I am primarily interested in the relationship between technology and the experience of narrative. My research focuses on film and television audiences, in particular in relation to the development of cross-platform narrative forms. I am concerned with issues such as interactivity, agency and immersion. My first book, Transmedia Television, explores the attitudes, opinions and values of audiences towards the development of the internet and mobile phone as extensions and alternatives to the television set.
My current project "Engaging Screens: Interrogating Engagement with Transmedia Content' explores how practitioners and audiences understand ‘engagement’ with transmedia content. With the screen industries increasingly privileging ‘engagement’ as highly valuable and desirable, this project asks what is actually meant when we talk about ‘engaging audiences’ or ‘being engaged’ by content. I am speaking to practitioners and audiences in the UK and US to find out how they define engagement, either through their own work or through their own experiences with transmedia content. The project’s findings will offer the chance to interrogate the multiple definitions of ‘engagement’, whether the industry’s idea of ‘engagement’ matches that of its audiences, how 'engaging experiences' are managed by both practitioners and audiences, and how ‘engagement’ is leveraged as an sign of content’s success.
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television indu... more The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set’s status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with ‘television’ without ever turning a television set on.
Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ‘the television audience’? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry’s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ‘television’ now means for its audiences.
In March 2014, the BBC announced that it would be ‘reinventing’ its youth-oriented digital televi... more In March 2014, the BBC announced that it would be ‘reinventing’ its youth-oriented digital television channel BBC Three into an ‘online only channel’ as a way to trim £50 million from the Corporation’s budget. The announcement was immediately followed by protests by key BBC talent, audiences and the press. This debate raised issues of value in terms of the economic costs of producing content, the contribution of the BBC Three’s content to broader British televisual culture, the status of particular audience groups, the potential for online distribution to revolutionise the nature of ‘televisual’ content, and the nature of broadcasting itself. These values were couched in fears over changing audience behaviours brought about by the internet and mobile technologies and political pressure to reduce the budget of an institution facing an imminent funding renewal process. At the heart sat a re-evaluation, and re-statement, of what public service broadcasting means in a media landscape that is increasingly embracing non-broadcast forms of distribution.
This paper explores the debate around BBC Three as a case study to interrogate the politics of online distribution in the UK. In particular, it interrogates how the debate frames and re-negotiates ideas of what ‘television’ means within the context of public service, and the role that a large, publically funded institution such as the BBC should (and can) play. In doing so it contributes to wider debates within television studies about the impact of digital technologies and how they are transforming the broadcast landscape.
The last fifteen years have seen dramatic changes in the UK within both the television industry a... more 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. This article examines the relationship between industry strategy and transmedia storytelling techniques. By considering how television studies can look to its own past and re-appropriate foundational models to understand these strategies, this article examines how the changes to television’s narratives exist in a context of both change and continuity.
This article explores how The Memory Dealer reveals the multiple literacies at stake in pervasive... more This article explores how The Memory Dealer reveals the multiple literacies at stake in pervasive, transmedia, multimodal drama. It will argue that TMD’s use of sound-based storytelling combined with live performance and art installations opened up new relationships between the audience, text, technology and space that required them to re-learn how to understand narrative. In contrast to much scholarship on digital and media literacy, which focuses on children, attention will be drawn to adult audiences who are already well versed in a range of media-related literacies, including ‘new’ forms such as videogames and digital media, but are simultaneously not ‘digital natives’. The nature of pervasive drama as transmedia, bringing together different modes of storytelling including the visual, aural and spatial, required audience members to not simply develop literacies in each mode, but also a the ability to shift between and combine these modes. This article identifies three specific forms of literacy that were apparent within TMD’s focus group discussion but that cut across individual media forms and were seen as necessary for ‘successful’ engagement: narrative, technological and geographical-logistical, and how participants worked through and developed these literacies. On the one hand, participants articulated their mastery of these literacies by drawing on well-established narrative media forms. By pulling out specific components of TMD’s structure they were able to build on their pre-existing knowledge of how narrative is constructed and what their role within that narrative was. On the other hand, however, when that knowledge failed them and they were confronted with new narrative configurations of sound, image and space, they articulated this failure as a form of personal inadequacy, placing the blame on themselves and their own limitations, rather than the performance or its inherent ‘newness’.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games t... more The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of gameplay. Free to download, but structured around micropayments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetize player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetize player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience.
Alternate reality games (ARGs) combine transmedia and pervasive storytelling, layering fictional ... more Alternate reality games (ARGs) combine transmedia and pervasive storytelling, layering fictional narratives onto real world spaces and raising a number of production challenges in the process. This article will consider the key professional skills, working attitudes, and relationships that sit behind ARGs’ complex narratives by focusing on a case study example, Nottingham-based The Malthusian Paradox (TMP). It will focus on how flexibility and trust were manifested throughout TMP’s production process and shaped the dynamics of the production team. In doing so, the article will argue that emerging transmedia narrative forms that exploit the potential of digital technologies are reshaping working practices within the creative industries and requiring practitioners to evolve and revaluate their roles within the creative process.
The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Sh... more The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over 3 months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third-party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design.
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television indu... more The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set’s status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with ‘television’ without ever turning a television set on.
Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ‘the television audience’? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry’s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ‘television’ now means for its audiences.
In March 2014, the BBC announced that it would be ‘reinventing’ its youth-oriented digital televi... more In March 2014, the BBC announced that it would be ‘reinventing’ its youth-oriented digital television channel BBC Three into an ‘online only channel’ as a way to trim £50 million from the Corporation’s budget. The announcement was immediately followed by protests by key BBC talent, audiences and the press. This debate raised issues of value in terms of the economic costs of producing content, the contribution of the BBC Three’s content to broader British televisual culture, the status of particular audience groups, the potential for online distribution to revolutionise the nature of ‘televisual’ content, and the nature of broadcasting itself. These values were couched in fears over changing audience behaviours brought about by the internet and mobile technologies and political pressure to reduce the budget of an institution facing an imminent funding renewal process. At the heart sat a re-evaluation, and re-statement, of what public service broadcasting means in a media landscape that is increasingly embracing non-broadcast forms of distribution.
This paper explores the debate around BBC Three as a case study to interrogate the politics of online distribution in the UK. In particular, it interrogates how the debate frames and re-negotiates ideas of what ‘television’ means within the context of public service, and the role that a large, publically funded institution such as the BBC should (and can) play. In doing so it contributes to wider debates within television studies about the impact of digital technologies and how they are transforming the broadcast landscape.
The last fifteen years have seen dramatic changes in the UK within both the television industry a... more 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. This article examines the relationship between industry strategy and transmedia storytelling techniques. By considering how television studies can look to its own past and re-appropriate foundational models to understand these strategies, this article examines how the changes to television’s narratives exist in a context of both change and continuity.
This article explores how The Memory Dealer reveals the multiple literacies at stake in pervasive... more This article explores how The Memory Dealer reveals the multiple literacies at stake in pervasive, transmedia, multimodal drama. It will argue that TMD’s use of sound-based storytelling combined with live performance and art installations opened up new relationships between the audience, text, technology and space that required them to re-learn how to understand narrative. In contrast to much scholarship on digital and media literacy, which focuses on children, attention will be drawn to adult audiences who are already well versed in a range of media-related literacies, including ‘new’ forms such as videogames and digital media, but are simultaneously not ‘digital natives’. The nature of pervasive drama as transmedia, bringing together different modes of storytelling including the visual, aural and spatial, required audience members to not simply develop literacies in each mode, but also a the ability to shift between and combine these modes. This article identifies three specific forms of literacy that were apparent within TMD’s focus group discussion but that cut across individual media forms and were seen as necessary for ‘successful’ engagement: narrative, technological and geographical-logistical, and how participants worked through and developed these literacies. On the one hand, participants articulated their mastery of these literacies by drawing on well-established narrative media forms. By pulling out specific components of TMD’s structure they were able to build on their pre-existing knowledge of how narrative is constructed and what their role within that narrative was. On the other hand, however, when that knowledge failed them and they were confronted with new narrative configurations of sound, image and space, they articulated this failure as a form of personal inadequacy, placing the blame on themselves and their own limitations, rather than the performance or its inherent ‘newness’.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games t... more The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of gameplay. Free to download, but structured around micropayments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetize player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetize player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience.
Alternate reality games (ARGs) combine transmedia and pervasive storytelling, layering fictional ... more Alternate reality games (ARGs) combine transmedia and pervasive storytelling, layering fictional narratives onto real world spaces and raising a number of production challenges in the process. This article will consider the key professional skills, working attitudes, and relationships that sit behind ARGs’ complex narratives by focusing on a case study example, Nottingham-based The Malthusian Paradox (TMP). It will focus on how flexibility and trust were manifested throughout TMP’s production process and shaped the dynamics of the production team. In doing so, the article will argue that emerging transmedia narrative forms that exploit the potential of digital technologies are reshaping working practices within the creative industries and requiring practitioners to evolve and revaluate their roles within the creative process.
The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Sh... more The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over 3 months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third-party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design.
Television is vital to the interpersonal relationships of visually impaired audiences, despite th... more Television is vital to the interpersonal relationships of visually impaired audiences, despite their being unable to see the images clearly. However, their ability to fully engage with television’s social role hinges on their ability to gather meaning from the text, something that becomes increasingly difficult when only the aural signifiers of television are accessible. This article explores the role of audio description services, which provide an additional soundtrack detailing visual information, and the way in which they facilitate interpretation and subsequently discussion of television texts for the visually impaired. In doing so it will interrogate arguments that present a singular model of television aesthetics. Instead it will present the need for a more nuanced approach, one that understands the specificity of individual genres or programmes and the fact that the relationship between sound and image may not be the same for all television content. Key words: Television, audiences, image, sound, disability, audio description.
This article uses empirical audience research gathered at three East Midlands’ independent ‘art’ ... more This article uses empirical audience research gathered at three East Midlands’ independent ‘art’ cinemas to examine the cultural and social value of specific cinema spaces. It will argue that the value of ‘art’ venues lies in a sense of collective identity that participants see as lacking at commercial multiplexes. This collective identity is formed around a number of factors including taste, class, age, ideology and etiquette. As such, these audience members form ‘indirect communities’ that lack the face-to-face interaction of traditional community structures, but maintain a strong collective identity that distinguishes them from other cinema audience. For these audiences, ‘art’ cinema is not just about the film onscreen, but also about who you are watching it with.
The blurring of television’s technological and formal boundaries through transmedia storytelling ... more The blurring of television’s technological and formal boundaries through transmedia storytelling and distribution has provided media producers in the UK with new ways of negotiating their audience’s relationship with content, bringing together multiple modes of ‘engagement’ with the same core screen content. Audiences may watch content, but may also write, read, edit, share, talk, interact and play, with ‘engagement’ occurring across and between individual media and involving multiple behaviours. Simultaneously, claiming to offer ‘better’ or ‘deeper’ viewer ‘engagement’ has become a marker of quality for UK broadcasters to the extent that it now operates as a political and strategic currency. Both the BBC and Channel 4 have positioned viewer ‘engagement’ as central to future-proofing their content and distribution strategies. Industry bloggers have explored the nature of ‘engaged’ vs ‘non-engaged’ viewers, heralding the former as the truly valuable members of the television audience. Within academia, a similar emphasis is occurring, with ‘engagement’ being examined in terms of how the (predominantly US) media industry measure and rationalise their audiences (Napoli, 2011; Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013). Within these discussions, however, what ‘engagement’ actually means in terms of audiences experience fin remains elusive. This paper will use industry practitioner interviews and audience focus groups to explore how the tensions and alignments in how ‘engagement’ with transmedia content is articulated and understood by those who create and those who experience such content. For many industry practitioners, being ‘engaged’ with content has become shaped by medium specificity and primarily linked with non-viewing behaviours including social media discussions, creating and sharing content, seeking out further information, or the exploration of additional website and app-based content. For audiences, however, it remains rooted in the text, emerging from well-crafted narratives and characters, that construct an emotional connection, regardless of the medium the story is told in. This paper will map and explore the nuanced differences in how ‘engagement’ is defined in order to offer a framework for examining how the experience of screen content shifts or remains consistent as it moves between and across the different media platforms of transmedia texts.
As transmedia content on UK television has evolved there has been a noticeable shift in industry ... more As transmedia content on UK television has evolved there has been a noticeable shift in industry strategy. Early experiments in transmediality explored the potential for transmedia storytelling. More recently, however, such experiments have been twinned with, and occasionally overtaken by, transmedia strategies that are based more on the proliferation, and integration, of distribution avenues. These strategies emerge in the concept of ‘digital estates’, a term increasingly being used by major broadcasters to classify digital technologies and catch up services as a core part of their activities. This paper will use the concept of ‘digital estates’ to explore transmediality as something that emerges through not only the strategies of the television industry, but also through the daily lives of audiences. It will initially examine industry discourse and strategy to explore the evolution of the transmedia television industry into ‘digital estates’ of interconnected services that incorporate digital technologies on an equal status to broadcast activities. It will go on to use empirical audience data generated by an innovative ethnographic project to explore the idea of domestic ‘digital estates’ and how moments of transmedia storytelling and distribution are bound up with the technological, social and temporal dynamics of daily life. By considering transmediality in such a way, it becomes possible to explore the work audiences put into creating transmedia experiences as well as the mundane, ephemeral and even passive modes of transmedia viewing that are increasing shaping the new television landscape.
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Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ‘the television audience’? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry’s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ‘television’ now means for its audiences.
This paper explores the debate around BBC Three as a case study to interrogate the politics of online distribution in the UK. In particular, it interrogates how the debate frames and re-negotiates ideas of what ‘television’ means within the context of public service, and the role that a large, publically funded institution such as the BBC should (and can) play. In doing so it contributes to wider debates within television studies about the impact of digital technologies and how they are transforming the broadcast landscape.
Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ‘the television audience’? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry’s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ‘television’ now means for its audiences.
This paper explores the debate around BBC Three as a case study to interrogate the politics of online distribution in the UK. In particular, it interrogates how the debate frames and re-negotiates ideas of what ‘television’ means within the context of public service, and the role that a large, publically funded institution such as the BBC should (and can) play. In doing so it contributes to wider debates within television studies about the impact of digital technologies and how they are transforming the broadcast landscape.
Within these discussions, however, what ‘engagement’ actually means in terms of audiences experience fin remains elusive. This paper will use industry practitioner interviews and audience focus groups to explore how the tensions and alignments in how ‘engagement’ with transmedia content is articulated and understood by those who create and those who experience such content. For many industry practitioners, being ‘engaged’ with content has become shaped by medium specificity and primarily linked with non-viewing behaviours including social media discussions, creating and sharing content, seeking out further information, or the exploration of additional website and app-based content. For audiences, however, it remains rooted in the text, emerging from well-crafted narratives and characters, that construct an emotional connection, regardless of the medium the story is told in. This paper will map and explore the nuanced differences in how ‘engagement’ is defined in order to offer a framework for examining how the experience of screen content shifts or remains consistent as it moves between and across the different media platforms of transmedia texts.