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• 1 2019-09-04T14:55:37-07:00 Translating 19th Century Interactions into Tweets 2 The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Transmedia gallery 2019-09-04T17:03:44-07:00 One of LBD's greatest strengths is its ability to remain engaging as its content lengthens. The videos start out as only two to four minutes each, but as the plot progresses, they get longer, sometimes reaching up to ten minutes in length.
  
  Audience participants might only interact with the YouTube portion of the multimodal platform. I know I certainly did. But the characters mention LookBooks, Tumblr, and Tweets throughout the videos, and audience members can't help but check out supplementary information from offscreen characters.
  
  The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a proponent of transmedia storytelling, a phrase coined by Henry Jenkins. He says that

  ‘A trans-media story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’. In that definition transmedia is not different from intermediality or cross media phenomena. But transmedia storytelling is different. From a production point of view transmedia storytelling is the systematic planning of a story throughout different platforms – and not one story on different or multiple platforms (Mikos).

  It is, as Jenkins calls it, “a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Tepper). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries uses many different social media platforms to communicate and interact with its audience, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LookBook, Tumblr, and FaceBook. Each character has at least one form of social media - for example, every character who appears onscreen has a Twitter account - and therefore at least one way outside of Lizzie's vlogs to communicate with other characters and the audience. Throughout the series, the characters' social media profiles were active and engaged with viewers through Q&A's or simply responding on the various platforms.
  
  Lydia uses Tumblr and vlogs like Lizzie.
  
  Jane uses LookBook and Pinterest.
  
  Darcy and Bing only use Twitter.
  
  Bing, Caroline, and Darcy's first published Twitter interactions (as shown above) give readers a piece not offered in the original Pride & Prejudice puzzle: Mr. Bingley's purchase of Netherfield. The characters don't say much given the then-140-character platform, but Bing's enthusiasm, Caroline's pretty-girl nonchalance, and Darcy's skepticism are all expertly conveyed. 
  
  Each character has their own separate voice and space to seem like a real person in this fictional world.
  
  This approach is radical.
  
  For Hank Green and Bernie Su to create a platform that depended on audience interaction and feedback that then exploded based on that interaction is groundbreaking for several reasons.

  1. With the modern attention span being three to five minutes, the average person wouldn't spend time on more than one video in one sitting. There weren't always links between every social media platform, so people would have to actively seek them out if they wanted the supplemental information.
  2. For the technological generations, this is the new form of reading. You can bounce around from platform to platform and only spend a few minutes on each one. While this approach might not appeal to older audiences who are big believers in "The Book Is Always Better," it is important to recognize the cultural significance of multimodal storytelling.
  3. Because Lizzie Bennet was the first of the "YouTube books," it was the first to engage in an interactive story format. Vlogging has been around for a while, but this specific format allowed for the millenial audience to use their own social media to participate in a story they'd read before or were maybe introduced to for the first time in clear modern terms they could understand.