Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Title: "Then why don't you watch my videos!?" Modern entertainment & transmedia

Please copy/paste the below directly into the html option, not the content option. :)

Blog post:

I am a big fan of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

For those of you who don't know, the Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a modern vlog adaptation of Jane Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>.  In its base form, it's a vlog series; in its full form, it's a massive transmedia project that utilizes YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and several other social media websites.

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The overall effect of this means that you can watch the webseries in two ways. The first is as a regular web series, where you watch the videos as you would a normal television series. The second is to immerse yourself in the virtual world that they've created - you can follow the characters on Twitter (Is Darcy following Lizzie? Why isn't Wickham Tweeting?) and Tumblr and keep up to date, in real time, on the story.

Of course, the Lizzie Bennet Diaries isn't the first web series to use this interactive transmedia mode; various other vlogs for the online cult story Slenderman have been using them for ages. Slenderman, an internet myth, is a creature (about eight feet tall, in a suit and no face)  who supposedly lives in another dimension and - to put it bluntly - fucks shit up in the lives of those he comes in contact with.

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While there are many Slenderman stories and YouTube channels, two of the most predominant ones are Tribe Twelve and EverymanHybrid, both of whom use the interactive transmedia world. a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/TribeTwelve" target="_blank">Tribe Twelve</a> incorporates the most important of the things happening into their videos, so like the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, you can exclusively watch the videos and keep up with the story; EverymanHybrid favors the transmedia method to the point that you NEED to follow their Twitter and other channels in order to even understand what's going on in the videos.

Both methods would be nearly impossible to do with a television show or a movie; because they're so heavily fan based and so incorporated into real time, it takes the smaller and more intimate vlogging format to work. Where entertainment used to be situated into half-hour and hour chunks of time, it now invades (albeit willingly!) every hour and every minute of your day.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think about transmedia projects like Tribe Twelve and the Lizzie Bennet Diaries?

(Nicole Brinkley)