The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 2) The Story Wars

The Rise and Fall of a Story-Showing Empire

By Peter Usagi

The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers...
Image via Panicposters

After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium.  They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience.  These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.

People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood.  Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce?  It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”

We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).

All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.

Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda.  Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.  

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them.  They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching.  Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.

Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination?
Image via Wikipedia

If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it.  Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.

This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot),  you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):

If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?

If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society?  Perhaps...

Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise.  One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 1) To Arms...

The Book Thump Heard Round The World

After more than thirty years of fits and starts, a storytelling revolution is finally about to begin.  Naturally, the catalyst was a book; surprisingly, however, it was a high school text book...

Immersive and interactive digital books will
soon be jumping off screens everywhere...
(Image via Creative Commons) 

Earlier this week, Apple announced the release of iBooks Author, a new content creation platform for their ubiquitous iPad.  However, unlike most of Apple’s hardware or software announcements, this one has seemed to garner little public interest.  This could be attributed to the fact that according to Apple’s keynote, the only things that were “unveiled” were a new kind of digital school textbook, and a software program to make them.

School, text books, and reading…ho-hum.

The average person is as likely to sit through a keynote presentation on those two topics, as work on their taxes for fun. And this new software isn’t even wrapped in shiny high-tech aluminum: a baby iPad to combat Amazon’s encroaching Kindle Fire.  As I watched the footage of the keynote, and it become apparent there was going to be no iText, iTome, or iTablet reader—just a pair of “un-Jobs” like Apple executives walking the audience through the pages of a digital biology text book—I was sorely tempted to give up early on the hour long presentation.

Apple Education Keynote, January 2012

But I’m very glad I didn’t.  It isn't often that you get the chance to be on the ground floor of history as it happens.  Stop, and bookmark this moment in your life (it happens right around time marker 23:52 in the video above).

It might seem like a trivial thing, but imagine if you could remember the exact moment mankind learned to use fire as a tool, or how to farm, or how to surf the net on the world’s first web browser?  Imagine if you could remember where you were, and what you were doing, when a major cultural revolution happened?

News flash: it already has...

"The evolution of e-readers..."
(Image via Wikipedia)

Join My Cult Free Ebook

For the newcomers, and in preparation for the 1st edition release of Party At The World's End, here's a free version of Join My Cult:

Join My Cult is a subversive, satirical novel written by James Curcio and released by New Falcon Publications (publisher of some notable counter-culture authors such Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and Aleister Crowley). It is a work of collaborative fiction based on real events. (Wikipedia)

Join My Cult

An interview with John Wisniewski about this book.

Fallen Nation eBook downloads

Out of curiosity I recently looked into the download figures on the Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning eBook. The tally is a bit over 55,000, with some possibility that it could be more as the metrics on one of those hosts started several months after I posted it. (There are versions on a couple different hosts.)

Though it's hard to know how many people downloaded the book and never read it, that still seems like a considerable number to me. I actually made the decision to release the novel as a free eBook, along with the print version on Amazon, after getting stonewalled by the press time and again.

Well, the press is still stonewalling me on this title because I released it print on demand- though I'd love if that changes as this number keeps going up. (Any takers?) In the meantime, I'm happy it's getting out there. And I will keep moving forward...

Fallen Nation PDF

Just got word that the Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning eBook that's on Greylodge is about ready to cross the 20,000 download mark.

The truth is, though of course I would prefer that I had those many sales, I'd rather people read it than not at all. And I hope that some of those people enjoy the experience, and if they don't come back to purchase Fallen Nation, they look for my next work. (Note: it's usually cheaper to order a book than it is to print it, when you've factored in the ink and paper.)