TV Series, Convergence Culture, and the Davy Crockett Hat

This chapter focuses on the transition from ephemerality to persistence and vice versa. The contemporary mediascape is formed of short, audiovisual fragments that contribute to complex narrative worlds that we have elsewhere called “narrative ecosystems.” These fragments play an important role in defining our temporal experience of audiovisual products; they are also significant in shaping our use of the past. This chapter takes for granted some relevant changes in the production and fruition models of TV serial narratives Such transformations have enforced a change of critical perspective, since contemporary narratives are an evolution of the “story”: they are ongoing and intricately developed storylines with many characters and multiple settings, all of which are fundamental for the creation of vast narratives. In the contemporary media environment, a vast narrative may often intersect with popular literature, comics, MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), and TV series, the last-named of which are the main focus of our discussion. This chapter studies intertextual relations, considering them to be the result of a dialectic between extraction and integration. This process can be explained as a form of the convergence/divergence paradigm, and we proposed reading extraction as an operation that often erases the relations between the extracted objects and their cultural context, therefore generating objects that are more the result of reconstruction than of an intertextual integration..