May 16, 2018

The Civic Imagination Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, has accepted as its mission an effort to stimulate discussions within communities across America and around the world about our shared values, about our hopes for the future, and about the models we use to think about the process of social and political change. We conduct workshops where participants are encouraged to imagine the future together, using techniques that have been inspired by the world building practices associated with speculative fiction. We ask those who come to our workshops to imagine the world of 2060 — not as it will be but as we desire it to be, and in this way, we try to find some degree of consensus about what an ideal society might look like, a consensus which cuts across other divides amongst us. As we do so, we are using utopias not as blueprints for an ideal world, but as provocations to have further conversations about the nature and process of social change.

But we do not want simply to focus on the future — on what changes are ahead. We also want to reflect on our traditions, on things we cherish and want to carry with us into the future with us. One way we get our participants to reflect on that sense of tradition is to ask them to bring a meaningful or memorable object with them and share its story as a means of introducing themselves to the group. At first, we understood this practice as simply an ice-breaker, but from the start, it was clearly much more. Sharing these objects and their stories with each other creates a degree of intimacy and vulnerability between the workshop participants; it enables trust as people talk about stuff that is at the core of our common humanity. In the room, the sharing of these stories, the handling of these cherished artifacts, break down bareers, but as we’ve returned to our base at the University of Southern California, we have found that these object stories continue to do important work as tools to think with, ways that we as a research group can gain some sense of what things are valuable and meaningful to the people we encounter in our research.

This semester, we conducted an interpretive experiment trying to understand the memorable objects shared with us by the participants in two of our recent workshops — one centered on the future of work, involving former coal miners and tobacco farmers, assembled in Bowling Green, Kentucky and one centered around the future of faith amongst the congregation of a Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Our discussions of these memorable objects were shaped by recent work in anthropology and sociology which explores how humans map meaning onto their possessions, how our belongings often express a sense of belonging, how the exchange of things helps to shape our relations with other people in our lives. In this tradition, certain objects are seen as telling — that is, they yield stories that help us to better understand the people around us. When we are asked to show off things that are meaningful to us, we engage in a process of self-fashioning — we construct and perform our identities through the stuff we share (both the objects themselves and the emotional baggage they carry for us).

In these short and very personal essays, our graduate students engage with some of the object lessons which we gathered from our engagement with the people of Kentucky and Arkansas. Our students are writing here to and about people they have not met, people they only know through these stories about cherished objects. Given the contemporary political context, the temptation is to read these essays as pieces written from a very blue state — California — to the inhabitants of two red states. But, in practice, the situation is far more complex, since some of our group members were raised in the south or in the rust belt, and thus these stories offer a glimpse into a world they have left behind, at least for the purposes of their education. And beyond this, the members of our research group come from varied other places — from Latin America to Eastern Europe — and thus find other cultural connections with the original tellers of these tales and possessors of these objects.

For our research group, this is a means of getting our intellectual juices flowing — a discovery process that we hope will yield further insights into the civic imagination. But we also hope that it is simply another stage in a longer communication process. We are reaching out to the original storytellers to get their reactions to what the students have written and we encourage other readers to share their responses with us. Tell us how and why you connected with these particular stories. Share with us objects that you use to remember who you are and where you came from.

Introduction was originally published in Memory Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

January 25th, 2017

For the past few months I have been coping with chronic back pain and muscle contractions, which have taken their toll on me physically and emotionally. I have been largely incapacitated, often reaching out to the rest of the world via Skype and email, and having to continually negotiate through the USC medical system, which has taught me more than I wanted to know about how even very good health care providers routinely under-serve even the most privileged populations of patients, leave aside the quality of American health care as experienced by those who lack access to wealth, power, and resources.

The patient finds herself constantly jockeying for the attention of doctors, who listen only enough to find the trigger words that push them to the pre-scripted solutions to predictable problems. The system strives to be efficient in getting patients in and out of the offices; it strives to lower risks and liabilities, but it has not been optimized to identify and solve complex problems having to do with the emotional and physical lives of their patients. Patients learn to speak faster and faster, trying to provide a fuller context, trying to make sure they say the trigger words that allows their pain and suffering to be taken seriously. Despite access to sophisticated information management tools, the doctor scarcely recalls the patient from one visit to the next and thus the same basic questions need to be asked and answered again and again, squeezing out anything but the most surface data about the issues. Records are imperfectly transferred between health care providers. And there seems to be no incentive for anyone to pursue questions between visits, to seek out new data which might link a particular patient’s experiences to larger patterns, to check in on patients who are not actively tugging at their pant legs, or to check to insure recommended follow-up visits get scheduled.

All of this contrasts sharply with the way the health care system is portrayed in popular media. I’ve been watching a new television series, Pure Genius, which represents an idealized medical facility where the world’s top doctors and top engineers work together to insure that they meet the needs of their patients, money is no object, and in the process, the Bunker Hill doctors stretch the limits of current medical technologies and practices. There’s lots of cool stuff going on here in terms of medical databases and self-monitoring technologies and 3d printing and genomes and… But we don’t have to go that high tech or that contemporary: the health care drama continually reminds us of the links between the medical issues a patient confronts and the social/emotional contexts of their lives. The doctors are constantly searching throughout each episode to identify and respond to problems that seem elusive; they often reach medical breakthroughs by getting some new insight into who their patients are; and they are seen talking across specialities about their patients even when they are not sitting there in the room demanding their attention.

To me, it is this mind-set, this mix of curiosity and empathy, this collective intelligence and team work, which we would need to see as the core values of American health care in 2040. Sure, the tech is nice, don’t get me wrong, but the point of the show is that these tools and processes will always be high-end. But what would it take for curiosity and empathy to be the new norms for all healthcare professionals? Would it require us to establish a class of people in the system who are assigned as advocates for patients, who go with them across all of the various parts of the system, keeping track of the whole patterns in their lives, insuring that their needs are met? Would it require some kinds of incentives for doctors not just to treat problems but to identify their causes and even better to deploy preventive medicine to respond to potential medical issues before they disrupt the patients’ lives? Would it require a different, less hierarchical and bureaucratic structure in favor of more fluid ad hoc structures where doctors work together around specific patients and problems, a key theme running through Pure Genius?

Recommendations

Providing health care access at low cost to all Americans should be the minimal rather than maximum expectation.

Once health care is guaranteed, the shift should be towards defining what qualities we expect from American health care. The goal should be a more holistic and patient-centered approach, one which encourages doctors to be more empathic, creative, and curious in how they approach medical questions. Clearly developing these skills starts with medical schools and perhaps before in how we recruit potential doctors and nurses.

Patients need to be provided with case-workers/advocates who help them navigate through the health care system, insuring they access the best doctors and specialists for their needs, making sure they do not fall through the cracks at any point in the process. These advocates should be assigned to the patient, not serve the interests of the insurance company, and so they should be about maximizing health benefits.

There should be greater collaborations between specialists and doctors so that they pool knowledge and consult regularly about the challenging aspects of cases, so we can follow developments that fall at the borderline between areas of focus rather than dismiss symptoms that do not fit squarely into any one area.

Health care records systems need to be upgraded to insure easier sharing across different doctors and medical facilities, something easier said than done as suggested by the analysis of this problem provided by Robert Wachter’s The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015).

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Art and Education at USC.

Health Care 2040 was originally published in Imagine Us, 2040 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What people new to the concept often do not understand is that transmedia is an adjective in search of a noun to modify.

“Transmedia,” by itself, simply describes some kind of structured relationship between different media platforms and practices. Initially, it was a practice identified more closely with fictional work. More recently, however, producers of nonfiction transmedia have been using these techniques to tell their stories “by any media necessary,” taking advantage of whatever resources they can access as long as they can meaningfully deploy them in the service of their goals.

When Marsha Kinder wrote about transmedia in Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (1993), she was describing a set of iconic characters, such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the Super Mario Brothers, who were recognizable across a range of media platforms, even if there was little or no integration of their stories. When I wrote about transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture (2006), I ended up discussing a range of different experiments both at the heart of Hollywood (The Matrix franchise, Dawson’s Desktop) and on the edges (the emergence of alternative reality games).

When Andrea Phillips writes that transmedia “as I once knew it was, as Brian Clark would have said, an art scene encompassing a particular group of creators doing some things in common, largely springing up around the space that used to be alternate reality games,” she is describing one particular tribe — what Clark himself half-jokingly labeled “the East Coast School.” This tribe has created some of the most exciting transmedia art projects in recent years, but it represents one subset of a larger phenomenon.

We need to distinguish transmedia from multimedia and cross-platform:

• Transmedia approaches are multimodal (in that they deploy the affordances of more than one medium), intertextual (in that each of these platforms offers unique content that contributes to our experience of the whole) and dispersed (in that the viewer constructs an understanding of the core ideas through encounters across multiple platforms).
• As I use the terms, cross-platform refers to delivery channels: if the same documentary — say, 13th — appears simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix and perhaps down the line on DVD, then we can describe it as benefiting from cross-platform distribution. But there is no opportunity here for additive comprehension, no real reason for the same consumer to visit these various hubs to learn anything new.
• Multimedia refers to the case where a single app or website might include video, audio, text, and simulations (see, for example, The New York Times’ 2012 Snow Fall, whereas a transmedia project may distribute these experiences across platforms so that the audience must actively work, often through networked consumption, to assemble the pieces.

These distinctions are far more important than the often asked question of how many different media must be involved in order for something to become transmedia: the core question is not how many media but what kind of relationship exists between them, what kind of contributions do they each make, and what cognitive and social activities do they require from their spectators.

An independent or documentary producer should start with a broader conception of the media that surround them. We can imagine, for example, the use of lower cost media such as podcasts or tweets or web video (as was deployed in The Lucy Bennett Diaries) or perhaps live and location specific experiences (such as dramatic or musical performances, street art, augmented reality games, audio guides, or museum exhibitions).

Consider, for example, the Historically Black podcast created to celebrate the launch of the Smithsonian Institute’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture: episodes are structured around objects donated to the museum to reflect different kinds of African-American experiences, with images of the objects shown on the web, their stories told through spoken word, and the objects themselves physically on display at the museum.

Most forms of transmedia are structured through a process of world-building. The concept of world-building emerged from fantasy and science fiction but has also been applied to documentary or historical fiction. Worlds are systems with many moving parts (in terms of characters, institutions, locations) that can generate multiple stories with multiple protagonists that are connected to each other through their underlying structures. Part of what drives transmedia consumption is the desire to dig deeper into these worlds, to trace their backstories and understand their underlying systems. Fictional texts imagine and design new worlds; documentaries investigate and map existing worlds.

A focus on world-building allows documentary producers to share more of what they learned, to encourage their viewers to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the institutions being explored, the factors that impacted their characters’ lives, and the roots and potential responses to the problems being identified. Some use transmedia to explore multiple points of view or competing realities, which the engaged viewer is encouraged to bring into conversation with each other. A focus on documenting worlds may also allow professionally constructed texts to incorporate various forms of crowdsourcing and participatory storytelling, as the public shares their own experiences with the issue. Transmedia texts in all forms are layered: each extension adds something we did not know before and thus deepens our emotional connection to the material.

In my own recent writings, I talk about transmedia locations and logics.

Location refers to the context from which transmedia products emerge, so that the struggle of indie media producers in Manhattan to find a business model to sustain alternative reality games, often in collaboration with the advertising, publishing, or recording industries looks different from, say, the transmedia strategies currently shaping Hollywood franchises, such as the extended universes of Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Avatar. And these look different from locations where transmedia production is state-subsidized to promote multiculturalism, education, or social change, all goals that dominate in countries where media production is shaped by public service priorities.

Brian Clark started us down this path with his East Coast and West Coast distinctions: “Neither is wrong. Few practitioners or creators work exclusively in one sphere or the other. One is not more noble or pure or profitable than the other.” We now can locate more models for transmedia as we start to look at exemplars beyond the United States.

By transmedia logics, I mean the different kinds of goals that transmedia producers pursue: early work centered on transmedia characters, stories, performances, and promotion, but more and more interest surrounds transmedia documentary, learning/education, mobilization/activism, diplomacy, and so forth.

As transmedia models are taking root around the world, we are seeing these different logics get mixed and matched: the Hollywood model involved the blurring of lines between storytelling and promotion/branding, with extensions building audience engagement around the so-called “mothership.” But an entertainment-education model, such as Hulu’s East Los High, sees the entertainment as creating a context for discussion of pressing social issues, with audience interests deepened through documentary or public service extensions and directed towards social change campaigns.

Transmedia was not a paradigm or a movement, but rather a provocation — a recognition of the increasingly networked relationship between different media sectors and platforms and in particular, a particular model of media audiences which valued tracking down and discussing scattered bits of information. These insights led to various experiments in what transmedia experiences might be like, some of which have taken deep roots, others (such as ARGS or hopefully, Second Screen) have proven short-lived.

I prefer a looser definition, one elastic enough to encompass new and emerging experiments. But then, I am an academic and my job is to generate discussion. If I were an industry insider, I might want greater exclusivity in order to enhance the market value of my particular skill set.

Given this history, we should not be surprised that individual creators, even those who have deeply invested in particular models, will migrate into other media sectors and adopt new models, bringing insights with them. This is what Phillips calls the “transmedia diaspora.” Otherwise, things would have become very static. That said, the discussions around transmedia are continuing to expand, bringing new people to the table.

First, the initial claims that transmedia was emerging from a particular moment, at the place where old and new media collide, has given way to a recognition that transmedia has a much longer history. Just as there are multiple transmedia locations and logics today, there is a rich history of people trying to tell stories by tapping the affordances of multiple media.

Watch for Matthew Freeman’s upcoming book, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, which considers early 20th century examples such as the Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, each of which were built up over time across multiple media experiences.

Transmedia has also slowly but decisively spread to media industries and creative communities around the world, each adapting what it means to the particulars of local production — from Japanese media mix to Bollywood and Nollywood, from the European Union to Latin America.

We might, for example, think about the kinds of transmedia interventions represented by Priya’s Shakti, a creative collaboration that uses graphic novels, games, and augmented reality, not to mention street art, to call attention to the struggles women face in India, a project which owes much to the spirit of the ARG experimenters Phillips discusses; or Burka Avenger, an animated series in Pakistan in support of women’s education, that owes more to the Sesame Street model. Or Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, a location-based experience adapted to enshrine everyday objects referenced in Nobel Prize Winning novelist Orhan Pamuk’s novel about a doomed love affair.

And third, the concept of transmedia has caught the imagination of educators, activists, nonprofits, NGOs, journalists, and documentary producers, anyone who is struggling to get the attention and deepen the engagement of a particular constituency. Some of these projects are hyperlocal — see, for example, various efforts by educators to build augmented reality games that are tied to the specific communities where they are situated and encourage their students to do research as they contribute to the design and deployment of these projects. Here, transmedia connects with a new educational emphasis on multimodal learning or on models of multiple intelligences, both of which stress the need to communicate ideas through multiple modes of representation to stimulate the interests of diverse learners.

This doesn’t mean transmedia means everything to all people and thus means nothing to anyone. Rather, it means we need to be precise about what forms of transmedia we are discussing and what claims we are making about them. Phillips gives us a rich progress report on one important dimension of transmedia, but doesn’t provide a map of the whole terrain. Transmedia — broadly defined — continues to grow in many different directions as people respond to the challenge and opportunities of communicating systematically across multiple platforms.

Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.

Transmedia What? by Henry Jenkins was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.