I found that there is an interesting relationship between the Death of the Author and the born of the reader in Transmedia storytelling.  I am interested in Transmedia as process, since Jenkins defines transmedia as a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. Transmedia stories, as defined by Jenkins, are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This world building encourages encyclopedic impulse. It is interesting how Barthes foresaw this stating “we know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”.

Transmedia practices may expand the audiences by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. Ideally, each “episode” must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. With “additive comprehension,” we understand more of the whole by adding a little piece of information.  According to Jenkins, this is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence, to refer to new social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society. Participants pool information and tap each other expertise as they work together to solve problems, think through concepts. Transmedia narratives also function as textual activators – setting into motion the production, assessment, and archiving information.

A transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life. The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own. Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media franchises into new directions which reflect the reader’s desire to “fill in the gaps” they have discovered in the commercially produced material. This is also presented in Barthes stating “the reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”.