ABSTRACT
This chapter will present a broad overview of the larger industrial and cultural configurations that encouraged what is now called transmedia story telling. This will help to show the broader context within which trans media storytelling first took shape and evolved as part of the economic fab ric of twentiethcentury American media industries. For as I argued in the introduction, only by looking to the past can the contingencies of the present be more richly understood. And this means reunderstanding transmedia storytelling as the result of different industrial and cultural determinants of the past; it means reframing historical media forms in order to illuminate or even to challenge our understanding of the present media moment.
