Transmedia Selves

This book examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media. Across an international roster of essays, this book establishes a transdisciplinary theory for the 'transmedia self', exploring how technological ubiquity and digital self-determination combine with themes and disciplines such as celebrity culture, fandom, play, politics, and ultimately broader self-conception and projection to inform the creation of transmedia identities in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the book repositions transmediality as key to understanding the formation of identity in a post-digital media culture and transmedia age, where our lives are interlaced, intermingled, and narrativised across a range of media platforms and interfaces. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, and politics.

James Dalby is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK. He specialises in a range of disciplines within the creative and tech industries, including XR and immersive (virtual reality, Web3 etc.), AI, transmedia, cinematography, and visual special effects, and has published and spoken internationally on immersive and XR, transmedia, social technologies, and media economics. His work also includes the development of pioneering undergraduate curricula, in which disruptive methodologies and workflows, such as Design Thinking, are structurally embedded as part of an overall paradigm. James is currently undertaking a PhD studying correlations between the use of social, immersive, and Web3 technologies, and perceived chronoceptive distortion, and has further interests in tech, Philosophy, posthumanism, and transhumanism. Matthew Freeman is Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, where he is the Research Lead for Film and Media and Co-director of The Centre for Media Research in the Bath School of Art, Film and Media. Matthew led the university's Communication, Cultural and Media Studies submission to REF2021, and is currently the Course Leader for the the BA (Hons) Media Communications degree. Matthew is the Founder and Director of Immersive Promotion Design Ltd., a new breed of R&D-led marketing consultancy that supports virtual and augmented reality creatives and businesses to better communicate with their audiences about the magic of immersive content. The company is based at The Studio in Bath, Bath Spa University's new enterprise and innovation hub for creative technology.

Introduction: Conceptualising the Transmedia Self; PART I: Communication of the Self; 1. Story of the (Virtual) Self: Transmedial Narrative Construction through Social Media Usage; 2. Personal Storytelling: A Semiotics Approach to Constructing Identities across Media; 3. Professional Transmedia Selves: Finding a Place for Enterprise Social Media; 4. The Post-Digital Self: How Transmedia Dissolves the Boundaries of Work and Tourism; PART II: Technologies of the Self; 5. The Transtemporal Self: Transmedia, Self, and Time; 6. Crossing Space-Time Action; 7. Geotagging the Self: Analysing the Locative Dimension of Constructed Transmedia Identities 8. Made in My Image: Co-Produced Fantasy and the Politics of Play; PART III: Politics of the Self; 9. Trans, Media and [In]Visibility: Trans Representation in the Transmedia Era; 10.The Manosphere: Incel as Transmedial Construction; 11. #PrayforAmazonia: Transmedia Mobilisation within National, Transnational and International Identities; 12. The Kabir Project: Using Transmedia Work to Disrupt Right-Wing Narratives of Othering