Transmedia Historiography as Educational Practice: Narrativising Colombian Cultural Memory
Matthew Freeman(Bath Spa University)
AbstractBoth the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for understanding transmediality – itself the use of multiple media technologies to tell stories and communicate information – is the sheer breadth of its interpretation. Though primarily still seen as a commercial practice, this article explores the application of transmedia practices to the communication of history across multiple media platforms, questioning what this approach means to understandings of transmediality. More specifically, the article furthers discussions of the contribution that transmedia storytelling can make to educational practices, identifying new strategies for how transmedia storytelling is now being used to capture and narrativize historical memories, as media-based educational resources. To do so, the article focuses on the Colombian armed conflict and the Desarmados project, which I use to theorise how transmediality can work as historiography, allowing for not only a new way of experiencing and remembering history, but as that which can reshape history for the better, reconciling the past and the present.
Introduction
It may be a cliché, but it is often said that travelling broadens the mind - that immersing yourself in different cultures around the globe can open your eyes to the true potentials and possibilities of the world. Cliché or not, it is absolutely true. Toward the end of 2015, I was invited to teach on the Masters in Transmedia Communication programme at EAFIT
University in Medellín, Colombia, itself the first postgraduate degree devoted to transmediality in Latin America. Here, transmediality is not - or rather should not be - a commercial practice associated with fictional storytelling, franchise world-building, cross-promotion, branding, and so on. Instead, it is a political communication technique that is seen as key to developing social change in local communities; in this context, transmediality is about reconstructing memories and building educational bridges between past and future. As one of the postgraduate students at EAFIT University asserts, 'I strongly believe that transmedia in Colombia can contribute to creating processes of memory, recognition and solidarity for the victims of the Colombian armed conflict. I think that using transmedia with local communities can be the clue to starting real processes of reconciliation in the country.' When understanding transmediality, in other words, travelling really does broaden the mind.
Across 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. And yet perhaps the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for understanding this 'transmedia' phenomenon right now is the sheer breadth of its interpretation. In the contemporary era of media convergence where the sharing of media across multiple platforms is increasingly accessible, transmediality has emerged as a global strategy for targeting fragmentary audiences and spreading content across a spectrum of media channels. Still, practices of transmediality are still most closely associated with what Birkinbine, Gómez and Wasko (2017: 15) refer to as the global media giants - those being 'the huge media conglomerates such as Disney and Time-Warner, [which] take advantage of globalization to expand abroad and diversify'. Outside of the conglomerates, though, transmedia storytelling - the practice of telling stories across multiple media platforms, often in creative, digitised and participatory ways (Jenkins, 2003; 2006) - has evolved in far more experimental spaces in recent years. While transmediality is still a common strategy in Hollywood's contemporary blockbuster fiction factory, so often tied up with corporate notions of brand-building, 'cash nexuses' (Lemke, 2004), 'multiple revenue streams' (Starlight Runner Entertainment, 2011) and the use of intellectual property as a brand-orientated 'marketing assault' (Alpert and Jacobs, 2004), smaller national communities and often far less commercial cultures around the world are now beginning to make very different, nationally specific uses of transmediality, applying the practices of the transmedia phenomenon to the needs of a nation or re-thinking the application of this phenomenon by reapplying it to non-fictional, political, or heritage projects (Freeman and Proctor, 2018). Such a shift feeds into wider global transformations towards the 'unofficial' appropriation of digital media platforms for socio-political purposes; Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, Klinger-Vilenchik and Zimmerman (2016: 7), for instance, have explored the challenges now faced by the current youth generation seeking to acquire 'the skills necessary for political participation at an age where there is less than complete access to the rights of citizenship.'
This article deals with one such example of political participation, focusing on the socio-political context of Colombia and its armed conflict. I explore the application of transmediality to the practice of communicating an aspect of Colombian history and its socio-political fallout across multiple media - questioning what this means to our understandings of transmedia storytelling. More specifically, in the most basic sense this article furthers discussions about the contribution that transmedia storytelling can make to educational practices. But beyond mere education, something that scholars including Jenkins (2009), Scolari (2016) and Teixeira Tárcia (2018) have each considered previously, this article identifies strategies for how transmedia storytelling has been used to narrativize memories and histories, as well as psychological and physical consequences of conflict, as media-based educational resources in schools. To do so, I focus on the Desarmados project (on which I served as a consultant for its later developments) as an indicative case study. Not about the history of transmedia storytelling, then, but instead a theorisation of how transmedia storytelling can be used to deal with history - that is, to narrativize history across media in ways that affords educational and socio-political benefits. And in doing so, I consider how this application of transmediality raises broader questions about exactly what transmedia practices are for, reflecting on the role of such practices in building cultural memory, fostering reconciliation, and creating new ways of experiencing and remembering history.
Conceptualising the Practice of Transmedia Historiography
It is now understood that 'transmedia' is not a noun, but rather an
adjective in search of a noun. 'Transmedia, by itself, simply describes
some kind of structured relationship between different media platforms and
practices' (Jenkins, 2016). Thus scholars have turned their attention to
'transmedia storytelling' (Jenkins, 2003; 2006), 'transmedia engagement'
(Evans, 2015), 'transmedia branding' (Tenderich and Williams, 2015) and so
on. But what of transmedia historiography? How can we understand
the use of 'multiple media technologies to present information … through a
range of textual forms' (Evans, 2011: 1) as that which communicates the
stories of history, embracing the multifaceted politics of those histories
along the way? Research has delved into the relationship between the
cultural form of transmediality and politics already, albeit in relation to
'politicized [entertainment] properties like The Hunger Games,
Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Christopher Nolan's
Batman films' (Hassler-Forest, 2018: 304). For as Hassler-Forest (2018:
297) stresses:
Transmediality is more than just a textual practice, in which a single
narrative - or, more appropriately, storyworld - is strategically
disseminated across multiple media (see Jenkins 2006). It is also a
dialogic form that is constantly being reconfigured by competing forms of
audience appropriation, technological transformations, and changing
industrial practices.
By 'transmedia historiography', then, I mean the coordinated use of digital
platforms and non-digital materials - integrated dialogically in ways that
encourage audience appropriation - to transform how people make sense of a
historical moment, encouraging more active ways of learning about the
complex, multi-perspectival components that make up a given history, such
as its politics, cultures, memories, and so on (see Freeman, 2019). Still,
before analysing the workings of Desarmados - a project that will
be fully outlined shortly but for now can be summarily described as an
internationally funded initiative that aims to reconstruct the cultural
memory of the Colombian armed conflict using video letters and other media
artefacts - I will begin this article by outlining some of the key
theoretical pillars needed to conceptualise transmediality as a
historiographical education practice. This means delving into some existing
scholarly understandings of transmediality, education, and historiography.
Today's digital transmedial environment, itself 'the migration of our media
and our attention from one screen to many' (Holt and Sanson, 2014: 1), has
the potential to tell stories in new and dynamic ways across multiple media
(Jenkins, 2006; Scolari, 2009; Freeman, 2016a). However, Hay and Couldry
argues that understandings of transmediality are all too often based on
Western-centric and commercial media sectors such as film and television:
'International differences are obscured by the generality of the term
"convergence culture", and it can be helpful to consider convergence
"cultures" in the plural' (2011: 476). Pearson, too, notes that
'researchers have focused primarily on the United States and occasionally
the United Kingdom' (2014: vi), thus leading to a rather macro-level
interpretation of the workings of transmediality. By contrast, better
understanding the practices of telling stories across media means
acknowledging the innate multiplicity of transmediality's potential. And
this means establishing a cultural specificityapproach to both the
study and the practice of transmediality, conceiving of it as essentially a
recognisable approach to creating and communicating stories whilst also
taking into account the politics, peoples, ideologies, social values,
cultural trends, histories, leisure and heritage of individual peoples and
their own communities. Taking a cultural specificity approach to
transmediality means mapping the many faces of transmediality in different
countries. For as I argued previously, 'past builders of fictional story
worlds employed many different strategies that showcase just how many
possibilities there are for telling tales across multiple media' (Freeman,
2016a: 189-190).
So what are the possibilities for transmedia practices once applied as an
educational strategy? One of the newer meanings for transmediality lies in
its application to education, with educators and different governments
around the world seeking to bring the digitised, creative and participatory
engagement associated with the former to the teaching and learning
practices of the latter (Fleming, 2013). Current debates in this area of
digital literacy studies center around the integrated and diverse uses of
digital technologies in educational contexts, for example how today's youth
generation are learning new things via uses of digital media (Scolari et
al, 2018). Specifically, 'transmedia education' represents a move away from
traditional learning and towards interactivity across multiple platforms
and learning zones. The interactive power of a transmedial approach to
education was recognised by the United States Department of Education in
2011. Jenkins (2009) challenged teachers to involve students and to
encourage them to utilise what they see, hear, and read in a far more
interconnected way, both in and outside of the school classroom. In such a
system, students are urged to seek out additional content, explore
different pieces of information in various contexts, interact easily with
other readers, and evaluate ideas across formats. Later I will analyse how
such a transmedial approach to education has been adopted to shape how
school children have made sense of the Colombian armed conflict, but for
now it is important to consider the conceptual relationship between
transmediality, education, and historiography.
How, in other words, can a transmedial approach to communicating history
create new ways of not just experiencing that history, but also reshape how
it is remembered, acted on, and even transformed for the better? What is
the value of thinking about transmediality as a historiographical practice?
Conceptually, the art of transmedia storytelling has a great deal in common
with the multi-perspectival narratives of a historiographical practice. In
a fictional example of the former, for instance, the story may well switch
from one character's point of view to another's, as the audience moves from
one medium to another. See, for example, Wide Sargasso Sea, a
novel written by Jean Rhys in 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel
to Charlotte Brontë's famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Rhys' novel
followed the life of Antoinette Cosway, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in
the Brontë novel, who was a secondary character in Jane Eyre that
was turned into the hero of her own story. By switching between the
perspectives of different characters across additional stories, the larger
story of Jane Eyre was thus extended. As Jenkins (2009) puts it, this kind
of transmedia storytelling is precisely about subjectivity - that is,
'exploring the central narrative through new eyes, such as secondary
characters or third parties. This diversity of perspective often leads fans
to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for.'
And much like a transmedia story, history, quite similarly, is never a
single-perspective narrative; it cannot be easily synthesized into one
single chronicle. Rather, the tales of history are entirely made up of a
'collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses
… students of history would be better served descending into the bog of
conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose any given subject'
(Conway, 2015). In effect, both the consuming of transmedia stories and the
learning of history operates on the basis that people will gain a richer
and fuller understanding of that given story/historical event if they
consume as much material relating to it as possible, across any number of
platforms: 'To fully experience any fictional storyworld, consumers must
assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story
across media channels … to come away with a richer experience' (Jenkins,
2006: 21). Similarly, historiography is about rejecting the idea of a
single, standardized perspective and instead embracing the idea that
hunting down as many perspectives on history as possible will provide the
fullest understanding. As such, applying the practice of transmediality to
the learning of history makes sense, but more than this, it can also allow
for a multi-perspectival way of communicating and sharing history that
leads to reconciliation and solidarity for all parties involved, as I will
now explore in relation to Colombian culture.
Colombian Culture and the Desarmados Project
Colombia has a population of 48 million, a landmass of 1.139.000 km2, with
5 million internally displaced people, 480,000 refugees, two left-wing
guerrilla groups/armies and more than six new right-wing paramilitary
groups/armies called BACRIMS (see Gómez and Velásquez, 2018). Colombia also
has the most unequal distribution of wealth across the continent, with 30%
of its population living in poverty, and it is experiencing one of the
longest armed conflicts in the world, lasting almost 50 years (Fisas 2009;
UNDP, 2010).
As part of its ongoing peace process, on May 25, 2015, the Colombian
government issued decree 1038, under which it established the aspiration
that all educational institutions, spanning pre-school to higher education,
would promote the objective that young people and teachers alike have a
newfound space for learning, discussion and reflection on non-violence, the
culture of peace and sustainable development in the country of Colombia. In
the Colombia Country Strategic Plan document (2017-2021), education is one
of the Government Priorities, 'targeting schoolchildren … [and]
participation in education activities', while also 'prioritiz[ing] the
areas most affected by the conflict.' The need to understand the emergence
and history of violence in Colombia has led researchers to consider the
origins and multiple causes of the armed conflict, the main factors that
have contributed to the persistence of the violence, and the impacts it has
had on the population. As such, a number of Latin-American academics (see
García-Durán, 2014; Gomez and Velásquez, 2018) highlight the need to adopt
a multi-perspectival approach to education in order to understand the
multifaceted nature of the Colombian armed conflict. Transmedia
storytelling is one such multi-perspectival approach, establishing itself as
the ideal communicative form for the complexity of the country's political
state. For some Colombian universities - such as EAFIT University in
Medellín - transmedia storytelling is as a way of dealing with the
complexities of the conflict precisely because of its multi-perspectival
nature, as different media communicate different perspectives of the
conflict: 'The multiplicity of socio-political factors shaping the
Colombian armed conflict highlights the need to adopt a complex and
multidimensional approach in order to understand the nature, and future
solution, of this conflict' (Gomez and Velásquez, 2018: 178). As we shall
see, transmedia in Colombia can contribute to creating processes of memory,
recognition and solidarity for the Colombian armed conflict victims.
Indeed, out of this context comes Desarmados, an internationally
funded initiative supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture, EAFIT
University, and Bath Spa University. The Desarmados project aims to
reconstruct the cultural memory of the Colombian armed conflict using video
letters and other digital/non-digital artefacts and was proposed as a
pedagogical tool for the Colombian Chair of Peace. Its purpose is to involve
young people with the country's history and to give them a platform to ask
questions to ex-guerrilla and paramilitary fighters as well as civilian
victims. It harnesses the potentials of transmediality by allowing the young
people of Colombia to meet the various voices of the armed conflict, like
indigenous people, Afro-descendants, soldiers, teachers, ex-guerillas,
paramilitaries, and so on. As will be demonstrated shortly, these groups can
each tell their own experiences through multiple media platforms, in turn
allowing students to better understand the origin and impact of the
violence. Specifically, Desarmados aims to: harness and
appropriate (commercial) practices of transmedia storytelling as tools for
documenting the citizens of Medellín and for narrativizing their memories
of the Colombian armed conflict; reconstruct the cultural memory of this
armed conflict; and develop workshops with a total of ten secondary schools
in Medellín to help engage children in the transmedia project and to test
new transmedia education materials as tools for social enterprise between
survivors and civil society. Desarmados was the result of the
thesis of three students enrolled on the MA in Transmedia Communication at
EAFIT University. The University subsequently presented the project to the
Ministry of Culture, in the category 'Co-production of Content for a
Culture of Peace', and won. After the delivery of the prize, the main
website was built, which includes numerous interactive videos about the
history of the armed conflict and over a dozen audio-visual video letters.
Other transmedia materials deriving from the project comprise a
journalistic resource
, social media channels (
Facebook
and
Instagram
), a student-led workbook, and an app, which at the time of writing is in
the final stages of development. The project was nominated in Colombia for
the Kids' Choice Awards 2017 in the 'Favourite Website' category and was
presented at the international Build Peaceconference in 2017.
Research for the project was based on the simple process of speaking to as
many people as possible who had been impacted by - or themselves impacted -
the conflict in one way or another, be them victims, politicians,
ex-guerillas, and so on. These voices are the stories that were joined up
across media, as project leader Juan Sebastián Zuluaga explains:
It is a platform that aims to generate an exchange of correspondences and,
in addition,
become a pedagogical tool of the Chair for Peace. It offers an interactive
map, with a timeline, showing animated videos that explain the relevant
events of the armed conflict. The country of Colombia cannot simply turn
the page after sixty years of conflict. If we forget the victims it is to
victimize them a second time. Those who left, those who died and those who
suffered during the conflict have to be in force in the memory of their
society, otherwise it risks victimizing them all over again. So a project
like this is not to revive wounds but is to remember that we have forever
tarnished the human being.
Indeed, Desarmados was not intended as a piece of propaganda;
rather, in its hope to not revive old wounds, the project sought to create
a far more hopeful sense of reflection. That is to say, by allowing people
to see and witness others, be them other victims or whoever else, the
joining up of their voices across and between multiple media platforms
sought to join up these different political and emotional perspectives into
something that inspired solidarity, reconciliation, and reflection. Digging
into the past so as to remedy the future, if you will.
The original methodological contribution of Desarmados as a
practice discovery thus lies in its mix of qualitative research methods,
multiplatform media production practices and pedagogic insight to comprehend
how a coordinated use of narrative, audio-visual and textual content can be
used to teach socio-political and historical aspects of an armed conflict.
But more than this, Desarmados's use of transmedia education
strategies and materials showcase a link between multiplatform education
practices and the development of peace-building. Allow me to now
demonstrate these ideas in action via the project's own media platforms. In
the ensuing sections, first I will explain the function of each platform in
historiographical terms before analysing how its technological affordances
led to rich forms of understanding the Colombian armed conflict while
inspiring positive acts of reconciliation and solidarity.
Website - remembering the past
Initiating the Desarmadosproject is its website
(www.desarmados.org), its
'mothership', as Jenkins (2009) puts it - meaning the primary media
platform that anchors the rest of the transmedia story and which all other
platforms build upon. Thematically, the strategic function of the website
is to remember the past, to provide a participatory means of
learning about the origins of the violence and how the past has shaped the
present. The website is divided into six sections: 'History of the
Conflict', 'Protagonists', 'Map of the Protagonists', 'Leave Your Study',
'Blog', and 'Pedagogic Material'. This final section will be discussed
shortly, but for now I will focus on the first three of these sections,
which all link together.
The 'Map
of the Protagonists' page shows a basic map of Colombia, including its
key cities. In the past, '[p]rinted maps were a popular way of holding
transmedia stories together and contributing new narrative information to a
story world' (Freeman, 2016a: 81), such as the maps produced by author
J.R.R. Tolkien for Middle Earth. But maps, especially digitised maps, today
afford much educational value, too. For example, along the bottom of the
Desarmados web page are specific dates - ranging from 1965 to the
present day. Users are able to navigate through the various years and
across different Colombian cities; when they do so, they can watch short
educational videos that reveal something about the origins or the impact of
the Colombian armed conflict in that particular city and/or year. These
videos are mainly of individuals, teaching users something about place and
history via subjective memories and experiences. Put simply, the map
epitomises the educational strategy of the entire project - that is, that
history is 'not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars
on high' (Conway, 2015), but is only ever a grassroots set of individual
memories, all in dialogue with each other and built up by all corners of a
society. The map signals the central idea to users - i.e. students - that
the history of Colombia belongs to the individual.
And the emphasis on the individual establishes a narrative for the history
of Colombia that is then extended transmedially across additional parts of
the website. Previously I argued that 'it is now time to theorise
transmedia storytelling not as a phenomenon that relates … to crossing
media, but instead as a single experience of drillable multi-media
consumption' (Freeman, 2016a: 200). The Desarmados website is one
such single experience of drillable multi-media consumption, with users
encouraged to click through to the
'Protagonists'
part of the website. Here, six videoletters, each documenting individual
reflections on the personal impact of the Colombian armed conflict, are
available to watch and listen to. Each of the videoletters come from very
different people, be them ex-parliamentarians or victims who have been
displaced from their homes. Discussing the strength of transmedia
storytelling, Hancox argues that 'its multifaceted use of multiple
platforms affords arguably the best possible mode of storytelling - a mode
that is capable of enhancing characterization, emotional and experiential
engagement' (2018: 166). Enhancing the characterisation of the
Desarmados
protagonists stems from the ability to upload your own 'responses' to each
of the aforementioned videoletters, such as further videoletters, diaries,
written letters or photos.
As such, users have a firsthand account of the testimonies of the people
who have been silenced and forgotten by the conflict, of those who feel
excluded and defeated. By allowing users to respond to and post their own
memories in dialogue with those of others, a narrativised thread of
correspondence is thereby created - a collective memory, if you will, based
on a chain of personal memories, each providing feedback, discussion,
questions and answers. It acts as a network of historical stories that are
complemented by the data of the aforementioned map, together creating a
history of place, of the events that were lived, and of individual motives
or consequences of violence. This feature allows children and young people
who see any of the stories to learn not only about the intimate experience
of the event, but also about the context in which it occurred. More than
this, the transmedial nature of the videoletters, i.e. with the individual
and previously disparate voices of the conflict suddenly coming into
contact with each other for the first time, as one videoletter responds
directly to the last, works to create a conversation that actually affords
a sense of reconciliation. Those who experienced personal loss, for
example, sometimes expressed forgiveness in their videoletter having seen
and heard from particular ex-parliamentary figures, who themselves
expressed a sense of regret over the causes and consequences of the
violence in their community; youth and ex-combatants began a correspondence
exercise to get to know each other, recognising each other for the first
time and learning of their common ground in terms of how they imagine the
future of Colombia. Such is the 'reflexive and self-organizing potential of
transmediality on the level of culture, [as] each additional version of a
text or its fragment influences the ways in which we understand and
remember the source text itself' (Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2018: 90). Put simply,
the transmediality of the videoletters led to empathy on both sides, as
well as a retelling of the history of the Colombian armed conflict based
not on one perspective, but on the exchange of memories between different
individuals.
Pedagogically, therefore, and unlike the average history book that does not
allow for the exchange of views or stories, the Disarmed website
makes participants out of students, participants out of individuals, and a
collective narrative out of personal memories - all of which is underpinned
by the transmedial exchange of correspondences (via videos, photos,
letters, interviews, etc.). Looking forward, then, users are building
new
stories in dialogue with the past, shaping a more hopeful image for
Colombia's future based on reconciliation.
And this ability to create new stories, shaped via an exchange of
correspondence, has implications for how we understand the value of telling
a story across multiple media. It may be common knowledge to think of
transmediality as a single narrative that is strategically disseminated
across multiple platforms (Jenkins, 2006), but the Desarmados
videoletters exemplify transmedia storytelling as a form of
cross-generational postmemory. The concept of 'postmemory' describes the
relationship that the 'generation after' bears to the personal, collective
and cultural trauma of those who came before to experiences they seemingly
'remember' only by means of the stories, images and behaviors among which
they grew up. But, as Hirsch (2012) elaborates, 'these experiences were
transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute
memories in their own right. Postmemory's connection to the past is thus
actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection,
and creation.' In other words, postmemory describes the way that one
generation remembers the past, and specifically the idea that the way in
which they remember the past is quite often not though recall but through
mediated images only. In terms of Desarmados and its process of
narrativising history transmedially, what is important to note is that the
very transmediality of the project website, i.e. its joining up of people
and platforms, works almost to counter this issue of postmemory insofar as
it puts different generations into contact with one another via multiple
media sources, which themselves come into contact digitally. In effect,
transmedia storytelling hereby allows one generation to speak to and learn
from another - not directly, perhaps, but via watching and engaging with
the larger narrativisation of everyone's history.
Workbook - imagining the future
The Desarmados website may initiate the project, looking backwards
to the past, but a more structured sense of engagement in real life was
needed in order to accomplish the project's ambitions. With 'the real roots
of transmedia storytelling [being] in education' (Fleming, 2013), a
workbook was subsequently designed for use in classrooms by secondary
school students, guiding the process of learning about the Colombian armed
conflict (see Fig. 1). In Colombia, it is common to find textbooks that
offer concepts about peace and human rights in the context of the country's
conflict, and for a series of pedagogic activities to be developed in the
classroom. However, in these textbooks there is often little interactivity
between the students, teachers, and the protagonists of the armed conflict.
Accordingly, the project team sought to explore which culturally-responsive
transmedia storytelling practices can be used to teach the Colombian armed
conflict to school children, delivering teaching guidelines and producing a
set of materials to be used in the transmedial teaching practices of
secondary schools in Medellín. Anchoring the educational resources in the
classroom is thus its student workbook. Thematically, the strategic
function of the student workbook is to imagine the future, or more
specifically, to creatively imagine a better future for Colombia. The logic,
quite simply, is that positive emotion trumps negative emotion; in the
search for reconciliation, for catharsis, the project team wanted the
transmedial act of crossing from one media platform to another to allow for
a positive emotional reaction based on reflection.
FIGURE 1
So, having witnessed the range of videoletters available at
www.desarmados.org
, the pedagogic journey of Desarmados continues via the workbook
activities that are led by teachers in the classroom. As with the earlier
analysed videoletters, students are required to reflect on the memories of
others; the 'protagonists' of the website become characters whose lives are
extended into the classroom setting, much like the character of Antoinette
Cosway being extended from Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea
. The subjective personalisation of this approach was designed to engage
students more emotionally and to allow them to understand the meaning of
the armed conflict and the violence that has been perpetuated on individual
lives. The first question posed to students is: How do you imagine the
people who have been part of the war? As Rojas points out, the history
books have tended to represent these figures as barbarians, uncivilized,
rebels, victimizers or victims: 'In traditional historiography, the faces
of the war have been divided between good and bad, ignoring their
particularities and the contexts in which they have grown up' (Rojas, 2001:
22). The pedagogic experience of Desarmados seeks to overthrow
those kinds of prejudices, rejecting the notion of a single, standardized
chronicle of the history of Colombia and its people in favour of an
exchange of different, often conflicting memories, with students themselves
descending into the proverbial bog of conflict and learning the many
histories of this particular conflict. More than learning multiple,
personalised histories, classroom exercises are designed to help the
transformation of Colombia, a country mired in decades of violence, hatred
and pain.
For example, classroom challenges, conducted in reaction to the website
content, include letter writing, drawing, and memory tree games (see Fig. 2
& 3). Having witnessed a reflection on the loss of freedom, students
might be asked, 'What does freedom mean to you?, and to draw a more
progressive idea of freedom in Colombia. As with the subjectivity of all
forms of transmedia storytelling, these classroom challenges allow students
to explore the central narrative of the conflict through new eyes, leading
them to more greatly consider the question of who is speaking and who they
are speaking for: 'Solidarity and respect are reflected in my letter to
Diana, one of the protagonists of Disarmed. In every mail we realize how
young Colombians trust that peace is the way!!' (Age 8). 'The young people
of the country admire [Diana] and trust that through teaching such as hers
we can understand the virtues of peace' (Age 10). As project leader Zuluaga
explains further of these challenges:
This innovation generates spaces of interaction between the protagonists of
the armed conflict in the country and society, at the same time that it
seeks to sensitize young people in terms of understanding the causes and
consequences of war and to encourage them to think together about the
changes that are required to rebuild the country. All this in order to face
a past in conflict and assume a process of peace and reconciliation that
allows changes in the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors in our society
to forge a shared and peaceful future.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Social Media - documenting the future
Utilising transmedia storytelling to draw profound attention to the
perceptions, attitudes and behaviours in Colombian society require that the
world of the story goes beyond the digital. In the case of
Desarmados
, its users are required to interact with the locales of the real world,
which is where social media comes into play. Thematically, and most
basically, the strategic function of the social media platforms - again,
Facebook
and
Instagram
- is to document the future, commemorating it in the real world.
The project's use of social media channels is really about extending the
experience of the project outside of the classrooms and into daily life.
Having gained a knowledge of the past (website) and imagined a vision for a
better tomorrow (workbook), social media becomes a means to document this
vision, joining up additional perspectives, reflections and memories across
multiple media. Examples include students using social media to document
their visions as graffiti drawing on walls, or posting further responses to
the videoletters, etc., building the multi-perspectival histories further.
Of course, one of Jenkins' original seven core principles of transmedia
storytelling was 'performance', which concerns 'the ability of transmedia
extensions to lead to fan produced performances that can become part of the
transmedia narrative itself' (2009). But the type of performance being
enacted by the Desarmados social media users is less to do with
notions of fandom and more about capturing a sense of historic place.
Joshua Meyrowitz commented that a lot of Westerners have lost touch with
their sense of place because the 'traditionally interlocking components of
"place"' (1999: 100) had been broken up by digital media since their
location did not hinder them from always being 'in touch and tuned-in' or,
as most would now say, connected to or 'always-on' their portable media
(McStay, 2010: 3) - an idea that arguably also applies to any social media
user. However, at a time when the innate connectivity and shareability of
social media is also making certain strands of transmedia stories
ironically fleeting, it is the role of locative media and physical
real-world projects such as the aforementioned graffiti drawing to keep
audiences politically engaged.
One such example of a locative, politically engaged extension of the
Desarmados
project is the use of its social media accounts to encourage users to
consider the relationship between what they have learnt about conflict and
its impact on their own community. 'Enter www.desarmados.org,' one Facebook
post reads, 'and you can share facts of the conflict that happened in your
community so that together we can create a map of memory reconstruction so
that these events will never happen again. Now it's your turn!' One
message, for example - again written on a wall for all to see and captured
via a photograph on Facebook - pleaded with the citizens of Medellín to
remember the violence that took place in a specific street but, in
response, to 'recover humanity, solidarity and start a new era of peace in
our streets.'
By inscribing parts of the transmedia story of the origins and impact of
the Colombian armed conflict outside of screen-based media forms (and the
classroom space) and onto the physical walls of real locations across
Medellín, those inscriptions essentially become characters in the unfolding
story. While I have implied throughout this article that the transmedia
practice represented by Desarmados has little to do with the
commercial whims of the likes of Disney and Time-Warner and their
brand-based transmedia entertainments, it is certainly possible to draw a
direct comparison between the social media strategy utilised by
Desarmados
and the practice of location-based promotion that has taken hold in the
advertising industry. Scholars have discussed the ephemeral nature of new
media promotion, from YouTube content and websites to interstitials and
memes (Grainge, 2011; Pesce and Noto, 2016). With the rise of mobile
technology, a promotional campaign now has the ability to both reach out to
audiences and to guide them to specific locations as part of a broader,
spatially linked experience. Broadly describing an internet-based scheme
employing a scavenger hunt metaphor, these promotional practices may span
multiple territories, and involve multiple users. The development of these
locative forms of promotion have seen promotion as a whole become an
explicit journey, with audiences invited to participate in one identifiable
event in advance of engagement with another event. Consider the way that in
2014
Starbucks
made use of locative mobile media technology to track consumers' device IDs
and locations, using that information to deliver personalised text messages
with offers of 50% discounts on their favourite drinks at the most local
Starbucks.
Occupying much more of a social-activist arena than this overtly
promotional area, the Desarmados social media channels are
nonetheless devised with a number of the same motives in mind. Just as with
location-based promotion, the aforementioned Facebook examples sought to
create a multimedia experience that transcended the screen and the
classroom; there is also a similar degree of interactivity that is based on
users generating content for projects by inputting their own meanings into
how the images are experienced. There is even a comparable emphasis on
equating experience to place, attaching location-based images to community
spaces that are public and shared, with the communal nature of these images
and spaces linked to the messages of reconciliation, solidarity, and
change.
All of which is to say that the same promotional leanings that are inherent
to social media platforms and which afford myriad ways to 'communicate and
share' (Gauntlett, 2011) are at work in the pedagogical, historiographical,
and socio-political uses of those platforms. The locative, real-world
physicality of the aforementioned Facebook posts, each enabling and
promoting 'sharing, collaboration and content creation' (McStay, 2010:
37-38), is what is most significant about the contribution made to the
meaning of the Desarmados narrative - that is, that everyone has
an important voice in the recreation of the history of Colombia.
Moreover, making use of the inherent promotional/democratic affordances of
social media to establish the socio-political ambitions of the project also
raises important questions about the recreation of cultural memory via
these particular platforms. The earlier analysed videoletters may have
exemplified transmedia storytelling as cross-generational postmemory, but
the use of social media to document new stories about Colombia's future in
real-world locations points to what Michael Rothberg (2009) describes as
'multidirectional memory', which encourages us to think of the public
sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply
articulate established positions but actually come into being thorough
their dialogical interactions with others. Writing in reference to the
collective memory of the Holocaust, Rothberg provides 'a framework that
draws attention to the inevitable dialogical exchange between memory
traditions and keeps open the possibility of a more just future of memory'
(2009: 21). For Rothberg, it becomes useful to rethink the means by which
collective memories are made, especially in political historical contexts
defined by conflict and tragedy, as 'moments [that] coexist in which
historical memory serves as a medium for the creation of new communal and
political identities' (2009: 12). Rothberg may be referring to the image of
the Holocaust across culture, but his ideas are equally useful for making
sense of the kinds of transmedial interventions represented by
Desarmados
and its social media platforms. In this case, and by understanding the
value of social media in a project like this one as that which fosters
forms of multidirectional memory, it becomes apparent that 'both the
subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction'
(Rothberg, 2009: 5). Users are not merely promoting solidarity; they are
rewriting the entire story of solidarity.
Conclusion
This article has explored how one project's combined use of digital
platforms (narrativizing the origins, consequences, politics, places and
peoples of the Colombian armed conflict across websites, social media,
video letters, etc.) and physical artefacts (drawings, games, workbooks,
etc.) allows for not only a new way of experiencing and remembering
history, but has demonstrated how the practice of narrativising history
across digital and physical artefacts can reshape that history, creating
new knowledge and ways of reconciling the past and present. Indeed,
Desarmados
is a transmedia project that encourages Colombian people not to escape
their pasts, but rather to think differently about their pasts by
traversing 'across and between the borders where multiple media platforms
coalesce' (Freeman and Gambarato, 2018: 11). It asks those people to see
their history differently, and it is the practice of transmedia
storytelling - with its power to immerse people in interactive platforms
and shared, connected experiences - that is fundamental to achieving those
important social ambitions. Fundamentally, the use of transmedia practices
in Desarmados - themselves representative of what I have argued to
be a practice of transmedia historiography - is really about making sense
of a violent past that for many people still does not make sense; such
practices enable the narrativisation of what is un-narrativisable from a
single perspective by making use of multiple perspectives and the activism
that emerges from surrounding media.
Where, then, does that leave my broader attempts to theorise transmedia
storytelling as that which narrativises history across media in ways that
specifically affords educational, socio-political and historiographical
benefits? Firstly, rather than separating 'commercial' practices of
transmediality, i.e. based on the use of additional platforms as 'cash
nexuses' (Lemke, 2004) that in turn create multiple revenue streams and
'marketing assaults' (Alpert and Jacobs, 2004) from so-called 'democratic'
forms of transmediality, like transmedia journalism (see Gambarato and
Alzamora, 2018), Desarmados reinforces the need to embrace the
multiplicities and pluralities of transmediality as a multi-perspectival
and cross-disciplinary practice, one that is capable of addressing specific
and very different objectives. Transmediality now means very different
things, in different parts of the globe, to different sets of industries,
cultures, practices, arts, and disciplines (Freeman and Proctor, 2018).
Yet despite the multiplicity and plurality of its applications around the
world, two ideas best characterise the kinds of transmediality exemplified
and afforded by Desarmados, both of which push forward our general
understanding of what transmedia practices are really for. The first idea
concerns the importance of conceptualising transmediality as a series of
practices for building and capturing memory. Colin B. Harvey (2014) has
argued previously that memory is a key component of all transmedia
storytelling, fictional or otherwise, insofar as audiences are required to
remember the specifics of a story from medium to medium. But beyond this
individualised definition of memory based on remembering plots or characters
during the act of migrating across media, one might wish to discuss
transmedia practices as the capturing of a more collective
cultural
memory: Desarmados is a transmedia project that is designed to
preserve the memory of a population, rooted in memories of its collective
past. Be it via postmemory or multidirectional memory, a project like
Desarmados
demonstrates the idea that joining up what were previously desperate
individual memories across multiple media platforms allows people to make
greater sense of those individual memories - the multi-perspectival
interconnectedness of transmediality here affords dialogue and context.
The second idea concerns the social-activist notion that transmediality -
far more than being a strategic practice of extending narratives across
platforms - is something that actually helps people. As Camilo
Tamayo Gomez, one of the Desarmados researchers, argues:
The development of transmedia narratives is a clear example of how
constructions of memory, recognition and solidarity are a healing process
for victims in contexts of armed conflict. Thus, the development of
transmedia products to construct memory narratives is based on expressive
activism as an instrument to exercise political and social actions in the
public spheres of this Colombian city (Gomez and Velásquez, 2018: 154).
Understanding how transmediality can deal with the traumas of a history in
a positive way, then, means acknowledging the ways that 'transmediality can
enable not just the spreading of messages across media, but equally the
creation of a social fence around those messages, inviting participation
and building a stronger community' (Freeman, 2016b: 95). Crucially, while
none of these ideas are necessarily specific to Colombia - and while the
thematic ingredients of different historical contexts will always change
the nature of how that history is narrativised transmedially - one can
nevertheless claim that these factors of conceiving of transmediality as 1)
a practice for rebuilding cultural memories, and 2) a healing process to
exercise political and social actions, do encapsulate an altogether
culturally specific model for the function of transmediality in Colombia.
Which, by contrast, raises related questions to do with the broader
potentials of recreating and narrativising everyday life via digital media
technologies, as well as how the integration of old and new media forms can
shape how we navigate everyday life, and indeed how the transmedial
narrativisation of histories across media can help people to deal with the
traumas of those histories in a profound way.
Looking forward, the potential exists for researchers to now consider how
Colombian notions of transmedia storytelling, i.e. as that which
contributes to memory and solidarity, can be adapted or localized to
achieve similarly profound social functions in other countries or cultures.
How else and for what historiographic benefits might transmedia practices
be applied elsewhere? The very act of narrating history across media, as
has been demonstrated via Desarmados, works to realise something
altogether new in terms of how we experience that history, remember it, act
on it, reshape it for the better. I believe it was George Santayana who
famously said that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.' With transmedia practices applied at their creative best, there
should be no need to forget.
Acknowledgements
Many of the ideas in this article emerged from a number of funded
initiatives. These include the
Transmedia Earth Conference
, held at EAFIT University in 2017 and for which I co-organised and
received Newton Funds (£2,000), and the Desarmados app, itself
funded by a Santander Pioneer Award in 2017 (£5,000). I would personally
like to thank both Paola Morales Escobar and Camilo Tamayo Gomez for their
generous support in Colombia.
References
Copyright (c) 2019 Matthew Freeman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.