Introduction: The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto

The idea of this book was born out of the necessity to better understand and assess a number of paratextual forms (from memes to animated Graphics Interchange Formats [GIFs]; from digital promotional materials to inter- active games; from fan videos to cinephiliac blogging) populating the con- temporary realm of entertainment and affecting it in ways that interfere not only with textual meaning, but also with the viewers’ fidelity (or infidelity) to a product, or with a fictional world’s “life expectancy.” This need is felt, we believe, by the scientific community, as well as by the media industry and by consumers of transmedia narratives and “complex TV.”1 What this work questions is not so much the permanence or evanescence of these by-products, as the effects of durability or ephemerality that their production and con- sumption have on a large scale within the mediascape.