Layering Engagement: The Temporal Dynamics of Transmedia Television

Abstract

The last fifteen years have seen dramatic changes in the UK within both the television industry and televisual storytelling techniques.Rapid technological changes have not only increased the variety of screen devices, they have also changed the boundaries of the industry itself as the internet opened up distribution avenues and alternatives for viewer attention in the form of social media.The traditional pillars of the UK television industry, the major broadcasters and content providers such as the BBC and ITV, have responded to these changes by expanding their focus away from the television set and onto newer, more portable screen devices.This shift has had consequences both for the kinds of narratives emerging from television and the experiences that such narratives craft for their audiences.Increasingly, transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006) techniques are becoming 'quotidian' (Grainge and Johnson, 2015), part of television programming's standard repertoire of narrative techniques.However, such changes to storytelling techniques only emerge from concrete industrial strategies.As Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, Trine Syverstsen and Espen Ytreberg (2014) argue, 'TV's transformations do not just happen to it, by virtue for instance of technological developments, but are actively made by those who want to stay in charge and also conquer new digital territories' (483-484).Examining these strategies, and unpicking how transmedia television narratives operate, reveals the shifting power relations within the mainstream media industries and the position of narrative within these relations.As Phillip Napoli (2011) argues in his examination of the changing construction of audiences in the US media industries, '[t]he process of audience evolution is being driven in large part by technological changes that are fundamentally reconfiguring the dynamic between media audiences and

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.