This book examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media. Across an international roster of essays, this book establishes a transdisciplinary theory for the ‘transmedia self’, exploring how technological ubiquity and digital self-determination combine with themes and disciplines such as celebrity culture, fandom, play, politics, and ultimately broader self-conception and projection to inform the creation of transmedia identities in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the book repositions transmediality as key to understanding the formation of identity in a post-digital media culture and transmedia age, where our lives are interlaced, intermingled, and narrativised across a range of media platforms and interfaces. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, and politics.

Calling attention to the unseen mediation and re-mediation of life narratives in online and physical spaces, this ground-breaking exploration uncovers the ever-changing strategies that authors, artists, publishers, curators, archivists and social media corporations adopt to shape, control or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Concentrating on contemporary life texts found in the material book, museums, on social media and archives that present perceptions of individuality and autonomy, Reading Mediated Life Narratives exposes the traces of personal, cultural, technological, and political mediation that must be considered when developing reading strategies for such life narratives. Amy Carlson asks such questions as what agents act upon these narratives; what do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose; how do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”; and finally, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? An examination of the range of sites at which vulnerability and intervention can occur, Carlson does not condemn but stages an intercession, showing us how it is increasingly necessary to register mediated agents and processes modifying the witnessing or recuperation of original texts that could condition our reception. With careful thought on how we remember, how we create and control our pictures, voices, words, and records, Reading Mediated Life Narratives reveals how we construct and negotiate our social identities and memories, but also what systems control us.

The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences captures the ways in which audiences and audience researchers are adapting to emerging social, cultural, market, technical and environmental conditions. Bringing together 40 original essays, this anthology explores how our constantly changing encounters with media are complex, contradictory and increasingly commercialized in the modern world. Each specially commissioned chapter by both early-career and experienced international scholars surveys new conceptualizations and constitutions of audiences, and assesses key issues, themes and developments within the field. As such, this companion cements itself as an indispensable guide for students and researchers who seek a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics in media audiences. The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences is an accessible, landmark tool which enhances our understanding of how media is utilized through advanced empirical research and methodological enquiry. It is a must-read for media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, humanities and social science scholars and students.

Transmedia Storytelling explores the theories and describes the use of the imagery and techniques shared by producers, authors and audiences of the entertainment, information and brand communication industries as they create and develop their stories in this new, interactive ecosystem.

"This book examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media. Across an international roster of essays, this book establishes a transdisciplinary theory for the 'transmedia self', exploring how technological ubiquity and digital self-determination combine with themes and disciplines such as celebrity culture, fandom, play, politics, and ultimately broader self-conception and projection to inform the creation of transmedia identities in the 21st century. Specifically, the book repositions transmediality as key to understanding the formation of identity in a post-digital media culture and transmedia age, where our lives are interlaced, intermingled, and narrativised across a range of media platforms and interfaces. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, and politics"--

Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious. This book examines: the nature of sacred space in virtual contexts technology as a vehicle for sacred texts who we are when we go online what rituals have in common with games and how they work online what happens to community when people worship online how religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires. Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today’s virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice – it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux.

This edited collection explores the roles of material culture in socializing young people through their play. Authors explore notions of play from diverse cultural viewpoints, as well as the impact of technology on play, and the kinds of resistant and liberatory play children might partake in. Informed by the field of performance studies, the book considers play as performance, asking questions about embodiment at physical, relational, and ideological levels, and considering «performance» to be part of identity construction, as well as a component of enculturation into various societies. Of interest are the ways in which children try on various identities through their play, and how these identities may (re)define their attitudes, values, and beliefs. As curriculum and instruction have become open to the use of games - and children's material culture more generally - as a forum for learning, intersections have emerged between schooling and culture at large. This book broadens the scope of «learning» to investigate how these cultural artifacts are open or closed to multiple perspectives and narratives, as well as how their use is constituted both in and out of the classroom.

The book investigates the new forms of empowered agency possessed by national audiences with reference to two particular television texts: Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The two popular American TV shows are highly successful products of the convergence era, characterized by trans-media storytelling as a strategy and the interconnection of audiences’ multiple practices of reception and fruition. The book argues how the analysis of audience engagement with trans-media texts will disclose important information about the various ways people organize their lives around media and how these activities help them to make sense of the world they live in.

This timely research handbook offers a systematic and comprehensive examination of the election laws of democratic nations. Through a study of a range of different regimes of election law, it illuminates the disparate choices that societies have made concerning the benefits they wish their democratic institutions to provide, the means by which such benefits are to be delivered, and the underlying values, commitments, and conceptions of democratic self-rule that inform these choices.

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.