Week 10: 'Networking'

Paul Booths ‘Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative identification’ (2008), delivers the interesting concept of ‘transmediation’, a concept created by Henry Jenkins (2006) which, from my understanding is a mode of advertising involved with creating a narrative which is then dispersed through a number of different mediums to target a mass market of people.
Booths article focuses particularly on social networks and the way in which ‘using their own fan created texts’ has not only for the consumer but producer, reinvented the structure and practice of narrative reading and consuming as a whole. It also explores the new found freedom of fabricating personas through social networks and denying who you truthfully are to attain a deeper connection with particular television show, book or movie character/s.
This creation of something you’re not in order to fit in and have easy accessibility in doing so was a facet of this concept I found very fascinating. When thinking about school and even uni life there are countless examples such as dressing a particular way, making certain life choices such as drinking, smoking or even choosing who and who not to talk to which fall into this mould of deception and reconstruction to target the desired audience.
I think this idea captures the essence of transmediation and narrative construction and identification as a whole, as in order to target the audience of interest the narrative must converge with as many point as possible and involve the audience on a much more diverse level making it more than the earlier one dimensional system of producer and consumer but now a three dimensional narrative system in which the audience interacts and has control and identity within the narrative of their choosing.

Bibiolography:

Booth, P., 2008, ‘Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification’ in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 25, No. 5, pp 514-536.

http://ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/login?url=http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a904854605~f rm=titlelink