by Marc Guidoni , published on 17.08.2009

Never before have we had so much content at our disposal and consumed so much of it, especially images, as has been the case since the beginning of the 21st century.

Receptors are everywhere: in our pockets, on our desks, hung on the walls of our living rooms and increasingly, in public places. From the TV screen being the only family screen around which people gathered religiously as they once did around the radio, we’ve now moved on to sometimes a dozen screens of every size spread out throughout the house.

Screens complete each other, enrich each other’s content, link to one another without impeding on each other’s territory. In the same way that television did not kill the movies, television has not been pushed aside by computers, and computers are not suffering from the arrival of game consoles and other Smartphones. Each time, the emotional experience with a new content support changes, improves, diversifies.

Is it a cause or a consequence that our collective appetite for content and media has never been so big: they deeply structure our approach to the world, to knowledge, to education, to work, to entertainment and more broadly, to all areas of human relationships, even the most intimate ones.

But today, we stand on the edge of a new frontier as the audiences – all of us – have new aspirations and skills. It has recently been demonstrated by researchers that a teenager or young adult has the capability of doing up to five things at the same time on different screens. This simultaneous activity could be, for example, to look at a sports program on a TV channel, flicking to an old film at the same time, while looking at emails, sending text messages and listening to the radio as background noise. Twenty years ago, this behavior would have seemed like science fiction, but today it’s completely accepted and banal.

Technologies and uses are now ripe for the advent of transmedia; complementary stories that take place in a real symbiosis across several media in a multi-screen logic: cinema, television, Internet, cell phones, connected tablets, videogame consoles, and even on the “ultimate screen” of reality with Alternate Reality Games.

Now all that’s left to do is to re-learn how to write and produce for this new environment. And it’s clearly up to independent producers to seize this chance and pave the way. They won’t do it alone, obviously, and will need to gather multiple talents around their transmedia projects. But the prime responsibility to cross this new frontier is up to them…