A COMPLEX MEDIA LANDSCAPE

Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multimodal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed, to the point that “the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers” (Sandvoss, “Reception” 246). Audiences operate as active users of media content by exercising control over their viewing schedules, and by integrating the media texts they are interested in into their lives through new patterns of consumption. This freedom in the modes of accessing and engaging with diversified media material has also benefited from the development of transmedia storytelling. The expression refers to the increasingly popular delivery of related media content across a set of media platforms, resulting in a particular “narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.)” (Scolari 587). Movies, games, TV series, novels, webisodes, podcasts, comic books, fan fiction and many other media forms all come together in creating a rich, expanded story-world. In his seminal work Convergence Culture (2006), Henry Jenkins asserts:

Elizabeth Evans, who in 2011 carried out a study on audience engagement with online and mobile phone content related to the TV shows Spooks and 24, defines the same concept as “the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms” (Evans, Transmedia Television 1).