Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, and Participatory Culture

Moulton, Carter

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-q9ac-0h74

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Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, and Participatory Culture

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Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, & Participatory Culture explores, like its title suggests, what we mean when we talk about “having an experience” in today’s media culture. Traveling to an expanded network of sites where media fans are actively called to go out and “have an experience” in the fictional worlds of the franchises they see onscreen—theme parks, escape rooms, opening-night screenings, studio tours, pop-up bars and retail, and location-based AR/VR experiences—the project illuminates how concepts that have largely been used to understand our digital media environment—concepts like convergence, transmedia, spreadability, stickiness, surveillance, drillability, and enclosure—are being extended beyond online spaces and mapped onto the physical places we find ourselves in.Bridging media industry studies, fan studies, tourism studies, and new media studies, the project analyzes the relationships between digital media culture and material media places, focusing on the promotional promises, social practices, and power dynamics that shape contemporary media experiences. It takes a multimodal approach, blending auto-ethnographic accounts with interviews and analyses of a wide range of texts—including promotional trailers, press interviews, box office data, Twitter feuds, retail architectures, theme park rides, mobile apps, technology patents, and cease-and-desist letters sent by studios to fan organizers. Throughout, the project interrogates the multifaceted nature of media experiences: what it has come to mean (culturally, economically, personally) to have one; what fans and visitors seek, value, and how they make sense of these experiences; how the cultural idea of “having an experience” is strategically promoted by media industries; how “experiences” are architecturally designed, circulated through social media posts, protected by intellectual property (IP) law, and rendered into corporate-controlled data; and ultimately, how cultural power might be reified or reshaped through the act of having one. By exploring the spaces and times of media experiences, Having an Experience situates the contemporary transmedia franchise as an increasingly touristic form of entertainment. It reveals an ongoing struggle over media expression, power, and place, a cultural process in which Hollywood cedes (and re-seizes) control not only of its texts as they are remixed and pirated online, but also of the spatial experiences it constructs, commodifies, and seeks to protect. In doing so, my work opens new avenues for media scholars to think beyond the “text” and to consider what it might mean to approach spatial experience as integral to our understanding of promotional culture, transmedia franchising, IP law, and the ever-evolving negotiations between industries and audiences.

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