My mom always told me that if someone has already said something well, it’s better to just borrow their word than to make less good. 🙂 So for all what follows, I’ll just borrow words to Henry Jenkins, Pierre Levy, Frank Rose and some who have already spoke about this matter better than me.

First maybe it’s good to remind what transmedia is :

Transmedia uses multiple media platforms tell « something » (game, story, etc). Each media piece—whether it’s a comic, novels, video games, mobile apps, or a film—functions as a standalone story experience—complete and satisfying but it also contributes to a larger narrative. The process is cumulative and each piece adds richness and detail to the story world (such as character backstories and secondary plotlines).

Transmedia storytelling is participatory and asks the public to be active. The unfolding story design creates the motivation to engage with other participants, seek out other parts of the story, and contribute to the narrative by adding content. Transmedia stories can be simple, across a few low-tech media platforms or break down the barriers between the story and reality by bringing the narrative out into the real world, in the form of complex and exciting alternative reality games (ARGs), where participants engage with narrative elements and characters using real world locations as part of the storyworld.

So a transmedia public could be resumed like this :

• They are interactive audience. No more potato couch. They are not only media-consumers but also media-producers, media-critics, media-publicists, media-distributors.

I can also ad a quote which inspired me this question and which we can maybe discuss.

« Pierre Levy speculates about what kind of aesthetic works would respond to the demands of his knowledge cultures. First, he suggests that the “distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend” to form a “circuit” (not quite a matrix) of expression, with each participant working to “sustain the activity” of the others. The artwork will be what Levy calls a “cultural attractor,” drawing together and creating common ground between diverse communities; we might also describe it as a cultural activator, setting into motion their decipherment, speculation, and elaboration. »

Henry Jenkins, convergence culture, where old and new media collide, p.95