Immersion, social media and transmedia storytelling: the inclusive mode of reception

In the present article, I argue that social media become the main site of a new set of relations between fiction and reality in transmedia storytelling by enabling interaction between characters (in the fictional world) and interactors (in the real world). These relations underlie a new mode of reception, which I propose to call the inclusive mode of reception. Unlike the "immersive" mode of reception, whose ultimate goal is to substitute one reality for another by altering the interactor's reality and plunging them into an entirely different fictional world, the main objective of the "inclusive" mode of reception is to make possible the simultaneous co-existence of two worlds (those of the interactor's everyday reality and of the fictional world they consume) and to connect them using social media as an interface.