Megan West(erby)

Bookavore: Have been wondering why I don’t give a shit about “interactive...

bookavore:

Have been wondering why I don’t give a shit about “interactive storytelling” or “enhanced books” or “transmedia.” No matter how many times they pop up in my Twitter feed. You’d think, as a dealer of traditionally-printed books, fear would be creeping into my heart as I confronted inevitable proof that the world continues to pass my profession by, or maybe on my better days, I’d muster interest in things to come. But it was mostly boredom. Then was shelving. Saw blurb on cover of The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. Alice Sebold sez:

“I could not put this novel down. Elena Ferrante will blow you away.”

Pretty standard blurb. But it’s true. This novel will blow you away. This novel will not just knock off your socks. It will rummage through your sock drawer and take all the socks you were planning to wear this week and knock them off too, to various corners of your bedroom, and also the freezer. It will make you hold your breath until spots form in front of your eyes. I literally paced around my apartment, unable to sit still, as Olga’s mind slowly unraveled in front of her children and she struggled to keep from complete nervous breakdown. This novel took up permanent residence in me.

So if a linear novel, simply composed of sentence after sentence after sentence in the usual way, printed in order on paper, can do that to me—-in translation, no less—-what on earth do I need interactive storytelling for? I cannot imagine feeling any more strongly about a piece of art than I already do about this book and many others. So I don’t get what’s with all the gadgetry and the hoo-ha and the reading of the tea leaves. Save it for something that could really use improvements, like printers. Printers suck. Can’t we make them better instead?

I mean, yeah, I really don’t think I could physically have a higher level of regard for something than I do for, let’s say, my three hundred favorite books of all time. And that number barely scratches the number of books that have left permanent marks on me. Outside of a select group of people and a few paintings, there’s nothing I esteem higher. Hey, maybe it IS fear. Maybe I am scared that anything that could mess with me more than good books already do would BLOW MY TINY LITTLE MIND. Hmm.

Anyway, glad I figured that out.

(NB that this does not mean, as a bookseller, I wouldn’t sell whatever everybody thinks is coming next, or whatever is coming next. If people want to buy it, and it’s part of the book family, I’ll sell it. As evidenced by the fact that I keep ordering Malcolm Gladwell and Bret Easton Ellis for the store. Different strokes.)

Agreed!

Can we skip throwing transmedia storytelling under the bus by assuming any addition to a linear narrative has to take away from a work? Or by assuming that transmedia must be all marketing and flash or include a user-generated element? Because it’s much bigger than that and takes as its premise a smart, active, and literate audience.

Admittedly, books aren’t the realm I see transmedia storytelling as having the largest impact (though this makes me wonder: if A Study in Emerald were released today, solely through the internet, what would it be labeled as? What would the reaction be?), since movies, television, web series and the like have more room in their standardized storytelling methodologies and tropes for a written word-based fictional overlay.

There will continue to be debate as to what transmedia is, whether or not that is an appropriate name for storytelling across platforms and projects. We’ve raised, what, three generations now that are accustomed to the movie and television empires created in the last hundred-or-so years? Transmedia might be the word we use for a while, to convey a narratives carried over to the internet in some form, but I bet we end up with something else before all is said and done.

I think the best description I’ve seen in the last day is from Nina: “[Transmedia is] leaving ROOM for our audience, leaving narrative threads for them to pull.” It’s the logical extension of how we as thinking, creative human being interact with a story: we keep it running in our own heads. A work we like, that we respond to, keeps living within us. And transmedia is a way to play communally, not to diminish a source text.

26 September 2010 ·