2020  and 2021 have left all of us (except, perhaps, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) living with more uncertainty and vulnerability than we have allowed ourselves to admit previously. Like many, I have the very strong sense that a veil has been lifted, and we are in the midst of a series of societal reckonings that reveal how broken many of the systems we rely on are and that change is needed on a large scale. In 2014, I wrote two pieces about transmedia storytelling and activism for The Writing Platform. One outlined the form and processes and one put forward some examples of projects I thought were especially inspiring and innovative. Over the past seven years, technology has advanced exponentially and profound social movements have emerged across the globe. It feels like time to revisit the role and relevance of transmedia storytelling in activism, advocacy and social change, and to consider the ways traditionally under-represented cohorts have innovated the form of transmedia storytelling to create inclusive stories to agitate for change.

A lot of predication and claims have been made about transmedia storytelling since it first appeared on the media studies scene via Henry Jenkins’ blog in 2003. However, in my effort to update my previous articles it became clear that there has been a stagnation in the field of transmedia storytelling, and perhaps a lack of impact in regard to transmedia activism, at least in the mainstream understanding and discussion of transmedia. Outside the mainstream, transmedia storytelling still has the potential to create profound projects that seek to challenge the status quo. These projects use the capabilities of transmedia to amplify under-represented voices and make stories that suggest a more inclusive future, and consequently contemporary transmedia activism looks much more diffuse and diverse than it did seven years ago. 

An often overlooked aspect of transmedia storytelling that is most potent is its capacity to illuminate the relationships between people, places and practices that can influence social change, which is precisely what creators and activists have continued to strive to harness in projects. As we grapple with issues of representation of under-represented groups and environments across all forms of media, the question of how transmedia storytelling can continue to evolve in ways that are inclusive and ethical continues to be relevant. One of the issues that could hold transmedia back is that still so little of what is written about transmedia explores the subjects, the content of the stories, the place and the purpose of the story. The focus continues to be the purpose of the platform, the design or the fan interaction, rather than the purpose of the story itself: who is the story about and who is telling it? Why are they telling this story and where are they telling it from? Do the media and platforms chosen reveal new aspects of the story? Are they authentic and meaningful for the subjects and creators of the story? Does place, not simply location, contribute something profound to the story? Is the story being told from the outside, about someone else? Or is it one of the rare stories that is told from inside a place, rather than about the people whose story it is? What unique contributions can transmedia make to the futures of storytelling? 

We cannot afford to continue tinkering around the edges. With that in mind, I reviewed the projects I presented as examples in 2014 and sought out new examples. What became clear is that place has become a central element to successfully crafting stories that might just be able to shift our perspectives. How place might be used and embedded in transmedia storytelling requires other ways of thinking about storytelling which are not necessarily common in the fields that currently inform transmedia storytelling, such as media studies, games studies, narratology or film studies. As an element of transmedia storytelling, place is best understood through the lived experiences of those who inhabit it.

The interactive, transmedia project Hollow, from 2013, continues to exemplify what is possible in transmedia storytelling to promote social change and was an early leader of how to centre place and voice in the story. The multiple methods that are deployed to create the environment in which the project is set are examples of not only the impact that attention to cultural, physical and economic environment can have on non-fiction projects, but also the consideration of how particular media and platforms can be used to best portray particular aspects of that world. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Hollow is the ways it has captured the ‘feel’ of McDowell County while also telling a universal story. At the centre of the project are around 30 stories made about and by the residents of McDowell, using video, stills, text and voiceover that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories. McMillion claims that ‘the stories are encountered within this landscape so that the people featured emerge from a context of place and community’ (Rose, Mandy. 2013 “American futures: Hollow & question bridge” Collabdocs, July 1).

This approach is also used in the current outstanding transmedia story Neo Learning created between 2010 and 2020 by Big hART.  Big hART is an Australian arts media and social change company that works intensively in marginalised communities to co-create multifaceted arts events that reflect the stories and the creativity of the participants, and raises awareness about the urgent social issues facing these communities. Both Hollow and NEO-Learning are multi-year projects that relied on multiple media and forms to extensively represent communities and to connect with as large an audience as possible. These projects foreground story and the lived experiences and expertise of the communities as the cohering element. Further, all aspects of the projects and Hollow and NEO-Learning privileged the communities ahead of audiences. Instead of asking what audiences want to see, they asked the communities what was not being amplified or shared about them? What counter-narratives were there to the dominant stories about these places and the people who call it home? What frameworks needed to be used to facilitate the community being able to lead the storytelling? 

NEO-Learning is many things – storytelling, a learning resource, comic, a platform, training, an expression of culture, a reclaiming of place, and an imagining of futures. It is one big project, with discrete parts that can be enjoyed (by audiences, creators and community) on their own but has a particular purpose as a large project. There are a number of elements that make up the NEO-Learning project: NEOMAD comic, Future Dreaming VR film and the educational platform for teachers. NEO-Learning as a suite of educational tools began development in 2018, but was preceded and inspired by the award-winning sci-fi comic NEOMAD, also created in collaboration with Big hart. The NEOMAD comic was co-created with over 40 young people in the Roebourne community, through workshops in scriptwriting, literacy, Photoshop, filmmaking and sound recording. 

The result is an entirely original and innovative view of Indigenous young people, who are so often represented across the commercial media in Australia in negative and racist ways. As a transmedia project, NEO-Learning is a tantalising glimpse of what is possible: 

• each element is  unique and purposeful; each aspect amplifies the strengths, the creativity of the participants; 
• the technology is used to support and share traditional knowledges;
• representation is determined by the people being represented and reveals complex and creative ways to share approaches to positive representation between marginalised groups.

 As an educational tool, it is focused on what non-Indigenous Australians can learn and benefit from Indigenous culture and people and is grounded in strength rather than focusing on any challenges the community may face. The community owns the project, and it is about how they see themselves and what they want to communicate about themselves in the ways they want to communicate. 

Our world is made up of stories, and transmedia storytelling has a real and important role to play in creating a world that is made up of different stories, because it has become frighteningly clear that the same old stories, the same old voices and the same old ways of communicating have little to offer when the world falls apart.

At the start of the year our Australian Project Editor, Donna Hancox, wrote a piece for us on Transmedia Storytelling and Social Change; describing how digital technology has provided certain communities and activists with the means to quickly create and widely disseminate stories. To follow on from this she has written up 5 examples of this sort of activism:

Transmedia storytelling and transmedia activism both afford and demand new approaches to telling our stories.  Contemporary transmedia utilises multiple tools to engage audiences by creating stories that offer unique approaches to narrative, character, setting and innovative ways of looking at social issues. Here are 5 of the best recent examples.

Welcome to Pinepoint was borne of nostalgia for a town that no longer existed and the lost art of remembering through photo albums.  As a transmedia project it differs from older more traditional projects by existing entirely online, but sits easily alongside the more contemporary transmedia in which the notion of separate platforms is replaced by a range of storytelling techniques using text, sound, photographs and film to create a layered experience for the audience. This project does not immediately appear to be explicitly activist in its approach; it feels much more like a personal story. However, as with the other projects mentioned here, Welcome to Pine Point combines personal narrative with innovative storytelling techniques to invite audiences to connect with issues portrayed, and in this case to consider the ways in which we capture and honour our memories.

The Hollow is a community participatory project bringing together documentary, digital storytelling, photography, audio and interactive data mapping on a HTML5 website to explore the social and economic devastation of McDowall, a rural town in West Virginia.  At the centre of the project are around thirty stories made about and by the residents of McDowall that provide a context and personal perspective around the broader issue of the social and economic disintegration of rural communities, and the efforts by the people who live in those communities to tell their stories with dignity and in their own way. The Hollow has much in common with Welcome to Pine Point in its intentions and celebration of ordinary voices. New expressions of transmedia storytelling allow for projects to exist in ecology of storytelling and to choose aesthetics and methods that most effectively tell their stories and portray the participants in those stories.

Highrise was created to ‘see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it’ and the result is a many media collaborative experimental, interactive documentary. Highrise is not one self-contained project rather it is a series of projects that together create a multi-faceted view of what it means to be an urban species and homes in on a particular tower block in Canada to investigate what occurs when the residents of a high rise are provided with means to create a better version of urban living. The result is a 3D immersive documentary powered by HTML5 and other open source JavaScript libraries. In the same vein as Welcome to Pine Point and The Hollow, Highrise (and its components Out my Window and The One Millionth Tower) have found new ways – through re-mixing existing media and through new software – to articulate the stories of marginalised or overlooked voices in exciting and authentic ways.

Lowlifes consciously blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction in an experiment by producer Rob Pratten. This project tells the story of drug addicted San Francisco cop Larry Hayes and his fight to save his career, his life and his family. The other two characters in Lowlifes are Haye’s ex-wife Jennifer and the private detective she has hired Lauren Ortega. The story is set in and around the Tenderloin in San Francisco (which is almost a character in itself in the story) and uses three distinct storytelling styles for each of the characters. Larry’s story is told through a novella in the tradition of the hard-boiled detective novels from the early twentieth century by writers such as Dashiell Hammett (who lived and wrote in the Tenderloin), Jennifer’s story is told through a series of blog posts, her Facebook page and her Twitter account and Lauren’s story is a series of webisodes shot on the streets of San Francisco while looking for evidence on Larry.  Pratten uses each of these to their fullest potential and they are perfectly suited to the character. Lowlifes is also interesting in its approach to social activism.  Traffic from the Lowlifes site is directed onto the Coalition for the Homeless San Francisco website where the audience can explore ways to become involved with the not for profit organisation. Also the business model for Lowlifes means that all the content is available as paid and free media, and is licensed under a Creative Commons agreement meaning readers can add their own content.

Half the Sky is a movement dedicated to addressing the challenges facing women and girls globally such as sex trafficking, forced prostitution, gender based violence, maternal morality and poverty. The campaign began as a book of the same name in 2009 by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn that has been amplified by a four hour television series for PBS in America and a Facebook game and mobile games.  Audiences are encouraged to get involved in multiple ways and to share their stories.

The avenues through which communities and community organisations raise awareness about the issues they face and how they agitate for change have developed rapidly in the past ten years; and digital technology has provided community activists with the means to quickly create and widely disseminate stories.  Perhaps the most influential and wide reaching of recent innovations in storytelling has been transmedia storytelling. The term transmedia storytelling first came into prominence via Henry Jenkins; he used it to describe a particular approach to storytelling that made use of the emerging media platforms being utilised more frequently by everyday consumers.  Jenkins’ concept of transmedia storytelling, which remains the generally accepted definition – albeit oft revised and somewhat fluid – was first introduced in his Technology Review column in 2003 stating ‘a transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’. The practice of transmedia storytelling, in turn, has expanded the possible modes and styles through and in which stories are told, and the opportunities for storytellers to connect with audiences.

The pervasive examples of transmedia storytelling that have emerged over the past ten years are big budget, mainstream film and television franchises that roll out their marketing campaigns disguised as story or narrative over a number of distinct media platforms, such as Lost, Prometheus and Avatar.  However, over the last three years other types of independent, stand alone projects like Lizzy Bennett Diaries and Granny’s Dancing on the Table have become more commonplace. These projects utilise recognisable conventions of transmedia storytelling and borrow elements from other forms of storytelling that predate transmedia, such as digital storytelling and documentary film making.  In addition to being hybrid in form these projects are independent and solely focused on raising awareness about particular social issues or telling the stories of marginalized groups, who otherwise do not have a voice in the public sphere. These types of projects have re-worked and re-purposed some of the conventions of transmedia storytelling to suit their intentions, and have much in common with the notion of transmedia activism. Lina Srivastava has defined transmedia activism as ‘creating social impact by using storytelling by a number of decentralised authors who share assets, create content for distribution across multiple forms of media to raise awareness and influence action’.

Transmedia activism challenges a great deal of what we understand to be transmedia storytelling.  Much of what has been identified as transmedia storytelling fetishes mainstream, franchise based stories (and even in the instances where fans have to an extent taken control of the story it is still always in the interest of the large corporations at the heart of the project) or what James Bridle calls ‘sleek black box, corporate controlled objects, platforms or services’. Without dismissing or diminishing these mainstream projects or the ways in which they are considered, the aim of redefining transmedia is to open up the field to encompass other works that instead champion what Bridle describes as ‘open source, hackable, comprehensible and sharable alternatives’.

The kind of activism illustrated in projects such as 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise and The Hollow are inclusive in their approach and focused on illuminating hitherto unexamined aspects of an issue, particularly the experiences of the people involved, to create alternative media representations and express alternative political possibilities. 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise and The Hollow clearly show how potent storytelling can be in this space, and it is useful to explore the ways these kinds of projects re-define our understanding of transmedia as an evolving concept.

Highrise is described as ‘a multi-year and many-media collaborative documentary experiment funded by the National Film Board of Canada’. The online project is comprised of two main components – Out my Window and One Millionth Tower, and the aim is to ‘see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it’ . One Millionth Tower was released in August 2012 and tells the story of one Canadian high rise in a 3 D immersive documentary powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL and other open source JavaScript libraries. The residents of the crumbling tower block collaborated with a group of architects, animators and web developers to create the three dimensional documentary.

18 Days in Egypt is a group storytelling project that encourages a dynamic and dialogic method of storytelling via the use of many contemporary storytelling tools such as tweets, Facebook updates and mobile phone footage and uploading them to the purpose built 18 Days in Egypt site. Egyptians were encouraged to contribute stories they had from Tahrir Square and then invite family and friends to contribute to the story uploaded by adding their own perspective on the events.

The Hollow is a ‘community participatory’ project and interactive documentary that explores the social and economic devastation of rural towns in America through the story of McDowell County in West Virginia.  It brings together personal digital stories, photography, sounds, interactive data and grassroots mapping on an HTML5 website which was designed to ‘discuss the many stereotypes associated with the area, population loss and potential for the future’. At the centre of the project are around thirty stories made about and by the residents of McDowall using video, stills, text and voiceover that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories.  The director of The Hollow, Elaine McMillion, states that when she arrived at McDowell County she found ‘really phenomenal stories of pride and hope’ and realised that ‘she wasn’t comfortable editing those into 75 minute form and putting a title slide saying “The End”.

Similarly in Highrise the vision of the creators was to see how ‘the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it; and to help re-invent what it means to be an urban species in the 21^st century’ rather than to document and implicitly claiming objectivity while simultaneously authoring the work on behalf of the participants.  18 Days in Egypt is described as a ‘collaborative documentary’ that aims to capture the days in Tahrir Square leading up to the ousting of President Murbarak on the 11^th February 2011. The use of the word ‘capture’ rather than to ‘document’ or ‘report’ is important; and suggests that unlike traditional documentary this type of group storytelling offers a more authentic and representative picture of the Egyptian revolution.

The kind of activism demonstrated in 18 days in Egypt, The Hollow and Highrise highlights a fundamental belief in the dignity of the subjects and strives to convey the complexities of the lives and issues by taking advantage of the technology available to challenge audiences to enter, experience and interact with the stories in new ways.