The Storyteller, the Fixer

An Immerse response

“What’s happened to transmedia?” Well, concludes Andrea Phillips, “the genie is out of the bottle.”

Transmedia — once its own distinct form, a unique, new, and entirely 21st century form of storytelling — is now everywhere. It has become the default for supply, and assumed by demand: a strategy for advertisers, an ethos for young creators, and a way for independent media makers to find an audience for their work.

Where transmedia was once an option, now it is a necessity. A way of life.

In an always-on era, in which consumers have become creators who engage with media from anywhere and everywhere through mobile devices, existing on a single platform is a novelty, a luxury.

Transmedia in 2017 may not look the way it did a decade ago. Yet the influence of this form is present in everything from games to journalism, from documentary to big budget blockbusters, and even fast food advertising. If your story is not everywhere, for the person who searches you out on a specific platform and cannot find you there, you are nowhere.

The premise of transmedia and alternate reality games was intoxicating for everyone who witnessed the birth of the movement. Instead of the linear transition of video onto the Internet or books onto tablets, taking an established medium and copy-and-pasting it to a shiny new device, this felt like a wholly new form of storytelling, representative of the affordances of the networked world and our splintered attention spans.

But the world changed, and it changed fast. Back then we didn’t have iPhones. We didn’t have Snapchat or bots that could predict what we’re going to say next. We barely knew Facebook, let alone its powerful algorithms that would come to shape the stories we see and the media we access. Despite the massive change that was to come, the power of transmedia set the stage for everything that would follow.

Who would have known that it would come to this? That we would dab at our phones, tapping and swiping, constantly seeking a steady stream of new content, new input, new updates, new excitement. The story goes on. Day by day. Minute by minute. Each video, each Tweet. Each Instagram post and billboard. All adding to the story we weave together. The story world, once a concept of transmedia designers, has become a reality.

We live in the story world.

Who predicted it? Who saw ahead? The artists always know. Even when they don’t know that they know, they prepare us, through prose, and paintings, and most recently, through transmedia and ARGs. They prepared us for a world in which to survive, you need to be nimble and adaptive, and to succeed you need to be a curious knowledge seeker.

If the artist is the oracle, transmedia predicted where we were headed.

The artists are always first. The same way artists move into derelict neighbourhoods, and make loft living fashionable, the transmedia makers set the stage for the era of everything, everywhere, all the time. Born of necessity, transmedia in its second generation may be a little less artful, a bit more crass, but any indie creator working today will tell you that you need to be on all platforms to reach your audience. Can a documentary exist without a social media presence? Is there a VR experience that doesn’t benefit from an installation designed to lure viewers into the realm of the story, before putting on the headset?

Where transmedia as a unique art form has come up against challenges, with changing times and changing audiences — what Andrea Phillips calls “The Business Model Problem” — its impact is undeniable, and something we will come to take for granted.

As a gravitational force, transmedia set the stage for the new reality that story is everywhere.

Our options are endless. VR transport us to new worlds, and AR has the potential to shape stories around us, layering media over our immediate surroundings. Artificial intelligence changes the way we engage, by knowing more about us than storytellers have ever known before, and twisting and moulding the narratives we engage with through algorithms designed to tell stories, just for us.

Immersive theatre, room escapes, and hybrid experiences bring the magic of the original vision of transmedia into one space, one hour, or one play. Where movies and video games were born out of a desire to translate our hopes, dreams, fears and anxieties into a consumable narrative form that we could enjoy, engage with, and learn from, now, we’re bringing those experiences back to the real world they’re based on.

But when anything is possible, innovation means more than just new technologies and new platforms.

And so, we see the power of story for good, and innovative approaches born out of transmedia’s positioning of storytellers as designers: The allure of offline experiences and tactile interactions in a media saturated world; A slow movement of storytelling, designed to give us time to think and time to process information, instead of reacting instantaneously to an ever-updating timeline; A commitment to awe and wonder, and magic and imagination.

In this newfound role as designers, storytellers are uniquely equipped to bridge chasms in society, to point out what we don’t want to see, and what the algorithm-obsessed tech junkies keep hidden from sight, lest it drive down clicks. They shine light on the darkness, and cast shadows in the sunny days that are just a little too saccharine, a little too artificial. They are at once the fantasy weavers and the truth tellers. They are the fixers.

A few things are true:

1. The genie is out of the bottle.

2. Transmedia is the modern way of life.

3. Storytellers are problem solvers.

What does this mean? We can’t turn back the march of time, even on those mornings that we really wish we could. Just as we cannot stop the tides of innovation and change, we cannot alter what has come before. But we can shape what will be. In this age where media is everywhere, and everyone is a maker, storytellers are problem solvers, tinkerers, designers, and architects, and we have more tools at our disposal than ever before.

Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.