Seminar: “Transmedia and acceleration”, by Asher Rospigliosi

The seminar  "Transmedia and acceleration: what social media stories do current business undergraduate students engage with in the first ten minutes of their day?" seeks to reimagine transmedia in the context of the social media identity in an accelerated modernity. Here we have the intersection of three important rapidly changing constructs for the analysis of the use of media. The first area to deal with is the use of social media. In the last 10 years social media has moved from being a minority technologically enabled form of computer mediated communication to becoming one of the dominant means of participation in contemporary society. The role of social media in negotiating identity in late modernity is becoming central and is changing rapidly.

Rapidity is a characteristic of an accelerated society and the second topic that this presentation seeks to deal with is the relationship between acceleration and social media. Acceleration here is conceptualised by making use of the theoretical perspective developed by Hartmut Rosa. A significant part of this presentation will be to outline how Rosa’s work on acceleration helps to make sense of the adoption and role of social media, and how social media plays a part in identity in late modernity.

The intersection of acceleration identity and social media offers an opportunity for the reimagining of transmedia. While much current research on transmedia has focused on narratives as fiction, this imagining of transmedia explores the narrative of identity as negotiated with(in) social media. Transmedia is ripe for this expansion of terrain as the boundaries between media properties owned and managed by corporations and media entities imagined through celebrity merge. At one end of the spectrum, entertainers and celebrities from the world of show business, sport, fashion and lifestyle seek to harness the opportunities for engagement and the monetisation of their fan base across a range of platforms exemplified par excellence by the Kardashian family transmedia empire. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals seeking work and credibility strive to create a valuable media reputation across social media platforms.

Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes we find young graduates and undergraduates studying at the University of Brighton. Their access to the desired lifestyle of celebrity, and the imagined excitement of what their peers are doing, are a constant pressure. This social media of shared images of other people's lives forms the raw material of this research.