by David Peyron , published on 19.01.2010

Second part: Transmedia and declension

Other concepts are used to define this phenomenon, but to my knowledge, they only render its meaning partially. Some therefore talk about intermediality, such as Stefanelli and Maigret for example. They analyze the growing link between some television series such as Lost and Heroes and comic books as a proof of the growing intermediality of the cultural industry. For them, like for Jenkins, even though this process was born in some sub-cultural branches of mass media, it’s becoming stronger every day.

This concept therefore does take into account the present construction of some cultural objects. And indeed, how can we ignore the flagrant narrative inspiration of American comic books on a series such as Lost? And the way it’s adapted to several media makes it a successful example of “world making”.

However, the concept of intermediality, even though it works on the level of narrative analysis and it highlights the double movement of transmedia’s inter-textual meaning and of the stories themselves being spread out across several media, ignores the second aspect of the concept. Here, we are in an internal perspective, whereas the advantage of Jenkins’ concept is that it takes into account the social aspect, that of the audience, since the mass audience will only use one of the aspects of the content whereas the diligent fan will collect all the extensions and perceive the intertextuality.

Taking the audience into account when analyzing the links between media allows us to examine the reception in total continuity and without a break. This also allows us to perceive what John Fiske calls the “tertiary texts”, or the extensions and references made by the fans themselves. It’s the machinimas, the mash-ups, the fanfictions, all these non-professional productions which are ways of “expressive individualism” as Laurence Allard would put it. If we only consider the objects produced by the industry, we end up obliterating everything the audience itself can produce based on an original content provided.

Matteo Stefanelli et Eric Maigret, « la bd, nouvelle matrice des séries télévisées », dans Médiamorphoses hors série séries télévisées, Ina/Armand Colin, Paris, Janvier 2007, pp. 163-167

See also: Marie Laure Ryan, Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, University of Nebraska Press, 2004

John Fiske, « The cultural economy of fandom » in L. A. Lewis (dir. ), The Adoring Audience, Routledge, pp.30-49, 1992

See for example: Laurence Allard et Olivier Blondeau, Devenir média, l’activisme sur internet entre défection et expérimentation, Editions d’Amsterdam, 2007

David Peyron, « Quand les oeuvres deviennent des mondes: Une réflexion sur la culture de genre contemporaine à partir du concept de convergence culturelle », Réseaux N° 148-149, 2008

Anne Besson, D’Asimov à Tolkien, cycles et séries dans la littérature de genre, Cnrs éditions, 2004

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

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