Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media, Bath Spa University
Dr Judith Fathallah Postdoctoral Researcher, Solent University
The fourth panel for the Evolution of Story looks at current practice in and across a range of emergent media and asks questions about how these new forms of storytelling can empower people and bring communities together.
On the one hand, Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University explores the ways in which new forms of storytelling can narrativize memories and contribute to the reconstruction of the cultural memory. Dr Freeman is Co-Director of the Centre for Media Research, Deputy Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, and leads the University’s Communication, Cultural and Media Studies submission to REF2021. His research examines cultures of media production across the borders of platforms and history and is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling (2016), Industrial Approaches to Media (2016), The World of The Walking Dead (2019), the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures (2018) and The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology (2014).
While on the other hand, Dr Judith Fathallah investigates the ways in which new forms of storytelling have emerged on 4chan and how these have served to empower women and girls in this notoriously hyper-masculine online space. Dr Fathallah received her PhD in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies from Cardiff University in 2014, where she also taught. Following this, she lectured at Bangor University before taking up her post at Solent. Judith’s research interests lie in the areas of digital cultures, fan studies, convergence between media industries and users, user-generated content, and popular culture.
Be me, 24yo femanon’: Greentext stories as feminine space on 4chan
4chan is presented by the popular press as an aggressively masculine space, inhabited almost solely by males. In reality, around 30% of 4chan users are girls and women, according to the site’s own demographic statistics. As part of a larger project exploring feminine space-claiming and subcultural capital building on 4chan, this paper examines the usage and spread of the ‘24yo femanon’ story meme. This is a series of stories in the ‘greentext’ style, told in first person according to a range of stylistic and content-focused conventions established across the site, such as the literal usage of green text and opening with the imperative that the reader ‘be me’: i.e, a demand for empathy and identification. In this series, the narrator is a single 24-year-old woman who endures a series of social and romantic blunders.
We will explore how the first-person voice intersects with other conventions of 4chan to build empathy despite and because of gender boundaries, in conjunction with other strategies of subcultural capital claiming popular to the site and related web spaces. These conventions include a pose of social isolation and awkwardness, taboo humour, and negotiating the value of truth in storytelling on an anonymous site. We will pay particular attention to how the use of a ‘femanon’ character interacts with misogynistic and aggressive discursive norms. This contributes to a clearer picture both of 4chan and its user base, demonstrating how this new form of storytelling can be appropriated to resituate women and girls from a passive object of online and offline violence to active participants in the construction of gendered meaning.
Desarmados: Narrativising Colombian Cultural Memory Across Media
‘Transmedia’, by itself, simply describes some kind of structured relationship between different media platforms and practices (Jenkins 2016). But how can we understand the general practice of ‘using multiple media technologies to present information … through a range of textual forms’ (Evans 2011: 1) as that which deals with history in a progressive, educational way? This paper theorises current work from Desarmados (Disarmed), an internationally funded project supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture. Desarmados aims to harness oft-commercial practices of transmedia storytelling as tools for documenting the Colombian citizens of Medellín and for narrativizing their memories, reconstructing the cultural memory of the Colombian armed conflict across animations, games, social media, and an app. In asking how story can play a transformative role in how Colombia’s violent history is understood, the project shows that the transmedial telling of stories – with their innate power to engage audiences across interconnected, participatory media platforms – can offer rich, diverse and democratic understandings of history, inspiring acceptance for others.
This paper thus explores how this project’s narrativization of the causes, politics and impacts of the Colombian armed conflict across apps, social media, video letters, websites, drawings, classrooms, merchandise, etc. allows for not only a new way of experiencing and remembering history, but argues that the narrativization of history across transmedia platforms can reshape that history for the better, creating new ways of reconciling the past and present. In doing so, the paper raises questions about how the borders of transmedia storytelling – itself so commonly understood as a commercial media practice associated with Hollywood franchises and marketing – may be expanded to that which rebuilds broken communities and helps to bind disparate people together in a common socio-political cause.
Even, E. (2011). Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and daily life. New York Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2016). Transmedia What? [online] Available at: https://immerse.news/transmedia-what-15edf6b61daa [Accessed 21 Jan. 2020].