Article

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
The transmediated self: New Media Technologies
2014, Vol. 20(2) 233–249
Life between the digital ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856513501423
con.sagepub.com

J Sage Elwell
Texas Christian University, USA

Abstract
We are spending more and more of our lives online. Meanwhile, the combination of constant
connectivity and ubiquitous computing is folding the material world itself into an expansive
‘Internet of things’. As a result the line between life online and life off-line has become blurred in an
existential equivalence of the digital and the analog. In this networked ecosystem, the old Web 1.0
notion of an anonymous digital persona that is separate from off-line, analog self-identity is no lon-
ger applicable. A new paradigm for conceptualizing the dialectic of digital–analog self-identity is
needed. To that end, I argue that in our age of networked connectivity, self-identity is being fash-
ioned according to the aesthetics of transmedia production. I conclude that the transmedia para-
digm, taken as a model for interpreting self-identity in the liminal space between the virtual and the
real, reveals a transmediated self constituted as a browsable story-world that is integrated, dis-
persed, episodic, and interactive.

Keywords
Digital aesthetics, network, self-identity, social media, the Internet, transmedia, ubiquitous
computing

Introduction
We are spending more and more of our lives online. Mobile devices are making constant wireless
Internet connectivity a reality; meanwhile, the arrival of ubiquitous computing is folding the
material world itself into an expansive ‘Internet of things’. As a result, the line between life online
and life off-line has become blurred in an existential equivalence of the digital and the analog. In
this networked ecosystem, the old Web 1.0 notion of an anonymous digital persona that is separate
from off-line, analog self-identity is outdated and has largely been abandoned. A new paradigm for

Corresponding author:
J Sage Elwell, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 76129, USA.
Email: [email protected]
234 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20(2)

conceptualizing the dialectic of digital–analog self-identity is thus called for. To that end, I argue
that in our age of constant connectivity and ubiquitous computing, self-identity is increasingly
fashioned according to the aesthetics of transmedia production. I thus propose that the transmedia
paradigm, taken as a model for interpreting self-identity in the liminal space between the virtual
and the real, reveals a transmediated self constituted as a browsable story-world that is integrated,
dispersed, interactive, and episodic.
I present this argument in three sections. Section one begins by presenting the need for a new
paradigm for conceptualizing self-identity in light of the advent of constant connectivity and
ubiquitous computing. Section two presents the transmedia paradigm, outlining its origins and core
characteristics. Section three then applies the transmedia model to self-identity (and identity
formation) in today’s infosphere.

The Internet of life

Much has been written about self-representation and self-identity online. Boyd (2007) has written
widely on youth identity in social networks. Marketing scholars Schau and Gilly (2003) have
examined self-representation in the more controlled environment of the personal home page. Hod-
kinson and Lincoln (2008) have looked at identity presentation through blogs as public extensions
of the private sphere. Ellison et al. (2006) have explored the honesty of self-presentation on online
dating sites. And this is only a small sample of the work that has been done on the subject. How-
ever, in most cases, the focus is limited to specific Web sites (or types of Web sites). Little attention
has been given to the situation of self-identity in today’s broader networked ecosystem where
online and off-line identity are yoked together as mobile devices and ubiquitous computing usher
in the Internet of life.
In the early days of the Internet, the era of Web 1.0, you had to ‘go online’. It was an involved
process. Often a landline telephone had to be unplugged and the line rerouted to a computer for the
pings and hisses of a dial-up connection. The Internet was a destination, a place to go. It was an
ephemeral place apart from the solidity of life off-line, where, as the now-famous 1993 New
Yorker cartoon aptly put it, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’.
In the days of chat rooms, multiuser domains, massively multiplayer online role-playing games,
and online bulletin boards, it was not uncommon to conceive of online identity as a mask or cos-
tume that was easily put on and taken off while the Internet guaranteed anonymity.1 This fluidity of
identity that the early Internet afforded brought with it a wave of theorizing on the nature of the
self-identity in a burgeoning digital culture.
Writing in the early 1990s, Myron Krueger suggested that, ‘In the ultimate artificial reality,
physical appearance will be completely composable’ (1991: 256) and Katherine Hayles, writing
around the same time, noted that in cyberspace ‘subjectivity is dispersed throughout the
cybernetic circuit . . . ’ (1993: 72). Likewise, Howard Rheingold (1994) saw the Internet as a new
public domain where virtual identities might come together to form virtual communities.
Meanwhile, in his book Into the Image (1996), Kevin Robins critiqued such theorizing as
‘unspeakably vacuous and devoid of inspiration’ (1996: 89). Robins instead sought to penetrate the
deeper cultural conditions that made such notions of fragmented, decentered, and distributed
identity possible in the first place. Similarly, critical of the growing virtual world, Christopher
Lasch (1985) stressed that online identities and virtual relationships evidence ‘the waning of the
old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative – a way of understanding identity that depended on
the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity . . . ’ (1985: 32). These notions of the

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‘composable body’, ‘dispersed subjectivity’, ‘virtual communities’, and the critics of such theoriz-
ing became defining strands in the complex conversations concerning online identity.
As the above demonstrates, early Internet theorizing was by no means monolithic. Nonetheless,
identity multiplication and experimentation was a common concern – albeit one approached from
an array of angles. For instance, in the early 1980s, Sherry Turkle (1984) concluded that our digital
lives constitute a ‘second self’ that is infinitely more malleable than our staid embodied identities.2
Later, in her book Life on the Screen (1995), Turkle further explored this second self, raising
concerns about the psychological impact of leading multiple, often contrary, lives online while
cautiously celebrating the possibility of surrogate outlets for expressing otherwise repressed
identity impulses. In this respect, this book reflected a greater concern for the interplay between
what Turkle called real life (RL) and life on the screen.
Rosanne Stone Allucquére (1996: 43) similarly observed that ‘the technosocial sub-
ject . . . suggests a radical rewriting . . . of the bounded individual as the standard social unit and
validated social actant’. However, while Turkle addressed, in anthropological fashion, the social
and psychological impact of online identity, Stone adopted a more ‘cyborgian’ approach as she
attended to the newly experimental status of the body in cyberspace. However, for Turkle, Stone,
and others, the combination of digital disembodiment and anonymity created a technologically
mediated environment conducive to alternative modes of identity construction impossible in the
bounded realm of ‘RL’.
The situation has dramatically changed since the early days of the Internet. In today’s culture
of constant connectivity, the Internet is integrated into our lives such that the experience of being
online is qualitatively different than it was just 15 years ago. We no longer ‘go online’, rather the
Internet is of a piece with the infosphere where we already are and of which we are increasingly a
part. This is the result of three things. First, our off-line identities are tied to our online selves in
socially and commercially powerful ways that demand the integrity of this digital-to-analog con-
nection. Second, the advent of wirelessly connected mobile devices like the smart phone and
tablet computers means that we are always just a small screen away from the Internet and our
online selves. Third, the arrival of ubiquitous computing is heralding the introduction of
‘‘‘everywhere’’ computing [that] aims at making computing and communication essentially
transparent to the users . . . [where] we will be surrounded with a comfortable and convenient
information environment that merges physical and computational infrastructures into an inte-
grated habitat’ (Guan et al., 2011: 1653). Digital technology is increasingly built into the archi-
tecture of the everyday, and this technology is designed to both anticipate and trigger our needs
and desires whereby experience and identity take shape in the space between online and off-line.
As Guan et al. note, however, these technologies are integrated into the habitats of our lives so
much so that they become invisible and form the computational atmosphere of our existence.
Unaware, or at least unconcerned about, the extent to which our lives are part of a sprawling digi-
tal network, ubiquitous computing signals a fusion of the digital and the analog in everyday
experience whereby it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends as the two
are seamlessly integrated.
As such, we increasingly live our lives in this space between online and off-line worlds such that
both spheres become critical to identity formation and maintenance. Online identity markers are no
longer simply a compliment to off-line identity any more than off-line identity is a mere compli-
ment to online identity. However, to be clear, online and off-line identities are not functionally
equivalent to one another such that one is interchangeable for the other. Rather, together they
cocreate the experience of identity in the space between the digital and the analog. In a 2009 essay

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Kevin Ashton recalled how, a decade earlier, he coined the phrase ‘the Internet of things’ to
describe the way things were increasingly being assigned virtual counterparts. Today however
we are witnessing the Internet of life.
The convergence of these three factors means that online identity play, while still possible, is
less common (and less desirable) in everyday Internet usage amidst the contemporary ‘nonymous
online environment’ (Shanyang et al., 2008: 1818) of Web 2.0 where the anytime connection of an
online identity to a ‘real’ person is a valuable, if not necessary, social and economic premium. For
instance, Facebook and Googleþ require users to use their real names; online profiles must
correspond to real off-line people and false identities are prohibited. In keeping with this emphasis
on the correspondence (overlap) between online and off-line life, in 2011, Facebook introduced its
newest profile platform, Timeline – in January 2012, they announced that Timeline would become
mandatory for all of Facebook’s more than 800 million users. Interestingly, the public relations
logline for the new platform is ‘Tell your life story’. Through photos, videos, and status updates
users are invited to narrate the story of their lives; to re-present their ‘real’ off-line lives through
an online self-identity narrative.
And it is not just Facebook and Googleþ that promote the (re)creation of identity stories in
digital form. From Twitter to YouTube and text messaging to Skype, our lives are more integrated
and constantly connected to and through the Internet than ever before.
The 2011 ‘Future of Identity’ report commissioned by the UK’s Government Office for Science
notes that today’s constant connectivity holds together our identities spread across multiple social
networks, while ambient intelligence digitizes our environments, location services make every-
thing findable, and life-logging enables extended artificial memory. The report concludes that ‘the
generation growing up now will ‘‘never be alone, never lost, never forget’’ . . . [and this] is likely to
have significant effects on personal identity: parts of identity will reside in a persistent ‘‘exoself’’
of information and software’ (Bostrom and Sandberg, 2011: 4).
While I agree with the report’s findings, I would amend its conclusion in two ways. First, this
vision of a coming exoself is not something that is going to happen; it is already happening. We
already live in a feedback loop between the digital and the analog, where so much of what we do,
believe, and feel is expressed, documented, and preserved in digital form. So much so that phi-
losopher and technologist Luciano Floridi (2011: 477) has observed that ‘the very distinction
between online and off-line . . . is becoming progressively less meaningful. We already live mostly
onlife’. In this ‘onlife’, we use the Internet to find restaurants, book flights, read the news, and diag-
nose illnesses. And it is not just task-oriented projects. According to a 2011 study published by the
Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, everyday 58% of US adults use the
Internet ‘to just pass the time’ (Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 2011).
When asked how digital media is impacting our sense of self, German philosopher Thomas
Metzinger replied,

I guess the average British citizen now spends 46% of his waking time online, connected to media,
a mobile phone or a computer or in front of a TV set . . . we have no idea how the embedding of . . . con-
scious experience into these larger technical systems of representing reality and processing information
will change us. (Tippett et al., 2011: 15)

Indeed, it already has changed us. From the Internet to ubiquitous computing, who we are is so
intimately bound up with these technical systems that it is difficult to say precisely where the
analog, embodied self ends and the digital, virtual self begins.

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The second qualification I would propose to the conclusions of the ‘Future of Identity’ report
is that there is not a single ‘exoself’ of information. Rather, there are many exoselves, existing as
a network of digital identities that increasingly bear an existential equivalence to embodied,
analog identity. ‘Digital identity’, writes Tina Besley (2010: 126), ‘is a set of characteristics
asserted by one digital subject about itself or by another digital subject (human or otherwise) in a
digital realm, that is, what you publish about yourself, and what others say about you and
includes any electronic exchange with both human and non-human digital agents’. However, in
today’s hyper-connected world, most of us have multiple digital identities – Facebook profiles,
LinkedIn identities, Tumblr portfolios, YouTube channels, blogs, and more. Moreover, many of
these identities are connected to one another. Thus, together these digital identities constitute a
networked ecosystem of digital selves.
Robert Sweeny (2009) talks about this multiplicity of digital identities as a ‘networked identity’.
He explains that in the digital aggregate,

Identity is found in the relations between the sites, as well as how they interconnect, or fail to do so,
with lived experience. Moreover, the networked identity of the user is intertwined with the identity of
his or her friends, co-workers, family, and perhaps even total strangers. (2009: 210)

Sweeny’s explanation is a useful expansion on the notion of singular, discrete digital identities
because not only does it acknowledge the interconnectedness of our multiple digital selves but it
also recognizes that those networked selves are themselves connected to other networked selves.
Most importantly, however, it acknowledges that our cluster of digital identities also connect to, or
fail to connect to, our lived experience in the analog world of embodied being which carries a
resultant existential equivalence of our digital and analog being.
By ‘existential equivalence’, I intend two things. The first concerns the fact that what we share
about ourselves and what is shared about us (by others), both online and through Internet-based
technologies such as text messaging and innumerable apps, is constitutive of the deepest levels
of our interiority. From tweets to texts, we are transforming our private subjectivity into public
content in a way and on a scale never-before witnessed. When the early Internet pioneer Josh
Harris coined the phrase ‘we live in public’, he meant that our actions and spoken words are
increasingly being broadcast to a public audience. Today, however, it is not only our external,
otherwise visible (or audible) activity that is reaching a public audience. Rather, we are broadcast-
ing our innermost inclinations and impulses, our loves and hates, and our desires and derisions.
And this is to say nothing of the vast amount of information about us that is collected by others.
We no longer simply live in public, we have our deepest being in public.
The second aspect of this existential equivalence has to do with the extent to which our
technologically mediated selves can and do impinge upon our embodied selves. More and more
we live in a feedback loop, a dialectic, between the digital and the analog where what happens in
one domain informs the other. A most pernicious example of this is cyberbullying whereby
‘‘‘willful and repeated harm’’ . . . is inflicted on another through the use of digital devices such
as cell phones, text-messaging, and Internet sites in order to ‘‘threaten, harass, embarrass, or
socially exclude’’’ (Mishna et al., 2010: 362). The blunt reality that what happens online has
real, existential, consequences was illustrated in 2010 when Rutgers University Freshman Tyler
Clementi committed suicide after his roommate posted a video online of him during a sexual
encounter in his dorm room. Clearly the line between on and off-line existence has become
largely irrelevant.3

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In an earlier work (Elwell, 2011), I related the story of Madeline Coburn, a woman who was
mistakenly reported as deceased to a major credit reporting agency. Convincing the agency that she
was not in fact dead proved nearly impossible as the agency repeatedly responded that, ‘our records
indicate that you are dead. Do you have any proof otherwise?’ (2011: 47). Madeline’s digital
identity had become more relevant to her existence than her own embodied self. Moreover, the
proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of ubiquitous computing means that lived events are
increasingly recorded and circulated (voluntarily and otherwise) in digital form more rapidly and
more expansively. Consequently, to recall Floridi’s (2011) phrasing, our ‘onlife’ reaches out like
tendrils into the infosphere and cycles back to us ever more rapidly. As a testament to the reality of
this situation, in January 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it plans to
harvest open source outlets (online public posts, social media sites, etc.) for actionable intelli-
gence; the premise being that what happens in the real is most effectively engaged by surveying the
virtual.
The existential equivalence of the digital and the analog thus describes the increasingly intimate
character of our digital identities as they interact with off-line experience in a network of self-
identity that eschews the line between online and off-line experience. To date, the most compelling
presentation of this new state of self between the virtual and the real is Sherry Turkle’s (2011) lat-
est work, Alone Together. Here, Turkle offers a compelling vision of how, ‘Over time . . . living
with an electronic shadow begins to feel so natural that the shadow seems to disappear . . . ’
(2011: 260). In one anecdote after another, Turkle powerfully unfolds the story of how the Internet
of life is giving rise to ‘a new state of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real,
wired into existence through technology’ (2011: 16).
However, while Turkle’s presentation is expertly told and wonderfully informed, it is largely
anecdotal and lacks a robust theoretical architecture for conceptually framing the new state of self
she describes. What is needed therefore is a paradigm for understanding and interpreting the nature
and experience of identity in the network between the digital and the analog. To that end, I propose
the transmediated self as a model for understanding the networked identities of our onlives. The
next section thus briefly defines and discusses transmedia as a conceptual rubric in anticipation of
applying that model to the dialectic of digital–analog self-identity in section three.
Before proceeding, however, permit a few preemptive qualifications. It should be acknowl-
edged that some aspects of the transmedia model do not neatly map onto common assumptions
about identity. First, as Phillips (2012) notes her book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Story-
telling, transmedia products are typically heavily scripted according to the demands of a pre-
determined narrative. Identity, on the other hand, is rarely so purposeful and in many ways is a
product of the subconscious. Although the way we present ourselves online is often highly crafted,
with the proliferation of data mining and click-based advertising the construction of our online
identity is likewise often beyond our control. In short, identity does not typically unfold according
to an intentional script. Additionally, most transmedia projects are commercial products created for
economic ends and thus crafted to attract consumers. Identity, however, is rarely thought of as an
economic product designed for market consumption. Again, the intentional nature of transmedia,
whether for narratival or commercial ends, is admittedly out of step with how we typically under-
stand identity.
Such failure to achieve perfect synchronicity is however the nature of this kind of conceptual
modeling. The model is not itself the thing it illumines and thus cannot offer absolute correspon-
dence. Rather, like a metaphor, it suggests a new way to understand its subject. As such, the model of
transmedia storytelling and story-world construction provides a uniquely apt, if imperfect, lens for

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viewing and understanding how digital technology is transforming the creation and experience of
identity in the space between our online and off-line worlds. This is the transmediated self.

Transmedia
Transmedia is a way of telling stories across multiple media platforms to create an overarching
story-world where each narrative element makes a distinct contribution to the whole. Marsha
Kinder (1991) offered one of the earliest articulations of what she called ‘transmedia intertextuality’
in her book Playing With Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games. There she characterized
transmedia as the ‘ever-expanding supersystem of entertainment’ whereby
. . . any individual text (whether an artwork like a movie or novel, or a commonplace text like a news-
paper article, billboard, or casual verbal remark) is part of a larger cultural discourse and therefore must
be read in relationship to other texts and their diverse textual strategies and ideological assumptions.
(Kinder, 1991: 2)

While Kinder’s formulation of transmedia was steeped in the ‘intertextuality’ of Kristeva and
the ‘dialogism’ of Bakhtin, its application was largely as a conceptual rubric for theorizing the
production (and consumption) of the commercial entertainment industry. Thus, for Kinder,
‘transmedia intertextuality’ described the then emerging industry phenomenon of creating
multiplatform story-worlds through an array of media (products) ranging from toys, television
shows, books, and movies; all of which were coordinated to offer different contributions to an
overarching narrative universe.
More recently, transmedia practitioners such as Jeff Gomez (2007, 2010), Christy Dena (2008),
and Andrea Phillips (2012) as well as scholars such as Carlos Alberto Scolari (2009) and Neil
Perryman (2008) have further developed the idea and application of transmedia storytelling.
Christy Dena has helpfully explicated the participatory nature of transmedia in the realm of
Alternate Reality Games (2008) and Andrea Phillips’ recent book (2012) is not only a wonderful
practical guide for transmedia creators, outlining as it does an array of strategies for unfolding
a story from film to phone, but also – and uniquely for such an otherwise practice-heavy approach –
she offers an insightful conceptual introduction to the implication of fragmentation on transmedia
storytelling. Meanwhile, Scolari’s (2009) semiotic approach illustrates the way that consumers
construct transmedia stories in the space between such narrative fragments, in ways that differ for
the immersed participant from those that are more casually engaged. In similar fashion, Neil Perry-
man (2008), in his intriguing analysis of transmedia in Doctor Who, outlines the rich history of a
decade’s old media franchise revitalized in recent years through its use of transmedia storytelling
and interactive story-world construction.
However, Henry Jenkins has arguably cultivated the idea of transmedia more so than anyone
else. In 2003, Jenkins reported, ‘a growing realization within the media industry that what is
variously called transmedia, multiplatform, or enhanced storytelling represents the future of
entertainment’ (2003). In light of this, Jenkins went on to formulate one of the most commonly
accepted explanations of transmedia. In Convergence Culture (2006), Jenkins wrote,
In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might
be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored
through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be
self contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice versa. (2006: 96)

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Transmedia is thus the art of creating compelling story-worlds from networked stories told through
different dispersed media.
Consider, for example, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The franchise began in 1967 as
ride at Disneyland, but over the past 40þ years, the story-world of Captain Jack Sparrow and his
ship the Black Pearl has grown to include films, books, video games, toys, and much more. In each
case, each medium does what it does best and stands as a discrete yet integral part of the Pirates of
the Caribbean story-world. The films tell the action-packed tales of Captain Jack, the video games
unpack those tales in interactive adventures, and the novels allow readers to explore in detail those
elements of the Pirates mythology that are only suggested in the films, games, and the original ride.
Each medium is coordinated with and contributes to the whole all the while remaining independent
as a discrete component of that whole.
Advancing on this, Jeff Gomez (2010), Chief Executive Officer of Starlight Runner Enter-
tainment, a transmedia production company, describes transmedia as ‘The process of conveying
messages, themes or storylines to a mass audience through the artful and well-planned use of
multiple-media platforms’ (2010). I want to pause for a moment on Gomez’s observation that tras-
media is a process. In the transmedia model, stories are not stand-alone, finished products. There
is, for example, no single piece of the Pirates franchise that can stand by itself without implicitly
referencing the dynamic whole of which it is a part; this, despite the fact that each component can
be engaged without requisite recourse to the whole. This is because transmedia stories are organic,
living enterprises that unfold over time in a collaborative process between the storyteller and an
audience that participates, often as cocreators, in the story’s unfolding.
Transmedia is a process precisely because the old top–down industry model of creator–spec-
tator, producer–consumer is giving way to a nonlinear, immersive, and dialogical model of par-
ticipatory cocreation. As part of this shift, transmedia invites the audience to actively engage the
story by entering into an immersive story-world that they can interact with and help to shape.
Jenkins and Gomez, arguably transmedia’s most active theorist and practitioner respectively,
have proposed an array of essential features of transmedia storytelling. In a blog post, Jenkins
(2009) characterizes transmedia productions as spreadable, drillable, continuous, multiple,
immersive, extractable, serial, subjective, and performative. With some overlap, Gomez (2007)
sees transmedia as originating with a single visionary and a well-planned story and story-world that
will be distributed across three or more media platforms with participatory platform-specific con-
tent and minimal fractures and schisms.4 Acknowledging transmedia’s relative youth and thus its
conceptual fluidity, Jenkins asks of his own explanation, ‘Is this an exhaustive list? Probably
not . . . These represent insights into the various transmedia experiments we’ve seen so far . . . And
most of them point to new spaces for creative experimentation’ (2009).
In the spirit of creative experimentation and taking into account the insightful work of others,5 I
propose four basic features of the transmedia model of storytelling and story-world construction.
Echoing Jenkins’ tentativeness, I would stress that these characteristics are not intended to be defi-
nitive or in anyway absolute. Rather, they are more akin to the elements of a pragmatic heuristic
device that aims at accuracy in description and explanatory utility. To that end, I suggest that trans-
media stories and story-worlds are integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive. That is, the
transmedia model of storytelling and story-world construction is (generally) characterized by the
integration of multiple story elements that are dispersed across multiple media platforms in an
episodic format that allows for cocreative audience interaction.6
Returning to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, we see that all of the elements are (at least
loosely) integrated around the singular adventures and personality of Captain Jack Sparrow. The

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films, the books, the games, and the toys all participate in the creation of Jack Sparrow’s Caribbean
world and the ‘brilliant-or-crazy’ ethos he embodies. These elements are dispersed across a variety
of media and each medium contributes according to the particular strengths of its form. Together,
this integration and dispersion create the spreadability (dispersed) and drillability (integrated)
Jenkins identified as key features of transmedia products. Because the story is integrated qua story-
world, it can be pursued (drilled) in depth, which, for example, allows one to inquire after the pri-
vate life of Barbosa or the climate of Tortuga. Because the story is dispersed, the answers to these
inquiries might be spread across a variety of media platforms that offer what Gomez (2007)
describes as ‘platform-specific content’ with ‘minimal fractures and schisms’.
The episodic character of transmedia products describes both their seriality and the self-
contained nature of their constitutive ‘episodes’. Transmedia story-worlds unfold as a series of
integrated narrative elements that may appear as a literal series of episodes in the form of sequen-
tial films, books, games, and so on. However, transmedia story-worlds are also constructed as a
series of self-contained story events and objects that exist as independent yet interconnected nar-
rative arcs or artifacts (such as the story of Calypso, the discrete levels within the Pirates video
game, or unique toy action figures) with their own beginnings, middles, ends and narrative
emplottment, which is entwined with and constitutive of the architecture of the story-world as a
whole. Here, then we see Jenkins’ characterization of transmedia worldbuilding as evincing con-
tinuity (the episodes cohere by building on one another and incorporating overarching narrative
content), multiplicity (the episodes are numerous and diverse, often relating parallel stories that
are only tangentially related to the continuity of the whole), extractablity (the episodes are self-
contained as both discrete narrative arcs and literal extractable objects such as toys and T-shirts
that become part of everyday life), and seriality (the episodes are sequential such that, as Jenkins
(2009) notes, ‘chunks of meaningful and engaging story information have been dispersed not sim-
ply across multiple segments within the same medium, but rather across multiple media systems’).
Transmedia storytelling is also interactive. It invites the audience to participate in the process of
the story’s unfolding by encouraging them to search out the depth and details of integrated, dis-
persed, and episodic story-worlds. This creates an immersive environment that fans can live inside
and explore, and in some cases, cocreate. Fans of Star Trek, for instance, have long been living
inside the Star Trek story-world – dressing as their favorite characters, learning Klingon, mapping
the Star Trek galaxy, and even pilgrimaging to Riverside, Iowa, the supposed future birthplace of
Captain James Kirk. Recent trends in transmedia creation make immersive interaction more acces-
sible as the age of constant connectivity makes the transmedia story-world perpetually available
through ubiquitous digital devices. The story is always in the process of unfolding online where,
for example, fans of Lost create maps of the island and Nine Inch Nails fans explore the dystopia of
Reznor’s Year Zero, each via interactive Web sites, graphics, audio, video, and text. Thus, the
interactive character of transmedia production is at once itself performative in that it performs its
content while also enabling and encouraging audience co-performance.
Transmedia creations are integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive. Naturally, they also
often share other common features such as clearly navigable space, narration from multiple per-
spectives, or richly developed cultural textures. Nonetheless, integration, dispersion, an episodic
structure, and interactivity signal their essential characteristics such that it is difficult to imagine a
transmedia story or story-world utterly lacking any one of these elements. Thus, while this brief list
is not intended to be exhaustive, it is, I believe, constitutive of those necessary elements without
which transmedia creation is impossible. The next section returns to the question of identity for-
mation and looks to this transmedia model as a paradigm for understanding self-identity in the

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midst of constant connectivity and ubiquitous computing where onlife takes place in the liminal
space between the virtual and the real.

The transmediated self

During the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of scholars foregrounding the importance of
narrative in individual and communal identity formation steadily increased. Since Goffman’s The
Presentation of the Self in Everyday life (1959) and continuing on through the work of Alasdair
MacIntyre (1984), Richard Rorty (1989), Charles Taylor (1989), Martha Nussbaum (1990), and
others, the idea that a narrative (conscious or otherwise) is one of the principle modes of personal
and civic identity formation has been foundational in theorizing around the idea of the self.
Advancing on the likes of Goffman, MacIntyre, and Taylor, and with great influence from
Ricoeur’s (1990) seminal work on time and narrative, scholars such as Marya Schechtman (1996),
Hilde Nelson (2001), Seyla Benhabib (1992), Gubrium and Holstein (2008), and others have
variously proposed that identity ‘is constituted by the content of [one’s] self-narrative . . . ’
(Schechtman, 1996: 94) and that identities are essentially ‘complex narrative constructions . . . ’
(Nelson, 2001: 20).
However, there are as many different ways of correlating identity and narrative as there are
authors writing on the subject. For some, such as Ricoeur and later Schechtman, the very meta-
physical being of identity is narratival. For Hilde Nelson (2001) and others, narrative is only a
conceptual (epistemological) mechanism by which identity is understood or constructed. For
others still, such as Margaret Walker (1997) and Martha Nussbaum (1990), narrative is the pre-
requisite for social and moral identity. And naturally, there are those such as Galen Strawson
(2004), whose work I address below, who argue that any and all narrative–identity theses are
deeply problematic on metaphysical, epistemological, and moral grounds.
Acknowledging the debate, but without wading too deeply into the fray, I modestly align myself
with those whom Diana Tietjens Meyers (2004) describes as ‘adopting very capacious views of
narrative’ (2004: 161). As such, I contend that the elements of narrative identity might encompass
‘story fragments and pictorial imagery . . . [while also allowing] that autobiographical narratives
need not be thematically unified or characterologically consistent, and . . . they need not cohere as a
single plotline’ (Meyers, 2004: 161). Rather, with respect to identity and identity construction, I
hold that narrative in all its possibilities – from the visual to the linguistic and from the dislocated
memory to the vaguest ambition – describes the way the complex story of selfhood is relayed and
understood. And in today’s onlife, I argue that that story is a transmedia production.

Integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive

In his book The Filter Bubble Eli Pariser (2011) wrote that, ‘The uncanny valley is the place where
something is lifelike but not convincingly alive . . . We’re now in the uncanny valley of persona-
lization. The doppelgänger selves reflected in our media are a lot like, but not exactly, ourselves’
(2011: 115). Clearly, Pariser is correct in observing that our digital ‘doppelgänger selves’ are not
the same as our embodied analog selves. However, whereas he suggests that there is a gap between
the two with the digital on one side and the analog on the other such that ‘some important things are
lost in the gap between the data and reality’ (2011: 115), I would argue that to speak of the two as
somehow separate and discrete fails to appreciate the extent to which the two are entangled and the
reality that we live inside that gap – we live in the uncanny valley between the digital and the real.

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The transmediated self describes the integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive narrative
identity experience in this space between the virtual and the real. The transmediated self is not the
exclusively online identity of Facebook or the identity construct compiled by data mining com-
panies. Neither is it the tangibly embodied identity of the analog world. Rather, it refers to the
identity experience emerging from the feedback loop between the digital and the analog whereby
one domain informs the other in an ongoing dialectic of existential equivalence. Thus, the
transmedia model serves as a helpful paradigm for understanding the nature of self-identity and
self formation in this new liminal space by offering the conceptual architecture necessary for
exploring and articulating its integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive narrative character.

The integrated self. Although dispersed and episodic, transmedia story-worlds nonetheless retain a
basic integrity by telling convergent stories that are woven around a loosely shared framework of
core plotlines and themes. For example, despite obvious variances among its assorted products, the
Star Wars franchise is about the balance and battle of good and evil, light and dark. Similarly,
James Cameron’s Avatar is about the place of the natural world in an age of technological progress
and the Toy Story franchise is about the importance of friendship. In each case, the assorted story
and product lines all revolve around shared thematic sets. In the case of the transmediated self,
narrative integration is woven around the onlife activities and preferences of the individual.
The transmediated self is constituted by the existential equivalence of the digital and the analog
such that the narrative of selfhood is simultaneously constructed on and off-line as a network of
identity markers and makers that coalesce in an onlife identity. The Internet today is designed
to promote both self identification and disclosure through peer-to-peer social networking as well
as activity and preference modeling through identity–data harvesting. As the Vice President of
Yahoo, Tapan Bhat, observed, ‘Now the web is about ‘‘me’’’ (Pariser, 2011: 8). The Internet and
its complement of digital devices are increasingly constructed as a ‘spreadable’ and ‘drillable’
story-world of self-identity that is integrated around a principle of personalization that at once
independently creates onlife identity through secondary actors while simultaneously catering to
primary interactive cocreation.
The combination of primary self-disclosure and secondary identity construction via that disclo-
sure creates a reinforcing – integrated – identity story-world of the self. Paul Booth (2009) has
described this as the narrative database and describes the interactive process of its construction
‘narractivity’. Booth writes, ‘Narractivity can be defined as the process by which communal
interactive action constructs and develops a coherent narrative database’ (2009: 373, italics in
original). Although Booth directs his comments to the transmedia story-worlds that unfold through
fan interaction, I would argue that the same applies to the transmediated self inasmuch as it too is
created and unfolds as an interactive narrative onlife database. And while Pariser claims that
‘we’re now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities, in which the Internet’s distorted picture of
us becomes who we really are’ (2011: 112), I would argue we have already crossed that threshold.
For example, consider Google Glass which offers wearers a constant stream of information
integrated into their daily activities. Wearers are able to learn about specific sites relative to their
location, the weather, consumer goods, and where their friends are and what they are doing.
Meanwhile, Google can collect all that data and reflect it back to the user/wearer as an ongoing and
ever-more personalized stream of identity-constructing and identity-reflecting recommendations
and advertisements, all of which are integrated around and constitutive of the story-world of ‘you’
– that transmedia product made up of sprawling identity markers ranging from likes, location, and
friends to reading habits, data usage, and mortgage payments, all of which is algorithmically

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woven together to form the complex tapestry of your life in the space between the real and the
virtual.
Moreover, as more and more objects (and people) are folded into the ‘Internet of Things’ through
the use of digitally encoded ‘quick response boxes’ and other ‘augmented reality techniques’, we are
witnessing the convergence of constant connectivity and ubiquitous computing in an ‘Internet of
Life’. The Dutch airline KLM, for instance, recently began testing a program called ‘Meet and Seat’
that lets people upload data from their LinkedIn or Facebook profiles to help in choosing a seatmate
(Clark, 2012). Clearly, the implication is that who we are online qua our various ‘profiles’ is on par
with who we are off-line when we live onlife. In this ‘Internet of Life’, the question of digital/analog
interface, ‘the place where you end and the technology begins’ (Pariser, 2011: 13) becomes increas-
ingly meaningless as both are folded into the expanding ‘in-betweenness’ of onlife as identity itself
becomes a porous membrane between the digital and the analog. Thus, the networked self is itself the
integrated and integrating gap between technology and embodiment.

The dispersed self. The dispersion of this narrative across multiple media platforms creates the
networked story-world that is the transmediated self. Integration and dispersion would appear to be
contradictory qualities. Integration entails unity pursuant to a whole, dispersion entails multiple
scattered parts. This however overlooks the fact that integration cannot exist apart from a multi-
plicity of parts, scattered or otherwise. A singular whole, whether a physical object or an irredu-
cible ideology, cannot be said to possess integrity because it lacks the requisite multiplicity of parts
necessary for integration properly so-called to obtain. A puzzle, for instance, can only be said to be
‘integrated’ in as much as its multiple pieces are fitted together. Were those pieces to somehow
fuse together, melding into a single cardboard image, the puzzle qua puzzle would cease to exist
as an object composed of integrated pieces. Similarly, the integrated aspect of the transmediated
self is predicated on dispersed yet coordinated constituent components.
Like the transmedia productions of the entertainment industry, the transmediated self is dis-
persed across multiple media platforms, with each platform contributing according to the pre-
dominant character of its medium. Thus, Facebook caters to sharing, Google to searching,
LinkedIn to professional networking, YouTube to broadcasting, and Twitter to linking. The
strengths of each medium are built into its structure. Twitter, with its 140-character limit,
encourages users to link to outside material. The transparency of Facebook’s identity/information
sharing model makes Facebook activity more performative as we carefully craft the identities and
activities we want to share with others. Meanwhile, because we assume the bulk of our Google
activity is hidden from others in an algorithmic black box, the identity construct it fosters is often
less well manicured (though just as well digitally preserved).
Along with such implicit valancing built into the structure of the medium, different digital
formats also cater more explicitly to differing modes of identity expression and construction via
their respective emphases on image, text, video, and so on. The photo-friendly format of Tumblr,
for instance, promotes a mode of identity construction based around aesthetically identifying cues
and themes such as graphic design, manga, graffiti art, or sartorial photography. Over time, users
build up massive personal portfolios of images that reflect a distinctive visual identity. Similarly,
text-heavy blogging sites promote the cultivation of a discursive onlife identity based on pillar
ideas and ideologies, while YouTube caters to brief informative or entertaining video clips that
tend to be more unidirectional.
Every status update, text message, and Google search represents a dispersed micro-story in the
complex story-world of the transmediated self. In a stunning visualization of this reality, graphic

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designer Michael Rigley (2012) transformed information into aesthetics in his video Network
wherein he recreates the reality that, ‘The average user will have 736 pieces of this personal infor-
mation collected everyday’ (Rigley, 2012). With dynamic data graphs and shifting information
maps that match data with imagery, Rigley visualizes the way Internet and cellular phone service
providers collect and store millions of pieces of personal information to create a digital identity for
each user, which is then sold to ad networks and data mining companies. From ‘Facebook stalking’
to data harvesting, who we are onlife – in that space between the digital and the real – is increas-
ingly a joint enterprise in identity worldbuilding undertaken in collaboration with those both near
and far, known and unknown.
And yet ironically, because the transmediated self is dispersed it never appears all at once and is
thus never entirely knowable. Not only is there no single place (virtual or real) where the trans-
mediated self is entirely present, but because, as previously noted, transmedia is a process, neither
is there a single time when the transmediated self is entirely present. Thus, ‘episodic’ is the
temporal counterpart to the more spatially valenced, ‘dispersed’ nature of the transmediated self.

The episodic self. In his article ‘Against Narrativity’ Galen Strawson juxtaposes the ‘diachronic self’
and ‘episodic self’. According to diachronic self-experience, ‘one naturally figures oneself, consid-
ered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further)
future.’ By contrast, if one is episodic, ‘one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as some-
thing that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future’ (2004: 430). Para-
phrasing then, the diachronic self is narratival whereas the episodic is not. If the notion of the
narrative self is familiar, the episodic self likely appears peculiar. Thus to clarify, Strawson
explains,

‘Another way is to say that it seems clear to me, when I am experiencing or apprehending myself as a
self, that the remoter past or future in question is not my past or future, although it is certainly the past
or future of GS [Galen Strawson] the human being’ (2004: 433).

That is, the present self is experienced as an ‘episode’, which is connected to past and future
episodes of the self by virtue of a shared corporeality and yet is isolated from such episodes in that
the present state of self is an interior state distinct from all such similarly interior selves/states that
correspond to past and future episodic (self) experiences.
Strawson’s argument, while problematic (see, James L Battersby’s (2006) critique) is none-
theless useful in the present context. Strawson’s point, as I take it, is that the self is always
experienced as ‘in the present’, and this ‘now’ self is phenomenologically distinct from past or
future ‘now-selves’. Returning then to Henry Jenkins’ description of transmedia, this makes the
episodic self both ‘multiple’ and ‘extractable’ in that the transmediated self is constructed in terms
of multiple discrete self-events. Consider for example, the way an isolated text message, Tweet,
Facebook post, or photograph can exist as a ‘self-episode’, wholly removed from further past or
further future episodes of self. The self-episode takes on a life of its own as an isolated status
update, photo, video, click-record, ‘like’, global positioning system location, or purchase. These
self-episodes in turn assume a synecdochical identity function whereby the part stands in for an
equally episodic whole.
Over time however, these episodes coalesce. Ubiquitous computing and constant connectivity
make it possible to algorithmically link discrete identity episodes from dispersed media platforms
into sequential, and I would argue, loosely narratival identity streams. For instance, if you take a

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trip to the beach with your family and check the weather while you are at the resort, advertising
algorithms construct a personalized marketing campaign for you with ads for suntan lotion, dis-
count sailboat rides, and deals at local beach-side restaurants. Discrete episodes are translated into
serial (narratival) activities. In other words, Strawson’s episodic self is more Web 1.0 than Web
2.0. But just as there is an essential element of Web 1.0 architecture built into today’s Web 2.0
world, so too is there an essentially non-narratival and episodic quality to the narrative story-
world of the transmediated self.

The interactive self. Everything we do online has an audience. Sometimes we know who that
audience is, as when posting something on a friend’s Facebook wall, and sometimes we do not, as
with Twitter posts which can be seen by anyone.
To be clear, this is not to say that we in fact post, comment, blog, or otherwise digitally publicize
every aspect of our lives. We obviously do not. And moreover, there are a great many for whom
social media and digital technology itself is completely foreign. However, as these technologies
spread and are increasingly integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, who we are and what we do
will become so much fodder for the digital cannons. And as such, we will have and we will be an
audience.
Our audience (from friends and followers to marketers and data mining companies), interact
with the episodes and story-worlds we create for (and of) ourselves in ways that affect those stories.
We comment, like, post, and blog not simply to be read or seen, but to be responded to; to be inter-
acted with. The episodic quality of these narratives contributes to the interactive character of the
transmediated self by establishing fixed nodules of onlife identity that other, similarly transme-
diated selves, can engage with. For instance, a photo of a favorite outfit posted on Pinterest will
outlast the day it is worn and will attract comments from friends and followers over the ensuing
days or weeks. The result is a dialectical cluster of onlife identity sparked by an outfit worn in the
real world, and, if the digital response was negative, may perhaps never be worn again, or alter-
natively, if positive, may be worn regularly. Thus, the photo and the online engagement it triggered
constitute an interactive identity episode that traverses the virtual and the real.
While everything we do online has an audience, we do not simply want an audience of spec-
tators. We want an audience of participants, just as we are the audience–participants for others.
Through multiple media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blogspot, Tumblr, Flikr, Vimeo,
and so on – we invite others to contribute to the story of our selves. And importantly, given the
existential equivalence between the digital and the analog, we adjust that story in light of those
contributions and in so doing, create a dynamic feedback loop among our assorted virtual plat-
forms and ultimately between our online and off-line worlds. Thus, the transmediated self resem-
bles an interactive performance involving multiple actors and encompassing multiple episodic
narratives that are dispersed across an array of media platforms and yet integrated around an
ongoing dialectic of identity formation.

Conclusion
Transmedia describes a way of telling stories, a way of construing and constructing narratives.
Thus, the transmediated self is the complex story-world of identity lived in the gap between the
digital and the analog, the virtual and the real. And as Jane Forsey (2003) points out, ‘To suggest
that the self is a narrative, or the product of a narrative, is implicitly to say that the self is a work of
art . . . this position has at its heart an aesthetic view of the self as the product of a creative and

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imaginative practice of a very specific kind’ (2003: 176). Integrated, dispersed, episodic, and inter-
active are thus more than conceptual descriptors useful for articulating the nature of onlife identity.
They are aesthetic categories of narrative creativity. And as such, they figure the transmediated self
as an essentially artistic project of a very specific kind indeed.

Notes
1. See, for example, the early work of Sherry Turkle (1984 and 1995), Carla Surratt (2001), or Pierre Lévy
(1998).
2. Turkle’s most recent contribution Alone Together (2011) marks a major (re)evolution in her thought on the
nature of our relationship to technology and helpfully problematizes much of her earlier work in light of
drastic technological changes.
3. To be clear, the ‘existential’ in my ‘existential equivalence’ is intended to elide any concern that I might be
asserting that online and off-line identity are literally or functionally equivalent. Rather, they impinge upon
identity in a comparable manner, though they are not themselves interchangeable. As such, these two
modes of identity function as two nodes informing an identity experience at a level of existential signifi-
cance that takes place in the space between them.
4. I address each of Jenkins’ and Gomez’s proposed transmedia elements in the following section.
5. For additional accounts of transmedia see Zapp (2004), Hill (2006), Wagner (2011), and Walker (2005).
6. Regarding this last category – and Jenkins’ list of transmedia attributes in general – it should be noted that
Christy Dena, whose dissertation looked at transmedia practice, has since augmented Jenkins’ account of
transmedia by ‘introducing an emerging participatory practice that . . . [whereby] audiences co-create, fill-
ing in gaps left intentionally and unintentionally by the primary producer’ (Dena, 2008: 41). I aim to fold
Dena’s augmentation into this final category of interaction.

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Author biography
J Sage Elwell is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Art, and Visual Culture at Texas Christian University,
Texas, USA. He is author of Crisis of Transcendence: A Theology of Digital Art and Culture (Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2011) and also publishes and presents in the areas of suffering and embodiment, the
aesthetics of atrocity, religion and film, and atheism and the arts. He also works as an artist in digital media,
photography, and book art. Dr Elwell holds a BA in religious studies from William Jewell College, Missouri,
USA, an MA in philosophy of religion from the University of Kansas, Kansas, USA, an MLitt in philosophical
theology from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and a PhD in religion, culture, and the arts from the
University of Iowa, Iowa, USA.

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