Chapter

Mobile Engagement: The Technological and Social Dynamics of Transmedia Pervasive Narratives.

January 2014

In book: Interdisciplinary Mobile Media and Communications: Social, Political and Economic Implications
Publisher: IGI Global
Editors: Xiaoge Xu

Authors:

Elizabeth Evans

University of Nottingham

One of the most significant technological developments to occur in relation to mobile technology is its capacity to act as an access point for narrative media. Since the early 2000s, mobile telephones have not only become more complex in terms of computing power, but also in their capacity to act as a platform for film, television or gaming related texts. This technological convergence (Jenkins, 2006, p. 2) between mobile telephony and screen media has wider consequences for the social and cultural circulation and experience of media texts. This chapter will focus specifically on the experimental use of mobile technology in relation to fictional narratives and consider the implications of this experimentation on our understanding of the social dimensions of both mobile technology and narrative itself.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Social Media Fiction. Designing Stories for Community Engagement

December 2015 · Lecture Notes in Computer Science

The current widespread use of digital videos, pictures, audio and text, and their distribution across social media leads to the rise of new consumption behaviours and the spread of new interactive narrative forms. These issues are considered with the analysis of the results of the workshop "Micro Narratives for Community Engagement", which is part of an ongoing research and educational programme ... [Show full abstract] about social media narratives and transmedia storytelling for community engagement. The aim of the workshop was to examine the structure of social media feeds as new ways of organising content based on storytelling and sense-making.

Article

Telephoning on the moveÂ¿Dick Tracy to Captain Kirk

March 1987 · IEE Proceedings F Communications Radar and Signal Processing

G.J. Lomer

For Dick Tracy of comic-strip fame and Captain Kirk of `Star TrekÂ¿, voice communication from tiny equipment over vast distances posed no problem, but in the real world of 1986 the situation is much more difficult. Historically, mobile telephone systems using HF, VHF and UHF radio have been developed since the Second World War with military and commercial systems evolving in parallel. Although ... [Show full abstract] often the military needs have led the technological developments, more recently civil systems have been taking the lead in many areas. Initially voice communication by mobile radio operated in closed groups of users on an `all-informedÂ¿ basis, but, more recently, connection to the world's telephone network has been possible and incoming calls are automatically routed to mobile subscribers wherever they may be in the systemÂ¿a real breakthrough in the concept of personal communication. But can this be extended ultimately to a worldwide system? And can the hardware really approach the convenience available to Dick Tracy and Captain Kirk? The paper considers some of the technical problems to be overcome in terrestial radio systems and touches on the prospects for satellites to play a role in this, but concludes that it will be some time before we can match the facilities available to our fictional heroes.

Conference Paper

Collapsing action; or, games of life and death

September 2013

Robbie Fordyce

Proposing a means to understand videogames in terms of the connections between players' engagement, a videogame's narrative, and the videogame mechanisms for play produces a complex map of relationships. Understanding it in its totality is difficult, but it is possible to identify key points of tension. This paper addresses the tension between the point where play loses its engagements for the ... [Show full abstract] player, and examines this problem through the double-sided lens of the principles of life and death. The principles of life and death have a long history in philosophical thought, and this paper contains a projection of some of these concerns from both theological and atheological philosophical thought into the world of gaming and simulation, including a presentation of a methodology for discussing life and death as principles in the context of fiction. Drawing on Marxist social theory, a concept of the 'tendency' finds its purchase, resulting in a number of social and philosophical theories on the conditions under which end-users conclude their game experiences.

Article

The Performative Functions of Dramatic Communities: Conceptualizing Audience Engagement in Transmedi...

January 2014 · International Journal of Communication

Sarah Atkinson

This article presents the analyses of audience interactions with The Inside, a fictional transmedia experience, in order to reveal insights into the multiple and often unexpected ways that audience members can translate, shape, and influence a transmedia text. The social media layering that binds a fictional transmedia experience together and the multiple pathways that the audience members create ... [Show full abstract] between its constituent elements can be the most compelling and fascinating aspect of the experience to study. This article seeks to conceptualize the audience activity around The Inside as the manifestation of a dramatic community. By identifying and presenting the dramatic community's emergent performative functions, this analysis examines how such functions collectively operate to uphold and perpetuate narrative congruence, coherence, and authenticity.

Article

Full-text available

Features of the Potterian as transmedia project

June 2018

Development of media technologies led to the emergence of the new cultural phenomena, among which transmedia projects stand out. The Harry Potter franchise is selected as the object of analysis. Originally the Potterian appeared as series of books. On the stage of appearance of the film adaptation it became a cross-media project, and afterwards broadened to a transmedia one. While analyzing ... [Show full abstract] transmedia projects it is important to understand what instruments are used by the author of fictional universe for the increase of audience engagement. To study this problem the comparative, descriptive methods and the method of analysis were used. The scientific novelty of the publication can be explained by the coverage of preconditions of transmedia project forming on the basis of the book series. In the article the specific of the Potterian as transmedia project is considered. The techniques of constructing fiction universe that are used for higher audience engagement are considered. The Potterian is analyzed as a product of postmodern culture. It makes the cultural phenomenon more favourable to transform it into a transmedia project. The features of functioning of different transmedia platforms and their contribution to the development of the history are characterized. Intertextuality, audience engagement and evolution of narrative style were defined as distinctive features of the Potterian. Due to them the fictional universe successfully broadened to the transmedia project. The results can be used in the analysis of modern transmedia projects or in the creation of new ones.

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Altering expectations: how design fictions and backcasting can leverage sustainable lifestyles

June 2014

Sustainable development calls for fundamental societal changes. Technological development alone won't suffice; in order to reach sustainable development objectives there is a need to rethink the way we live our lives. Sustainable lifestyles are today however often depicted through a sacrifice-based cultural narrative, in which losses, rather than gains stand in focus. The paper takes its starting ... [Show full abstract] point in recognizing that the future is open and possible to influence, but also that (ideas about) the future influences present decisions. These ideas, or expectations, about the future thus provide an opportunity for intervention. Through presenting concrete and positive representations of what a sustainable future might imply in terms of everyday life, the expectations for such a future might be altered. This paper aims to explore how design fiction and backcasting can be used to alter expectations regarding sustainable lifestyles, through creating concrete and engaging visions of everyday life in a sustainable future. The paper also presents a project based on this approach as well as some early findings from this.

Method

Full-text available

The Science Fiction Prototyping Framework: Building Behavioural, Social and Economic Impact and Comm...

January 2015

The fictional prototype uses imaginative narratives based explicitly on science fact as a design tool in the development of technology. Through traditional research and development we begin to define and understand what a technology is. This is the typical work that is going on in industrial labs and universities all over the world. Usually this work continues iterating itself until the ... [Show full abstract] technology is refined to such a point that can be productized and incorporated into an existing product. Fictional prototyping adds a step in the technology development process. It asks how the technology will be used. It provides a virtual reality in which the implications, problems and benefits of the technology can be explored. Its purpose is to facilitate the development of firm level “meta narratives” on future innovation and its social and humanitarian impact. http://www.fccrnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SFP-Framework-Impact-paper-1V3.pdf

Article

Full-text available

Transmedia Storytelling and Construction of Fictional Worlds: Aliados Series as Case Study

April 2019 · Correspondencias & Análisis

Tomás Atarama-Rojas

This paper explores the contributions of transmedia storytelling in the construction of fictional worlds, in an attempt to detect the narrative elements that strengthen the bond of the audience with the fictional world. The study shows that based on the solid construction of the poetics of a story, transmedia storytelling can enrich the engagement with a large audience. To prove this, we analyze ... [Show full abstract] the narrative elements and the transmedia strategies of the series Aliados, produced by Cris Morena Group and broadcasted in Latin America and countries in Europe.

Chapter

Full-text available

The origins of bone tool technologies: an introduction

August 2018

Tool use is one of the hallmarks of what makes us human. This defining behaviour is fostered by our high fidelity social learning environment and unique process of cumulative cultural evolution. From the Stone Age to the Digital Revolution, the human narrative has been written in the technologies we developed to meet the challenges of everyday life. How our ancestors accomplished increasingly ... [Show full abstract] complex tasks reflected the skills and materials available at the time, and as technology developed in complexity, so too did their lives. For over two million years of the human lineage, stone and bone tools preserve the only record of our technological heritage and capacity for innovation. Studying the origins and development of these technologies plays a vital role in retracing our evolutionary footsteps toward becoming human.

Chapter

Resurrecting the Victorians

January 2010

Louisa Hadley

The Victorian era and its narrative structures continue to haunt contemporary culture, and many neo-Victorian writers seek to understand that relationship between the present and the past through an explicit engagement with ghosts.1 While other historical fictions use ghosts to explore the relationship between the present and the past, most notably Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Pat Barker’s ... [Show full abstract] Regeneration Trilogy (1990, 1993, 1995), in neo-Victorian fictions the engagement with ghosts is usually connected to the specific context of nineteenth-century spiritualism. Therefore, these fictions tend to incorporate not only ghosts, but also medium figures. Writing about the usefulness of the tropes of haunting and spectrality for thinking about ‘the contemporary novel’s sense of the Victorian’, O’Gorman notes that ghosts are, for the most part, passive’ (p. 3). By adopting the figure of the medium, then, the neo-Victorian novels discussed in this chapter seek to establish a more active engagement with the Victorian past. Neo-Victorian authors also use the figure of the medium as a means to explore the forms of historical narratives, including that of historical fiction itself. While there have been several neo-Victorian novels that deal with spiritualism, the discussion in this chapter focuses on just three: Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen (1990) A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’ (1992) and Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999).

Article

Mapping Ireland in early fiction

March 2011

I.C. Ross

Mapping Vertue Rewarded (1693) and Sarah Butler's Irish Tales (1716) reveals significant cartographical and narrative distinctions between these and two near-contemporary English fictions, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). While the latter show the contemporary colonizing movement outwards from England, Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales reveal trajectories of ... [Show full abstract] invasion and incursion, characteristic of historiographical accounts of Ireland, from the eleventh-century Lebor Gabála Érenn onwards. A broader engagement with pre-Romantic Irish literature, it is argued, may help to address contemporary anxieties about the study of national literature(s), along lines suggested by the current comparatist objectives of the literary cartographer and theorist, Franco Moretti.

Article

Histories of Futures Past: Dystopian Fiction and the Historical Impulse

December 2018 · Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Anya Heise-von der Lippe

This article traces the historical impulse in two intertextually connected dystopian texts – George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) – by reading the two novels in the context of the construction of historical narrative after the proclaimed ‘end of history’ in the twentieth century. It considers their representation of history within the framework of literary ... [Show full abstract] criticism of the historical novel (György Lukács), critical dystopias (Tom Moylan), and memory as an active, mediated engagement with the past (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). It looks, more specifically, at how the texts contrast personal experience and the meta-narrative contemplation of memory with institutionalized versions of history on different diegetic levels by juxtaposing the narrators’/focalizers’ view of history with that presented in the framework of pseudo-historical appendices that accompany and significantly modify the interpretations of both narratives.