Abstract:

Who has never experienced the feeling of being lost in a story; of getting so involved in a story that you lose track of time or even forget where you are? Who has never felt empathy with a character? Who has never bought a product or made a donation after being persuaded by an inspiring story? Researchers refer to these behaviours as narrative transportation, a metaphor proposed by Richard Gerrig [1] for describing experiences in which readers are transported into a narrative journey by virtue of performing that narrative. Following Gerrig, in 2000, Green and Brock [2] conceptualized transportation as a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative. They distinguished transportation from elaboration, a kind of divergent process in which persuasion leads to an attitude change via evaluation of arguments. More recently, the phenomenon of narrative transportation has been taken as a prototypical form of experiential response in transmedia storytelling. [3] As it is well known, transmedia storytelling expands a single universe through different and well-structured story pieces that users are invited to get in and out. Recent evidence from neuroscience [4] corroborates the idea that oxytocin, a hormone molecule involved in social behaviour, can regulate the homeostasis that draws consumers’ connection with characters and influence pro-social behaviour in immersive narratives. In this paper, inspired by these findings, we propose that, in order to deliver more interactive and constructive learning experiences, transportation needs to be balanced with the divergent process of knowledge elaboration in a kind of “homeostatic transmedia structure”. We suggest that this approach not only grabs students’ attention and facilitates understanding, as it has the potential to make people more likely to act critically in the era of post-truth.

Keywords:

Narrative transportation, transmedia storytelling, 21st century skills, interactive learning experiences, neuroscience of narrative.