Programs and Areas
Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy
Digital Media and Composition Visiting Scholar Talk
Debra Journet (University of Louisville)
Friday, 2 May 2008
Noon to 1:30 pm (Denney 311): graduate students and faculty colleagues are invited to an informal lunch (pizza) and conversation with Professor Journet focused on "Composing Your Professional Identity"
(For this event, please rsvp with Carolyn Wilkins (wilkins.8@osu.edu) by Wednesday, 30 April so that we can get a head count for lunch.)
From 3:30-5:00 pm (Denney 311)
"Literate Arts in Convergence Culture: LOST as Transmedia Narrative"
This presentation will examine the television show LOST as an example of what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls "convergence culture": a phenomenon characterized not only by "media convergence" (flow of media over multiple platforms and the resulting migratory behavior of media audiences), but also "participatory culture" (interaction between consumers and producers) and "collective intelligence" (collaborative pooling of resources and skills). Convergence culture, Jenkins argues, creates new forms of "transmedia storytelling," in which the narrative experience is so large it flows over multiple media and so complex readers/consumers must work together in "knowledge communities" to understand its full detail and coherence.
LOST is not only a television show but also a complex multimodal and multimedia "text" for those viewers willing to follow its story over multiple platforms: e.g., pod-casts, websites, 800-numbers, novels and games. These new "migratory" demands create literate challenges for participants that are both connected to and different from the ways we read and write about established narrative genres, such as novels. That is, responding to LOST requires much the same kind of interpretive work used with other types of imaginative literature: e.g., close reading, identifying intertextual references, debating authorial intention, and related critical activities. But it also calls upon new literate challenges: e.g., moving among multiple media, discerning how narrative is shaped by media and mode, retrieving and sharing information and analyses in virtual environments, and building interpretations collaboratively in communities of participants. LOST, as an early attempt to construct a transmedia story, points to the new sorts of narrative experiences we may expect to find in convergence culture. As both a text to be read and a prompt for viewer and reader response, LOST suggests the kinds of interactive, collaborative, and participatory literate practices that media convergence may promote
