The Development of Technology continued…

It can be argued, that as the media text has been able to spread across space, the audience has begun to create new mediums to ‘enhance’ another, known as media meshing. Wendy Davis on an online article argues that “Using the Web in this fashion–dubbed “media meshing” by the report–“fulfills a need to become more deeply involved with hobbies, interests or stories that kindle passionate involvement,” states the report.” (Davis, 2014) An example of media meshing with the media text ‘The Walking Dead’ can be the websites such as ‘The Walking Dead Wiki’ (Walkingdead.wikia.com, 2014), which helps provide the audience with information from characters to storylines of the media text across all of its platforms such as the television series, the comic book and the game. This website can be accessed on IPhone’s, IPad’s or laptops while the television program can be playing in the background. This use of multiple screens shows how the multiple platforms, brought on by new technologies can be used to compliment each other and help the audience delve deeper into the media text and have a better understanding of content that they may have missed. The website even includes trivia’s about the text such as information about the behind the scenes development of characters and storyline’s, for example on the character page of Carl Grimes, it revels that the creator named the character after his father. The website also offers the audience the option to vote in poll’s such as “What did you think of the midseason finale” in which there are options such as “It was amazing” or “It was awful”. However, this idea can tie into the concept of audience participation being a prime catalyst for the expansion of the media text through the development of technology, which could challenge the suggestion that it is the development of new technologies alone that is allowing this cross platform text to exist over a large space.