Deep Media and Transmedia - Henry Jenkins and Frank Rose

Posted by Richard Kastelein in Breaking News on February 01, 2011  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Richard Kastelein on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Henry Jenkins, considered by many to be the partriarch of Transmedia Storytelling and former Wired magazine Contributing Editor Frank Rose have recently teamed up and discussed Rose's new book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories on Jenkin's popular blog. The terms 'Transmedia' and 'Deep Media' are intricately compared by these two giants of media convergence.

You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?

To me it's mainly a question of emphasis. Are we focusing on the process or the goal? Transmedia, or crossmedia, puts the emphasis on a new process of storytelling: How do you tell a story across a variety of different media? Deep media puts the focus on the goal: To enable members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to immerse themselves in it. Not that this was fully thought out when I started — the term was suggested by a friend in late 2008 as a name for my blog, and when I looked it up online I saw that it had been used by people like Nigel Hollis, the chief analyst at Millward Brown, so I adopted it.

That said, I think the terms are more or less interchangeable. I certainly subscribe to the seven core concepts of transmedia as you've laid them out. I also think we're at an incredibly transitional point in our culture, and terms like "deep media" and "transmedia" are needed to describe a still-evolving way of telling stories. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if both terms disappeared in 15-20 years as this form of storytelling becomes ubiquitous and ultimately taken for granted.

Because they engage the audience so directly, and because they've been around long enough to have a big influence on other art forms. Movies like Inception, as you've observed, are constructed very much like a game, with level upon level upon level and a demanding, puzzle-box approach to narrative. If you're a gamer, you know intuitively how to approach this. If you're not, well, good luck.

One of the reasons I started this book was that I'd begun to meet screenwriters who'd gone from TV to games and back again, and when they came back it was with a different approach to narrative — moving across multiple levels, thrusting you directly into the story and letting you figure it out for yourself, that kind of thing. But at first I just had this vague sense that games and stories were blurring into each other — that in some way that I didn't fully understand, games were becoming stories and stories were becoming games. I got obsessed with trying to understand the relationship between the two. I spoke with a lot of game designers, but it wasn't until I got to Will Wright that I found someone who could really answer my question.

We all know that games are in some sense a rehearsal for life — a simulation that models the real world. That's why kids who never play games tend not to pick up the skills they need to navigate adult existence. Wright said that at bottom, stories are an abstraction of life too — an abstraction we share with one another so we can all make sense of the world. This took on added depth for me when I stumbled across, in a neuroscience paper of all places, an 1884 exchange between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson on the nature of fiction. James described it as an "impression of life." Stevenson countered that life is "monstrous, infinite, illogical" while art is "neat, finite, self-contained" — a model, in other words. Steven Pinker took this a step further a century or so later when he described fiction as "a kind of thought experiment." Jane Austen novels? Rehearsals for womanhood in Regency England. All those Hollywood disaster movies? Rehearsals for the apocalypse. And so on.

So stories and games are intimately connected because they're two sides of the same impulse. Stories give rise to play, and play gives rise to stories. Think of Star Wars, and all those action figures, and the fan fiction that came out of it — story transmuted to play and then to story again.

The big question now is, will games and stories actually merge? Will we ever have the experience of being at the center of a carefully constructed dramatic narrative? That's certainly the way things seem to be headed, but I'm not convinced that anybody in the business today will achieve it. Probably there's a nerdy freshman at Harvard or USC who will. My advice would be, watch out for the Winklevosses.

Read full discusssion here.