The transmediated self

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the old Web 1.0 notion of an anonymous digital persona that is separate from off-line, analog self-identity is no longer applicable.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 fashioned according to the aesthetics of transmedia production. I conclude 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, episodic, and interactive.