ABSTRACT

New media storytelling can be seen as a catch-all phrase for a wide variety of storytelling styles, modes, and approaches which make use of digital media. This chapter reconsiders the meanings of pervasive storytelling from a transmedia rather than a games theory perspective. The extant literature exploring pervasive storytelling is almost universally preoccupied with either the role of mobile devices, games design, or audiences, and while the scholarship around transmedia storytelling has contributed to this it has also been instrumental in positioning story at the centre. Henry Jenkins (2006) brought the term “transmedia storytelling” into mainstream media studies as a way to describe, rather than define, an approach to storytelling that exploited the growing ubiquity of information and communication technologies and responded to a new generation of audiences. His continued examination of transmedia storytelling has been groundbreaking and served to progress understandings of how the nature of storytelling has been irrevocably disrupted by technology, however an in-depth exploration of the relationship between story and place is absent from the current literature. This requires not only an exploration of the influence of platforms or devices but of how people and place have created and responded to the pervasiveness of stories in the contemporary landscape. In many contemporary landscapes the immersion in ubiquitous narratives can be involuntary. Rather than a further investigation of the innovations in form for storytelling, this chapter and the book more broadly examines function. How do new technologies create stories in and about place, and how can these stories shape our societies?