Television Storyworlds as Virtual Space examines television as a series of virtual realities viewers enter and explore one episode at a time. Drawing on specific examples, from Westworld to Green Acres, Twin Peaks to Fargo, it illustrates how each of these worlds invites us in, encourages us to move about within it, and constantly pushes against its own boundaries so that its universe continually expands and develops. Specific chapters consider the importance of title sequences in helping us enter these storyworlds, how children’s television educates us in using virtual reality, and the centrality of the post-apocalyptic series to the TV landscape. Ultimately, the book situates television as part of an artistic continuum, one that stretches back as far as cave paintings, but that also anticipates the digitally-based virtual reality that lies just on the horizon.
Serial storytelling has the advantage of unlocking rather than simplifying the complexities of digital culture. With their worldbuilding potential, TV series open up new artistic horizons, particularly for the dystopian genre. Situated at the nexus of dystopia, complex TV, and a metamodern cultural logic, Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias offers readers novel insights into the dynamics of serial dystopias in the contemporary streaming landscape. Introducing the term 'complex serial dystopias' to describe series that allow audiences to engage with the dystopian premise from multiple angles, the book examines four Anglo-American series, including Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Westworld, and Kiss Me First. The in-depth analyses trace the variety of ways in which these series offer critical reflections on the human-technology entanglement in digital culture.
In 2020-21, the classic HBO show The Sopranos (1999-2007) saw a rapid increase in viewership and was proclaimed to be one of the “hottest shows of lockdown” by outlets like The Guardian and GQ. This resurgent popularity of The Sopranos raises important analytical questions for media scholars—how do audiences understand a complex text like The Sopranos in a radically different televisual and cultural context? Did they adapt the show to fit the particularities of the present moment or was it simply a nostalgic escape from the bleak conditions of the pandemic? Perhaps most importantly though, did the distinct televisual environment of the 2020s bring with it markedly new ways for audiences to understand ‘old’ shows? The New Audience for Old TV is the first book to investigate how audiences re-read and re-interpret resurgent shows when watching in new cultural contexts. Based on a series of original research interviews with young fans, it considers how new contexts of interpretation, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD), and post #MeToo gender politics, informed the unique experience of watching. Using the metaphor of the anamorphic painting, it introduces the analytical framework of a ‘retrospective reading’ to reveal the new meanings that are being made available for ‘old’ TV. Ultimately, The New Audience for Old TV uncovers fresh insights into audiences’ experiences with ‘prestige’ TV and the new avenues of meaning-making in the age of streaming.
Big changes have been taking place in reading in recent years. While American society has become more visual and digital, the general state of literacy in America is in crisis, with educators and public officials worried about falling educational standards, the rising influence of popular culture, and growing numbers of non-English-speaking immigrants. But how justified are these worries? By focusing on «reading», this book takes a serious look at public literacy, but chooses not to blame the familiar scapegoats. Instead, The End of Reading proposes that in a diverse and rapidly changing society, we need to embrace multiple definitions of what it means to be a literate person.
The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media--everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games--is key to understanding the dynamics of culture and society. "Storyworlds across Media" explores how media, old and new, give birth to various types of storyworlds and provide different ways of experiencing them, inviting readers to join an ongoing theoretical conversation focused on the question: how can narratology achieve media-consciousness? The first part of the volume critically assesses the cross- and transmedial validity of narratological concepts such as storyworld, narrator, representation of subjectivity, and fictionality. The second part deals with issues of multimodality and intermediality across media. The third part explores the relation between media convergence and transmedial storyworlds, examining emergent forms of storytelling based on multiple media platforms. Taken together, these essays build the foundation for a media-conscious narratology that acknowledges both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.
Words, Worlds, and Narratives: Transmedia and Immersion offers an interdisciplinary discussion of the way in which narrative is transmitted, transformed and translated through the wide variety of technologies and media platforms available in the 21st century. This volume critically engages with the field of transmedia studies and addresses the significance of media to narrative and authorship to immersion. What emerges is a unique look at collaborative scholarship and storytelling which is both disruptive and immersive. Using a diverse archive of narrative forms, including video games, fan fiction, film adaptation and social media, the chapters in this volume explore the narratological, social, political and economic implications of transmedia narrative in the public and private spaces of the digital and the immersive media communities.
From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on cell phones and beyond, this book examines television in an age of technological, economic, and cultural convergence. It contains essays that establishes television's importance in a shifting media culture.
A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.
The second edition of Disney Stories: Getting to Digital will be of interest to lovers of Disney history and also to lovers of Hollywood history in general. The first edition was planned as a short history of the companies evolution from analog storytelling to a digital online presence that closed the chapter on early Disney films with the release of the groundbreaking Snow White. The purpose of the new edition is to bring to readers a more complete view of the analog-digital story by including three new chapters on film that cover key developments from the live-animation hybrids of the 1940s to CAPS and CGI in the 1990s and VR in the 2010s. It also includes in the discussion of cross-media storytelling the acquisition of the exceptional story property, Star Wars, and discusses how Disney has brought the epic into the Disney Master Narrative by creating Galaxy’s Edge in its US theme parks. Krystina Madej’s engaging portrayal of the long history of Disney’s love affair with storytelling and technology brings to life the larger focus of innovation in creating characters and stories that captivate an audience, and together with Newton Lee’s detailed experience of Disney during the crucial 1995-2005 era when digital innovation in online and games was at its height in the company, makes for a fast-paced captivating read. Disney Stories first edition explored the history of Disney, both analog and digital. It described in detail how Walt Disney used inventive and often ground-breaking approaches in the use of sound, color, depth, and the psychology of characters to move the animation genre from short visual gags to feature-length films with meaningful stories that engaged audience's hearts as well as tickled their funny bones. It showed Walt’s comprehensive approach to engaging the public across all media as he built the Disney Master Narrative by using products, books, comics, public engagements, fan groups such as the Mickey Mouse club, TV, and, of course, Disneyland, his theme park. Finally it showed how, after his passing, the company continued to embrace Walt’s enthusiasm for using new technology to engage audiences through their commitment to innovation in digital worlds. It describes in detail the innovative storybook CD-ROMs, their extensive online presence, the software they used and created for MMORGs such as Toontown, and the use of production methods such as agile methodology. This new edition provides insight on major developments in Disney films that moved them into the digital world.
The 1st International Conference on Virtual Storytelling took place on September 27–28, 2001, in Avignon (France) in the prestigious Popes’ Palace. Despite the tragic events of September 11 that led to some last-minute cancellations, nearly 100 people from 14 different countries attended the 4 invited lectures given by international experts, the 13 scientific talks and the 6 scientific demonstrations. Virtual Storytelling 2003 was held on November 20–21, 2003, in Toulouse (France) in the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum “Les Abattoirs.” One hundred people from 17 different countries attended the conference composed of 3 invited lectures, 16 scientific talks and 11 posters/demonstrations. Since autumn 2003, there has been strong collaboration between the two major virtual/digital storytelling conference series in Europe: Virtual Storytelling and TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment). Thus the conference chairs of TIDSE and Virtual Storytelling decided to establish a 2 year turnover for both conferences and to join the respective organizers in the committees. For the third edition of Virtual Storytelling, the Organization Committee chose to extend the conference to 3 days so that more research work and applications could be be presented, to renew the Scientific and Application Board, to open the conference to new research or artistic communities, and to call for the submission of full papers and no longer only abstracts so as to make a higher-level selection.
