Postdigital Storytelling: Storytelling (Within or Across) the Digital and Transmedia Field

Abstract

The term postdigital implies a rupture and continuity of the digital paradigm, which allows us to analyse the challenges implied by a largely digitalised society. At the same time, the term transmedia goes completely unnoticed in the postdigital literature, despite sharing key elements in its reflection on the digital paradigm. For this reason, this article reflects on the points of contact between transmedia and postdigital storytelling, as well as the differences identified between postdigital storytelling and its precedents: digital storytelling and transmedia storytelling. It is discussed that postdigital storytelling becomes an evolution of digital storytelling in congruence with the challenges posed by the postdigital paradigm and, simultaneously, that transmedia storytelling can adopt a postdigital perspective under which to balance the media it uses, while maintaining its essence of narrative expansion, which is a dispensable condition in digital and postdigital storytelling. Finally, an analogous reflection to the digital term emerges that more and more the transmedia nature is intertwined and diluted in the context that surrounds us to the point that it ceases to make sense.