TOC 2011: Storytelling Across Mediums

The participating panelists in Wednesday's "Art and Business of Transmedia Storytelling" session at the 2011 Tools of Change (TOC) conference, held in New York from February 14–16, were all relative old hands in the burgeoning titular practice, which Jeff Gomez (CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment) described as "taking a platform-neutral story world and fashioning it so that it's so robust and its messaging is so clear that you can extend it across multiple media platforms."

Bornstein: it's about creating a mythology
For the transmedia storyteller, said moderator Jeremy Bornstein (cofounder, with authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, of Subutai Corporation), the medium controls the message: "When you're telling a story across media, it changes the way you tell it—it becomes less about the characters and the setting and more about the mythology," he said.

Even within existing mythologies, transmedia can unify disparate narratives of the type that have always frustrated Gomez, who recalled "growing up watching Star Wars and seeing all these contradictions crop up between the book and the movie versions." Transmedia storytelling converges story universes around a multiplatform-based mythology, turning storytelling, as game designer/scriptwriter/author Flint Dille put it, into "one giant medium."

Within this medium, user engagement and participation is integral, as the barrier between creator and consumer largely dissolves to engender more of a shared experience: "Transmedia brings us full circle to a time when we were all sitting around a campfire watching each others' faces while someone told a story," said Gomez. "We now have the technology to do that on a major scale."

Gomez punctuates his point with a tweet
Successful implementations of the practice, said the panelists, are abundant in Japanese pop culture, in sf world-based fictions, and in franchises like Glee. But what about nonfiction?, asked one attendee. The same principle applies, said Gomez—"You infuse a brand with characters and narratives as you can, you need to fictionalize nonfiction"—before Twittering (@jeff_gomez): "They always try to get me with the nonfiction type questions. I've made it work for sugar water! #toccon #transmedia."

Regardless of the medium through which he spoke, Gomez was the session's indisputable star, generating the greatest number of head nods and eliciting the most deafening keyboard clatter, for such gems as, "Books are the grandparents that movie executives keep in their basement—[Hollywood] never forgot publishing is the source for great intellectual property...."

But what about the implications for RA?
Still, Gomez and his fellow panelists were speaking to an amen choir predominantly made up of publishers eager to reap transmedia's multirevenue-generating rewards. Unaddressed was the phenomenon's huge implications for readers' advisory. Though no such discussion appears slated for any of the forthcoming major library conferences, it's an issue of paramount relevance to librarians, especially as transmedia endeavors continue to grow in scale, ubiquity, and daring.

Library Journal is a media partner for the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2011.

See also:

• "TOC 2011: Lending Panel Explores Library-Publisher Détente" by Josh Hadro
• "TOC 2011: Keynoter Margaret Atwood Highlights Author Roles" by David Rapp
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