Miss Trollmédia a rencontré pour vous… Henry Jenkins
Paris, le 16 juillet 2010
Chers amis-lecteurs,
Ca va bien ?? Bon, on s’est bien amusé ensemble à chicaner autour des médias mais il est temps de conclure.
L’ère des trolls n’est pas près de se terminer car disons-le comme le sociologue Antonio A. Casilli :
“Les trolls court-circuitent l’espace public”
Pour ce dernier article, j’ai donc décidé d’être fair-play et de vous montrer qu’on a beau être troll, on peut quand même être open à la discussion.
Voici les quelques mots que j’ai échangé avec Henry Jenkins... notamment sur sa définition in-progress du transmédia.
A vous de bien juger !

Miss TrollMédia : I read your book « Convergence Culture » and noticed during your lecture at Centre Pompidou that your definition of transmedia is a bit different than a couple of years ago…. Your examples of transmedia storytelling now appear wider and more commercially oriented.
Is it due to excessive pressure from marketing agencies?
Henry Jenkins : The definition is wider, perhaps, than in the book. We’ve seen six years of development in the name of transmedia since the book was published. I described The Matrix franchise as a kind of experiment in a new kind of storytelling. Now there are many people who are consciously producing transmedia.
As an academic theorist, my goal is to try to describe, categorize, and explain these developments. There have certainly been developments by commercial producers, both brands and franchises, and this is part of the story of transmedia. But, there have been developments by other groups also.
For example, by educators or activists or independent artists, which are also part of the expanded scope of transmedia. I would say this is where the most dramatic expanasion of my theory has taken me. Another stop on this tour I spoke about Occupy Wall Street as a kind of transmedia franchise, a very provocative notion, but one which is scarcely simply an extension of market logics. And perhaps the biggest expansion: I am thinking more deeply about what happens when fans are considered as unofficial extenders of transmedia narratives. To do so, we have to shift from a focus on continuity to a focus on multiplicity, which does radically rewrite the original definition.
Miss TrollMédia : Transmedia storytelling needs a strong cultural universe. The Centre Pompidou, a multidisciplinary Center which is a crossroad between contemporary art, dancing, theatre and other cultural forms, has this strong cultural potential.
Do you think a French institution could use patrimonial contents to create transmedia storytelling knowing the strong confines regarding the funding by the state? Even with the commercial turnaround ?
Henry Jenkins : That’s a really interesting question. Of course, the rich contents of French culture lend themselves to transmedia, although the desire to defend and close off those contents from outside influences also create challenges, since transmedia is at its roots participatory and generative. I would argue that some of the contents of French culture are already deeply transmedia. We could talk about the church culture which produced Notre Dame as one which was seeking every available channel from which to proclaim God’s Word and which embraced artists who remixed core icons and stories of their culture to create new works.
We could look at writers such as Hugo or Balzac as master world builders, who incorporated many existing stories into their works. So, Hugo sets his Hunchback inside the world of Notre Dame, thus extending the story it tells in new directions, where-as another author sets Phantom of the Opera in the basement and sewers of the Paris Opera House.
So, French culture has a long history of transmedia extensions and explorations, and there’s time for a new generation to enter into this process. But, in a networked culture, transmedia is not simply a conservative force, not simply about transmission, so having gone there, French culture can not work with a logic which treats the original author as a god or which seeks to police the borders of who wants to participate. You can transmit French culture to the world, but then, paradoxically, it will become world culture.
Biographie
Henry Jenkins est Professeur of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts à l’University of Southern California. Pionnier des études sur les fans, théoricien célébré de la culture de la convergence, il a repensé l’écosystème médiatique à l’aune du tournant participatif, marqué par l’essor des productions transmédiatiques. Passée la phase utopiste, ces dernières s’inscrivent dans un paysage de plus en plus diversifié, traversé par une même culture en réseau. Il anime le blog http://www.henryjenkins.org/ et le compte twitter @HenryJenkins.
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Bonne route les amis, transmédiens ou non, webeux et webeuses de tous horizons.
Kissoux-lolez-vous les uns les autres,
Vôtre MTM.








