by Jean-Yves Le Moine, published on 10.08.2009

Good stories are serial, meaning they develop in the form of episodes that may follow a linear or nonlinear progression and reprise or rather continually renew one another. Everyone knows American series like 24, Lost, Heroes etc. These “cliffhangers” leave us in such intense suspense that we can’t wait to see what happens next.

We even make up the next episode the next day with workmates or friends. So these stories get everyone involved. The next episode, whether it bears out or is at odds with the collective story we’ve all come up with, ends up activating our semantic memory even more profoundly.

In the final analysis, there are but few stories and all of them have probably already been written or told in one form or another. Every story is the reiteration of another one that we know consciously or unconsciously, and at the same time it prefigures the one we are going to tell or someone else is going to tell us. These reiterations, which can be found even within stories themselves, are not redundancies, but rather beacons that light up various inner recesses of our memories for our greater pleasure.

Good stories are, for the most part, made up of a bundle of plots in which the various characters straddle different time periods. This abundance speaks to the multiple facets of our personalities, to the diversity of others. Everyone can identify with a character, make a plot his own and intertwine his thread with those of others. This multiplicity, interwoven with seriality, produces a robust multicoloured fabric. The multiple intersections of different times, spaces and characters echo the increasing fragmentation of our lives in today’s digital world.

Serial stories began with the “chansons de gestes” [Old French epic poems], were taken up by Balzac’s bestselling serial novels with instalments coming out in the papers one day at a time; they were continued in serialized books, and became still more concrete in film. In our day serial stories proliferate on all the media: they are delinearized in time and space, in keeping or at variance, as the case may be, with the fragmentation of the world we live in.

Tomorrow, perhaps, new storytellers will emerge to bring listeners together in the same place, around the same story. Tomorrow, perhaps, stories will be the only machines capable of curving time, to put a twist on writer Nicolas Dickner’s expression with regard to books.

By letting us ramble in and out of multiple stories, transmedia should try to transcend the notions of past, present and future. The viewer will then be able to dive into the transmedia universe and lose himself there, forgetting the passage of time.

Every story should curve the time of the reader, the listener. That is indeed the greatest luxury transmedia has to offer today: it gives us back time…for ourselves.