From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-Narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience

Screens, as technological but also narrative and social devices, alter reading and writing practices. Users consume vids, read stories on the Web, and produce creative contents on blogs or Web archives, etc. Uses of seriality and transmediality are here discussed, that is watching, reading, and writing as interpreting, as well as respective and reciprocal uses of iteration and interaction (with technologies and with others). A specific figure of users or readers will be defined as a skilful and literate audience: fans on archives (FanFiction.net-FFNet, and Archive of Our Own-AO3). Fans produce serial and transmedia narratives based upon their favourite TV Shows, publish on-line, and often produce discourses or meta-discourse on this writing practice or on writing in general.The broader perspective of reception studies allows us to develop a three-step methodology that develops into a process. The first step is an ethnographic approach based on practices and competencies of users. The second step develops and clarifies the ethnographic dimension into an ethno-narrative approach, which aims at analysing mutual links between signs, texts, and uses of reading and writing. The main question is that of significance and meaning. The third step elaborates upon interactions in a technological and mediated environment. Social, participative, or collaborative and multimodal dimensions of interacting are yet regarded as key elements in reshaping a reading-writing cultural practice. The model proposed is a socio-narrative device, which hangs upon three dimensions: techno-narrative, narratological, and socio-narrative. These three dimensions of a shared narrative universe illustrate the three steps process. Each step also offers specific uses of interacting: an ethnographic approach of fictional expectation, a narrative ethnography of iteration and transformation, and a socio-narrative perspective on dialogism and recognition. A specific but significant example of fans' uses of reading and interacting will illustrate each step of the methodology. This qualitative approach of individual uses aims to be representative of fans' cultural practice (See Appendix 1). We will discuss cultural uses of appropriation. How do reading, interpreting, writing, and rewriting, that is to say interacting, produce meaning, create identities, and build up our relation to others and to the (story)world? Given our interest in embodied and appropriated meanings, appropriation will be revealed as an open cultural process, which can question the conflict and/or the convergence of the old and the new in cultural practices, and the way former and formal dichotomies have to be re-evaluated. We will take an interest in the composition of meaning that unfolds a cultural and critical process, from acknowledgement to recognition, a process where iteration and transformation are no longer opposites but part of a continuum.From Users' Competencies to the Composition of Narrative and Social Skills: A Fictional ExpectationThe pragmatic question of real uses steers our approach toward reading and writing in a mediated environment. Michel de Certeau's work first encourages us to apply his concepts of strategies and tactics to institutional strategies of engaging the audience and to real audience tactics of appropriation or diversion. Real uses are traceable on forums, discussions groups, weblogs, and archives. A model can be built upon digital tracks of use left on fan fiction archives: types of audience, interactions, and types of usage are here considered.Media Types Interaction Types Usage Types Media audienceConsumerSkilfulViewingReadingInformation searchContent production (informative, critical, and creative)Multimedia audienceConsumerSkilful+Online readingE-shoppingSharingRecommendationDiscussionInformative content productionCross-media audienceConsumerSkilful+SerendipityPutting objects in perspectiveNetworkingCritical content productionTransmedia audienceConsumerSkilfulInvolvedPrecursor+Understanding enhanced narrativesValue judgments, evaluationUnderstanding economic dimensions of the media systemCreative content productionTable 1 (Cailler and Masoni Lacroix)Users gear their reading and writing practices toward one medium, or toward multiple media in multi-, cross-, and trans- dimensions. These dimensions engage different and specific kinds of content production, and also the way users think about their relation to the media system. We focus on cumulative uses needed in an evolving media system. Depending on their desire for cultural products issued from creative and entertainment industries, audiences can be consumer-oriented or skilful, but also what we term "involved" or "precursor." Their interactive capacity within these industries allows audiences to produce informative, narrative, discursive, creative (or re-creative), and critical content. An ethnographic approach, based upon uses, understands that accumulating, crossing, and mastering different uses requires available and potential competencies and literacies, which may be immediately usable, or which have to be gained.Figure 1 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)The English language enables us to use different words to specify competencies, from ability to skill (when multiple abilities tend towards appropriation), to capability and competency (when multiple skills tend towards cultural practice). This introduces an enhancement process, which describes the way users accumulate and cross competencies to enhance their capability of understanding a multimedia or transmedia system, shaped by multiple semiotic systems and literacies.Abilities and skills represent different literacies that can be distributed in four groups-literacy, graphic literacy, digital literacy and interactive literacy, converging to a core of competencies including cognitive capability, communicative capability, cultural capability and critical capability. Note that critical skills appear below in bold italics. Digital LiteracyTechnical ability / Computational ability / Digital ability or skill Informational skill Visual LiteracyGraphic abilityVisual abilitySemiotic skillSymbolic skill Core of CompetenciesCognitive capabilityCommunicative capabilityCultural capabilityCritical capability Interactive LiteracyInteractional abilitySpectatorial abilityCollective abilityAffective skill LiteracyNarrative ability or skill / Linguistic ability / Reading and interpreting ability / Mimetic and fictional ability Discursive skillTable 2 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)Our first illustration exhibits the diversity, even the profuse and confused multiplicity, of cultural influences and preferences of a fan, which he or she comprehends as a whole.Gabihime, born on 6 October in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the United States, joined FFNet in 2001, and last updated her profile in September of 2010. She has written 44 stories for a variety of fandoms, and she belongs to two fandom communities. She has written one story about Twin Peaks (1990-) for an annual fandom gift exchange in 2008. Within Twin Peaks, her favourite and only romantic pair is Audrey Horne and Dale Cooper. Pairing represents a formal and cultural use of fan fiction writing, and also a favourite variation of the original text. Gabihime proposes notes to follow the story:I love Twin Peaks, and I love Audrey Horne particularly, and the rich stilted imagery of the show certainly […] I started watching my favourite season one episodes and reading the script notes for them. When I got to the 4-5 episode break (when Cooper comes back from visiting Jacques's cabin to the delightful sounds of the Icelandic junket roaring at their big shindig and finds Audrey in his bed) I discovered that this scene was originally intended to be left extremely ambiguous.Two main elements can be highlighted. Love founds fans' relation to the characters and the text. Interaction is based on this affect or emotion. Ambiguity, real or presumed, leads to what can be called a fictional expectation. This strong motive to interact within a text means that readers have to fill in the blanks of the text (Jenkins, "Transmedia"). They fill it with their desire for a character, a pairing, and a story. Another illustration of a fan's affective investment, Lynzee005 (see below) specifies that her fiction, "shows what I hope happened in between the scenes to which we were treated in the series."Gabihime does not write fan fiction stories anymore. She has a web site where she posts her stories and links to other fan art, vids, or fiction, as well as a blog where she writes her original fiction, and various meta-narrative and/or meta-discursive productions, including a wiki, Tumblr account, LiveJournal page, and Twitter account.A Narrative Ethnography of Fans' Production Content: Acculturation as Iteration and TransformationWe can briefly focus on another partial but significant example of narratives and discourses of a fan, in the perspective of a qualitative and iterative approach. We will then emphasise that narratives and discourses circulate, in other words that they are written and reformulated in and on different periods and platforms, but also that narratives use iteration and variation (Eco 1985).Lynzee005 was born in 1985 in Canada. She joined FFNet in 2008 and last updated her profile in September 2015. She has a beta profile, which means that she reads and reviews other fans' work

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