ABSTRACT
The kinds of multi-platform narrative worlds found with transmedia storytelling are only part of the picture when it comes to the shifting contemporary media landscape. In considering the perspective of the audience, the limitation of this single-focused model of transmediality becomes apparent. The question of how audiences are engaging with extensions of a television text (the games, websites and mobile content) also raises the question of how they are engaging with the core episodes themselves. Part of this potential, the part that demands a re-working of Jenkins's model, is the provision of new media as alternative televisual platforms. Anna Everett argues, ‘[N]ew digital media technologies make meaning not only by building a new text through absorption and transformation of other texts, but also by embedding the entirety of other texts (analog and digital) seemingly within the new’ (2003: 7). Televisual content is not just being transformed into transmedia storytelling; it is also being placed wholesale within digital interfaces. The viewers can continue to watch content via their television set and a broadcast structure, but they also have the option of watching on other platforms, with all the potential benefits and drawbacks that those platforms bring with them. This is what can be understood as ‘transmedia engagement’.
