The media ecosystem of contemporary fiction: stories, universes and intellectual properties through transmedial worlds

Abstract

Audiovisual content, once anchored to specific media devoid of interactive potential, is currently channeled through numerous platforms that favor uninterrupted access to an inexhaustible universe of pieces of very different nature. Related to this phenomenon, the popularization of communication modalities labeled as ‘transmedia’ has enhanced the attainment of experiences that gravitate around the so-called ‘transmedial worlds’, fictional worlds that not only favor narrative continuity through the stories themselves, but simultaneously, sustain their unlimited expansion through countless ways. Attending to this mutation, this article approaches transmediation processes from three different dimensions, considering them inseparable: storytelling, the construction of fictional worlds and the application of branding. To this end, a literature review has been carried out in order to link the different approaches to those phenomena that, since the term transmedia was coined to the most recent present, in which this concept has been integrated into a multitude of dynamics, have configured the contemporary media landscape. In this way, the paper tries to elucidate how the new modes of production, distribution and audiovisual consumption have drawn a renewed media ecosystem in which the media coordinates to meet the demands of audiences that, increasingly, wish to participate in the communicative flows in which they take part.