Holarchic Media: When transmedia just isn't Transmedia enough

Transmedia is a term which has been with us now for almost twenty years, gaining currency in the early 'noughties', although of course we may look to Jenkins' 'transmedia storytelling ' (2006) as a point from which we might agree it began to percolate more readily within the broader media consciousness. However while the term is tried and tested, the concept(s) it pertains to are -arguably -less well-defined and agreed-upon, and furthermore may perhaps be continually evolving. Indeed, at the marvellous Transmedia Earth Conference in Medellin, Colombia in 2017 -eleven years after the publication of Convergence Culture -a common refrain heard during informal conversations among many of us interested in the subject was 'What the &%&# is transmedia?!' (transmedia theorists, it seems, are fond of a colourful adjective; Jenkins' own blog, of course, contains the subtly-titled bio 'Who the &%&# is Henry Jenkins?'). We had travelled from across the globe to attend the conference, the first of its kind, and discovered that many of us had somewhat disparate ideas about what transmedia might actually be, and that individually we subsequently understood the term rather less fully than we perhaps believed we did beforehand (which is, of course, probably quite indicative of an excellent and successful conference!). Given a variety of overlapping uses, interpretations and definitions of the term, as well as its potential for continual evolution as technology and content-use progresses, the purpose of this short paper is to present a round-up definition of transmedia as-at 2021, and also to propose a new term -Holarchic Media -which I suggest may provide a defining counterpoint to the original concept.