Abstract

While much attention has been paid to the formal and creative challenges of world building in which vast narrative spaces cohere from complex textual designs and transmedia relationships, this chapter looks beyond the construction of cohesive, branded narrative spaces to consider how those spaces, once built, become sites of struggle for stakeholders within the media industries. Worlds are not just spaces of narrative elaboration, but shared sites in and in relation to which media professionals enter into collaborative relationships with one another. In the process of working within the established parameters of a shared world, such producers engage in a process of position taking, engaging in power plays that assert creative authority over the shared realm and making claims to identity, distinction, and legitimacy in hierarchical relationships to one another. By conceptualizing media worlds in the frame of “world sharing”, we can recognize them as significant sites of cultural struggle for media workers laboring in precarious, for-hire economies (Caldwell 2008, Deuze 2007, Mayer 2011).

Keywords: World sharing, industry, multiplicity, management, media Franchising