Participatory Culture

It could be argued, that the expansion of the cross media text ‘The Walking Dead’ across multiple platforms, is due to the participatory culture, that is taking place on platforms of new media, such as the Internet, video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo and online forums. Through these platforms, media audiences are able to take the existing story and world that has been created by the authors of the cross-platform media text and extend it with their own fan generated content, creating a paratext, adding backstories and new features that have not been put forward by the authors. These paratext’s can also take place as discussions or ‘fan fictions’ on forums on the Internet. The participation of the audience with media texts, suggests that they are creating a more personal and enjoyable text for the said audience and allows other’s to contribute and discuss matters that exist in the text. As said by Jonathan Gray (Gray, 2010), the audience “Carve a more personalised route through the text” and “create a reflective space in which viewers can engage more closely with the psyches, motivations, and specificities of multiple characters than they might be able to in the films or programs themselves.” An example of a spoof paratext of ‘The Walking Dead’ was created by the famous YouTube group known as “Epic Rap Battles of History” (ERB, 2010) in which they took the character Rick Grimes from the TV series of the media text and portrayed him as having a rap battle against Walter White, the main character from the TV series ‘Breaking Bad’ (Breaking Bad, 2008-2013) in a video called “Rick Grimes vs Walter White” (Epic Rap Battles of History, 2014). By doing so, it could be suggested that the creators of the video have taken on the multiple texts and made it their own work of fiction. This notion of almost ‘taking over’ a media text or multiple texts from the authors and creating paratext’s has been suggested by Frank Rose who says “Digital media have created an author-ship crisis. Once the audience is free to step out into the fiction and start directing events, the entire edifice of the twentieth century begins to crumble” (Rose, 2011).