Abstract
The increasing diversification of interconnected media platforms, which provide a complex discourse, demands an effective use of the space that is now called “transmedia”. This article provides terms and definitions for transmedia and for the new set of personal skills and abilities required to participate in it: “transliteracy”. It also presents the nemetic system, which facilitates analyzing, tracking and visualizing communication interactions in virtual transmedia environments. Learning to use these new media platforms requires skills beyond the traditional listening and reading, to be able to integrate multiple messages in multiple codes, as an essential skill both for personal and professional communication. This transliteracy is a complex ability of intertextual navigation, the strategy for coding and decoding the multidiscourse in the digital ecosystem.
TopIntroduction
The increasing diversification of interconnected media platforms, which provide a complex discourse, demands an effective use of the space that is now called “transmedia.” This article provides terms and definitions for transmedia and for the new set of personal skills and abilities required to participate in it: “transliteracy.” It also presents the nemetic system, which facilitates analyzing, tracking, and visualizing communication interactions in virtual transmedia environments.
Since humans started to use both gestural and oral codes to communicate, messages have been elaborated and expressed differently when different communication channels were in use. In recent times, with the dawn of radio and television, that fragmentation of content has become of interest to researchers (Steinberg, 2012), and has been identified as a characteristic of mass media (McLuhan, 1994).
With social media, content is fragmented across multiple virtual and physical platforms, with varying degrees of interaction that add complexity to social communication. Interactivity among multiple authors and multiple audiences generates dynamic “cross-media” seriality, “transmedia narrative” that has been studied from educational, entertainment, and sociological points of view (Dena, 2009).
Learning to use these media requires skills beyond the traditional listening and reading, to be able to integrate multiple messages in multiple codes, as an essential skill both for personal and professional communication. This transliteracy is a complex ability of intertextual navigation, the strategy for coding and decoding the multidiscourse in the digital ecosystem.
These recursive communication experiences are the subject of recent research (Duarte, 2014) that explores cognitive patterns in narrative that can be represented through geometric models, consolidating the use of the term “fractal narrative” in the transmedia context. The aim of this multilevel analysis is to take into account individual discourse (micro level), collective interaction (meso level) and community knowledge building (macro level). Interested readers will find a practical example of this in the documentation of the co-creative process that led to Daniel Durrant’s representation of a NEME (Figure 2 of this article) (Nemetics Institute, 2015).
In December 2010, Mark Frazier had explored the fractal essence of digital discourse, and debated with Spiro Spiliadis, Daniel Durrant, and Michael Josefowicz the possibilities of expressing its complexity using a symbolic language (Frazier, 2010). After this early work with Ebdish (Emergent by Design’ish), the nemetic system has emerged as a more elaborated code to express and visualize interactive communication processes in the transmedia ecosystem (De, 2014).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Transmedia: Complex communication interaction based on multimedia, multimodal, multiplatform, intertextual human communication, in which each medium or platform has a distinct role to play in communicating the complete content. This interaction acquires meaning with each participating element by rebuilding the fragmented discourse.
NEME: Mnemonic acronym for the fractal learning process of complex creative systems: Notice, Engage, Mull, Exchange.
Synchrodipity: The compound interaction of synchronicity and serendipity, to produce a sense of discovery, delight, or well-being, and a sense of connectedness between people, ideas and actions, derived from the flow and the interconnectivity of all things.
Wicked Problem: A problem that is difficult or impossible to solve, because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are difficult to define, identify, or recognize. It often involves stakeholders who have radically different worldviews. In addition, complex interdependencies make it so that the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create new problems.
Nemetics: A fractal code, evolved into a meta-language to facilitate communication among researchers in different disciplines in order to debate about complexity.
Intertext: A coherent text that shows a relationship to one or more other texts, where “text” is understood to mean any type of communicative content, typically forming a connected piece of work (includes images, sounds, video, etc.).
Transliteracy: The ability to read, write, and interact across a variety of communication tools, media, and platforms, from text, orality, signing, or drawing, through handwriting, print, TV, radio, and films to electronic networks and social media on digital platforms. It is a necessary complex skill for receiving, interiorizing or producing Transmedia.