ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most widespread mode of mobile narrative creation is the inclusion of mobile technologies as key components of transmedia design, where hardware like cell phones and laptops sit comfortably next to media like print novels, celluloid films, and console video games in constructing massively complex, connected, and, importantly, materially diverse fictional worlds. In arrangements such as this, narrative exists as a multisited and multimodal construct, where meaning and interpretation are always “stereoscoped” by the constant presence of multiple winding and weaving narrative pathways. Because transmedia design allows for the integration of multiple (often materially incompatible) sites of meaning some level of connection is needed between them to prevent incoherence. These fictions consequently often form extremely complex networks of meaning. This chapter will examine how the networked meaning of transmedia expression is impacted by three distinct modes of mobile integration: the placement of mobile technology in nonmobile media such as films or graphic novels (embedded approach); the creation of in-between spaces where meaning is created through the coordinated use of mobile technology and another, nonmobile site (simultaneous approach); or the ‘flattening’ of multiple media platforms into a single format for use on a mobile device (convergent approach).1
