The biggest problem that I had with Transmedia is that anytime I attempted to understand it, I could find no way to distinguish it from… well, from communications in general, really. It felt like a staged scene, where someone had picked the name and an assortment of venues, and spread the word, without any particular artistic vision. This could, of course, all be perceptual problems on my part, because I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anything that was intended to be Transmedia, only that which was about Transmedia.
Maybe they would have had better luck just folding the whole damn thing inward and telling stories about how they might tell stories, this time without slideshow presentations, or, as I call them, e-filmstrips, and which I consider to be the bane of effective communication in the digital age. It’s not that slideshows can’t carry information, but that they exist almost exclusively in presentation contexts, both technical and social, that place almost insurmountable barriers to the inclusion of anything other than a slide, which precludes some of our most effective modes of communications.
So… I hope TransMultiMedia (TMM) ™ fares better. Wait… did I just invent it?