Webseries, Orginal Series and Digital Series: The Forms of Serial Fiction on the Web
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to provide through an historical perspective an analysis of the morphologies of seriality in the web, from its origins to the latest linguistic and formal developments. The subject of this essay is the webseries: a webnative serialized fiction which, although it located several formal correspondences with the model of the TV series at the same time it differs significantly from them. Starting from the appropriation of models and forms of television series, nowadays the webseries stand at the center of the communicational and symbolic transformations that cross the way we communicate, relate and watch the stories in the era of convergence (Jenkins, 2007), within a post-media condition (Eugeni, 2015), and in a culture that always looks straight on the production of hybrid forms (Arcagni, 2016).
Webseries is not only a simple model for the serial storytelling, but a format that hybridizes entertainment places making the difference between offline and online series increasingly nuanced, for example like in the cases of Amazon and Netflix’ series. Therefore webseries become one of the formats with which to experiment the languages and narrative forms connected with the last generation of immersive media.
In the essay I will try to trace the new forms of webseries in relation to communicational development taken from social networks and from the technology of wereable media as the device for Virtual Reality, in order to draw guidelines for understanding the next horizon of digital storytelling. To do this, I’m going to propose terminological and conceptual change: to adopt the term "digital series" in place of the traditional and insufficient terms of webseries or original series.
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