Global Convergence Cultures

Book excerpt: Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality is so much more than global movie franchises. Different cultures around the world are now making new and often far less commercial uses of transmediality, applying this phenomenon to the needs and structures of a nation and re-thinking it in the form of cultural, political and heritage projects. This book offers an exploration of these national and cultural systems of transmediality around the world, showing how national cultures – including politics, people, heritage, traditions, leisure and so on – are informing transmediality in different countries. The book spans four continents and twelve countries, looking across the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Estonia, USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, India, and Russia.