Remember the days when we were so enthralled about live web cams that view a live scene happening somewhere else across the world?   What ever happened to that thrill?  These days we are more excited to look in on the live scenes showing us newborn puppies, birds hatching, etc.  (I swear it’s not just me: almost 25 million views of Shiba Inu pups to date since Jan 2010.  Come on, you know you wanna).

In other words, while media funding agencies and other media supporters of crossmedia and transmedia stories are valuing innovation and looking for those requirements to be met, to what degree are we valuing novelty over storytelling?  When we hear legacy and innovation in the same paragraph, I even wonder how much is wishful thinking?  I wonder how much is weighed on something “new” vs. something that truly moves us?

Twitter fever has died down since its peak a year ago, but one of the reasons why I love twitter so much is because I get access to links to article I really want to read.   Of course.  But the other reason why I love twitter is because of micro-fiction.  The 140 characters limitation is a novelty.  But the micro format of micro-fiction reflects those moments of feeling we experience in our day to day lives, or those comments we get from others that catch us unexpectedly.  Often profound, sometimes simply silly, almost always fleeting, and like the hint of dreams when we wake: remarkably human.

People have talked about microfiction as being a new thing (although it’s not really).   But from that aspect, is microfiction simply a novelty that will fall to by way side?  Or did the twitter application simply allow us to discover (or rediscover, really) something about ourselves that feels relevant for today?

To me, this is how we must approach transmedia.  Transmedia should not be a distribution of a narrative property across platforms just because this is what transmedia is supposed to be.  It’s all to easy to say, wow, now that Transmedia producer has been recognized by The Producers Guild of America, shouldn’t we better get on the bandwagon with this cross-media thing and think of how to get our projects into the digital space.  And by golly, let’s do it in a flashy new way.  We have to be on facebook!  We have to be on twitter!  Have to have a mobile app! What’s this Chatroulette I’ve been hearing about?! (careful with that one, kids).  We need to see what is truly right for our audience.  What would be right for us, if we were them?  And even if we personally are not a huge mobile user, for example, we can certainly use our imagination to identify with the experience.

So what works?  Are we really going about telling our story in the right way?    What we know about ourselves may need teasing out.  It may even need new circumstances to force it out.  But I have always said, and will continue to say, that while technology has changed, and behavior has changed, fundamentally humans have not.  We will always love novelty for novelty’s sake.  But we experience the world and re-imagine those experiences.  We think and conceptualize the world in stories.  Pay attention to yourself.  Look inwards.  Answers are there.