Converging Universes and Media Niches in Serial Narratives: An Approach Through Information Architecture

The paper deals with the models of convergence pertaining to the audiovisual media production, with specific reference to serial narratives. In fact, the peculiar features of this kind of audiovisual products, such as expansion and persistence over space and time, allow a privileged point of view on convergence phenomena. The paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach through the use of conceptual tools coming from several disciplinary fields, namely film and media studies, but also media economics and information architecture. Our ultimate purpose is to offer a cross-disciplinary perspective capable of taking advantage from all those fields together. In order to do so we apply information architecture and cross-channel user experience principles (such as consistency, resilience, correlation) to the media field, adopting an overall ecosystemic perspective, and focusing on the bias between local experience (that of the single product) and global design (that of the whole ecosystem) and vice-versa. Furthermore, we focus on three different production strategies we name derivation, cross-media and ecosystem, investigating them mainly in cinema, television and gaming production and highlighting the misalignments between project and practice, as well as the eventual forms of conflict and of adverse reactions to the planning. We account for divergence models that lead to the building of “media niches”, which often remain external or peripheral to the circulation and delivery of media contents as, for instance, the fan use and re-appropriation of media contents linked to specific gender practices and identities.