=RES_154&ID_ARTICLE=RES_154_0231