Transmedia Me

About Me

I’m an assistant professor in Rockford University‘s Department of English. From my perspective as a rhetoric and composition scholar, I’m interested in sonic rhetoric, intellectual property, fan studies, and writing program administration.

Beyond those interests, I garden, cook, eat, listen to videogame soundtracks, play music, read science fiction, watch Lost, learn from the wise people in my community, and relish marriage.

About This Site

This is a space for me to blog on academic topics I’ve been thinking about lately and share some of my work and personality as it spans across different media (pictures, sounds, texts, videos).

Transmedia storytelling refers to a story told over a variety of media–like, for instance, when fans of the TV show Lost spent the summer of 2006 interacting with The Lost Experience as told through TV commercials, voice mail, e-mail, various websites, billboards, and chocolate bars. The complete story was only found when all the disparate parts were brought together by audiences.

Any person’s web presence is similar, in that he has added a new medium to the various ways he already tells the story of his life.  I already know people (and am known by them) through both face-to-face interactions and online interactions (through e-mail, on Facebook or Twitter, in online course settings, and so on).  This site is a new hub for some of those transmedia parts of me–those ways that I represent myself across different mediums.

I also get a kick out of the assonance of the phrase transmedia me, all the lovely ee sounds butted up together.  And it’s playfully hard to pin down, I think: is this site a collection of the parts of “me” that are “transmedial,” or is it more imperative, asking readers to perform an act of transmediation (remix?) upon me?  “Transmedia me, ye scurvy dogs!”