A few thoughts on Transmedia and Tribalism

Our discussions in the last few weeks about tribalism and transmedia have me thinking about the forces we exert in our lives toward feeling secure. It seems to me that culture/society is all about the quest for light in the darkness. It all comes to feeling secure in the world we live in. Since the beginning of time, humans have worked toward understanding the big questions like where is the food coming from, how do we make it through the night alive and if its cold outside, how do we get warm. The basics of survival being air, water, food and shelter. It is this compulsion that sent us into tribes and built this multi-cultural world we live in. In the past, we lived inside a 20 or 30 mile radius of the place we were born. We lived with our families. To be outside the safety of the fire was to be ever in danger. We competed with our near neighbors for the food or banded with them into communities. Now, as we gradually spread out across the globe, able to travel anywhere, eat anything, know anybody, translate the babel, and contemplate the outer space, we return sometimes to the concept of tribe. It may seem we don't need the shelter of the common cave but we still need each other and the networks of money or power we inhabit. This long tail of applied interests we have been studying recently seems to me to be that reaching back into the small space of shared interests but with the twist that the internet can offer us neighbors from all corners of the global cave. We find we have shared interests with folks in other lands. We find that the threads which seem to divide us can also unite us but can also divide us yet again. The internet offers the same dangers but they seem more removed when they aren't right there knocking at the other side of the front door.

Transmedia storytelling takes the folk singer, the cave painter and the wandering minstrel and tosses in the Easter bunny, the corporate head cases, the librarian, the editor, the graffiti artist with his can poised on the edge of the brick wall and all these inordinate geeks and sets them loose together in a strange new tribe. One thing I note is that it takes a moderator, the uber-storyteller, to wind the threads together into something recognizable and remotely trackable. And even then perhaps the thing which attracts us most about the transmedia format is the stuff of fable, the idea that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if we could just find it. There could be an undiscovered country (clue) that not just anyone can find. We humans like stories that go on and on, serialized, remade, retold, reworked for every new generation. How else can you explain the remaking of classic films and books?