transmedia lab

Third part: Transmedia and cross media

We can make a very similar criticism of another one of today’s very fashionable expressions: “cross media”. This describes the links between media that allow us to follow the universes in a multimedia way. This is what Jenkins calls “world making” in the domain of fiction. This notion is even more biased than the two previous ones for two reasons.

First of all, cross-media is an expression which only concerns the dissemination of information (advertising, fictional), but in the framework of the concept of convergence, this practice is only the visible part of the convergence iceberg. Just like intermediality, it excludes the audience, but it also ignores the whole bubbling reference system that mass culture contains and that doesn’t necessarily enter the creation of multimedia objects. It’s not cross-media but without these links, these paths that are dug and maintained, the aforementioned would not be possible.

The second problem of the expression of cross-media regards those who use it. If the notion of intermediality is a well-defined concept treated by academic analyses, the one of cross-media is first and foremost used in the field of marketing. We’re going to create an ad for television and another one for the internet in order to appeal to different audiences, and in such a way that those who see both can see an advantage in their crossing. This goes back to the notion of viral marketing, which is the concept that the users will spread the information instead of paying for diffusion costs, this will create emulation and effervescence, which today, is usually gathered under the famous word “buzz”.

These marketing and industrial developments are obviously very interesting to analyze, but for a researcher it’s a bit dangerous to use an endogenous vocabulary with blurry limits such as the expressions “buzz”, “viral marketing” or “cross-media”. The notion of convergence, because of its visual origin (converging rays) allows us to keep an efficient image that takes into account all the phenomena listed without excesses and neologisms. Neologisms that hide behind their novelty, the fact that this evolution is historically anchored in mass culture and notably in genre culture (science fiction, fantasy…), which has been experimenting this with its niche, sub-culture audience for a long time. This last statement allow us to understand, for example, why some type of content is more present in this category than others. This also leads us to think of the question of immersion in fictional worlds, since not all of them are subject to extensions; and we know that the audience of fantasy worlds generally has a very immersive relationship to those and that it’s in these universes that convergence remains most common.

David Peyron : PhD candidate in Information and Communication Sciences at Lyon 3 University

http://www.omnsh.org/auteur.php3?id_auteur=203.