Psychology of Media & Technology

LEGO did a great job of activating two profound assets in their transmedia efforts: 1) a product that was itself essentially about nontraditional storytelling and 2) a highly psychologically-invested customer base who had linked their own stories with LEGO over a lifespan of play.

By allowing brands to enter a storyworld, they become peers and friends.  When done thoughtfully and seamlessly (in other words, it adds to the story fabric and doesn't trigger the "oh look, product placement" inner voice in the viewer's head) it transforms what is essentially 'advertising' into WOM.  14% of people believe ads from the source; 77% believe WOM.  Very powerful shift.

Harnessing the power of narrative and the passions of fans has tremendous potential for innovative approaches to CSR.

Eager to learn more about 'For the Records' and it's dynamics--interactivity, audience participation, multiple threads--and where the gaming elements intersect with the other elements.  All the things that create a rich sense of narrative transportation and multi-sensory experience may go a long way to shift perceptions through empathy.

The logical extension of this is as audiences change, it is critical to set aside your assumptions about who they are and what they want and go find out.  This is why customer/audience persona development from a psychological perspective is so important.

Great article by Frank Rose. Of particular interest to me was the underground map showing the linkages between the various areas of storytelling.  First, I'm always interested in how stories translate into visual representation.  Second, when you look at different 'stops on the lines' you can see how quickly the world is becoming transmedia, to the point of making that term redundant or perhaps equivalent to a 'coordinated and creative use of media tools to craft and extend a story.'  We might more accurately the underground stops hubs and nodes given the interretlationships among platforms and the increasingly blurry boundaries that aren't shown.  However the subway/underground metaphor more clearly allows content to ride a type of media.  Yet Mad Men, for example, really intersects other lines because , among other things, of fan co-creation.  The map itself raises interesting questions, such as where do you define 'real world'?  Is that a marker of the story's origins or where it is experienced?  But any visual metaphor or article that gets you asking good questions is effective in my book.  And Frank is always good at that.

Transmedia projects are for those willing to play the long game

An excellent article that explores the link between Minecraft and the concept of transmedia education.  It underscores the importance of defining transmedia as a cross-media experience and critical 21st century literacy (and not immediately escalating to images of a Hollywood franchise).  It also contains links to a couple of very good 'transmedia education' resources if you haven't read them.

The media isn't the message (and Jeff Gomez never says that).  It is the grand disrupter, the gamechanger, the brain bender.  The innovations in media technologies have upended traditional storytelling across all industries and challenged storytellers to learn new tools.  Media technologies and network connectivity have also, as Gomez points out, rewired consumer's brain with a new set of assumptions and expectation about the function and role of media.  Where media becomes part of the message, is in how it frames content within that set of expectations and meanings.  Our expectations of content, impact and interactivity are vastly different across platforms, i.e. mobile versus the big screen or web versus TV or digital versus paper.  The new environment as Gomez notes, demands integration of expectations in the content design

Transmedia approaches encourage (or even force) people to actively acknowledge and design for a fluid and multi-dimensional, rather than linear, media environment.  For the human brain, stories are not constrained by what's on the page. Transmedia begins to replicate how we think and encourages producers to innovate in each platform to create multiple touchpoints that facilitate our natural ability to imagine, project, expand and experience.   

Bushman's 3 keys is a great article because there is compelling psychology underlying all of them.  My favorite of Bushman's three keys are 2 and 3.  Key 2 is setting and keeping expectations.  However innovative your project, he speaks to the importance of creating rhythms and patterns so the audience can develop expectations.  From a neuro-cognitive perspective, the brain seeks patterns and derives pleasure and comfort from finding a structure and therefore can anticipate with pleasure new developments rather than feel frustrated.  In Key 3, Bushman says trust your team.  We often see articles about how you can't control your audience, but few about the same for the internal team.  Controlling people takes a lot of effort and at the end, nobody's happy.  Key 3 indicates how well Bushman has inspired his people and established team purpose and affiliation so that they can further the project with autonomy, increasing, no doubt, their own emotional investment it the characters and the project's success.  I would argue that right after having a good story comes having a good leader to achieve success.

Shows the artistry & skill of planning, coordination and development that enables the audience to experience a story across multiple media platforms.  You have to have something solid to make a good pitch.

Transmedia depends on engaging very primal psychologies--empathy, curiosity, the need for certainty and self-relevance--to get audience participation.  The power is, as always, in the story.  But the beauty of a transmedia strategy--compared to crossmedia--is that you don't have to tell the whole story at one time or in one medium, thus heightening the psychological response and increasing the motivation to explore and contribute.  I love the Toshiba/Intel piece.