[White Noise]
[Music and White Noise]
We're definitely at a moment of transition, a moment where an old media
system is dying in a new media system is being born. An era when spec tutorial
culture is giving way to participatory culture, where a society based on a small
number of companies controlling the storytelling apparatus is giving away to
a much more complex media scape where average citizens have the ability to
seize control over the media technology, and tell their own stories in powerful new ways.
[Music]
If we go back over thousands of years of human history, the most important stories
were retold many, many times around the campfire. They belong to the folk.
As we moved into 20th century, those images now belong to major media companies who claim exclusive ownership of it.
What we're seeing is in the digital age, as the public begins to take media in its
own hands and begins to assert its right to retell those stories, the public are
taking media without the permission of copyright holders and innovating,
experimenting, recontextualizing, responding to those images in new ways.
[Music]
We take control of the media as it enters our lives and that's the essence of Convergence culture.
Convergence culture is a world where every story, every sound,
brand, image, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media channels.
It's shaped as much by the decisions made in teenagers bedrooms
as it is by the decisions made in the Viacom boardroom, so a discussion
list online or Wikipedia function according to collective intelligence, where the group as a
whole can put together knowledge in a more complex way than any other individual is capable of doing.
[Music]
We are developing technologies around collective intelligence which allow us
to monitor government produce data in ways that would have been impossible before.
We're seeing human rights activists taking videos
recorded by torturers and turning them around and using them
to call attention to the role of torture around the planet.
If George Orwell imagined the world where Big Brother was watching us, what we
instead with little cell phone cameras are watching Big Brother every moment of the day.
[Music]
At Transmedia project, the story or experience is spread across a variety of
media platforms, not in a way that's redundant but rather in a way that's
complementary so that each platform contributes what it does best.
The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us even now in this very room.
Popular entertainment so far is been the best at exploiting these core principles.
We might look at The Matrix as a story that unfolds across three feature films,
a dozen animated short subjects, about 20 comic book stories,
about three videogames and continues to expand as the audience takes it up
and creates fan fiction, or fan art, or fan costumes, or fan theater.
[Audience noise]
The advantage of documentary filmmaker has is that we're already depicting a world.
The reality is already cross-platform and the reality is complex enough to allow us
to have many different characters or many different stories on many different platforms.
[Music] It was a Creed written into the founding documents declare the destiny of domination.
Yes, we can.
So far, the biggest nonfiction success of Transmedia storytelling is the Obama campaign.
Here, we see this political figure relatively unknown four years ago who exploded on
the national scene by exploring every available media platform.
Social network spaces like Facebook and MySpace, cell phone technology to connect to the voters.
YouTube is a platform for distributing both official video and
allowing consumers to produce their own grassroots video.
[Obama] We will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes, we can.
[Music]
We're all governed by principles of participatory culture, it has the potential
to be much more diverse in a world controlled by a small number of media producers.
As average people develop the ability to tell their stories,
we're seeing different perspectives emerge.
We're seeing different groups gain representation, we're seeing groups
challenge the dominant media images that have been constructed for their lives,
and the challenge for those of us caring about social justice issues is to make sure that these tools get in the hands
of those people who have been the most oppressed and most dispossessed to get
their stories out and get their stories in the circulation.
As we expand, you have the power to tell stories.
We have the potential for stories to grab our imagination, to touch our hearts that
come not from the entertainment infrastructure, but from some average
citizen out there whose reality has never been depicted on the screen before,
and I think that's the real excitement of our present moment of media change.
[Music and White Noise]