The performative functions of dramatic communities: conceptualizing audience engagement in transmedia fiction

This article presents the analyses of audience interactions with The Inside, a fictional transmedia experience, in order to reveal insights into the multiple and often unexpected ways that audience members can translate, shape, and influence a transmedia text. The social media layering that binds a fictional transmedia experience together and the multiple pathways that the audience members create between its constituent elements can be the most compelling and fascinating aspect of the experience to study. This article seeks to conceptualize the audience activity around The Inside as the manifestation of a dramatic community. By identifying and presenting the dramatic community’s emergent performative functions, this analysis examines how such functions collectively operate to uphold and perpetuate narrative congruence, coherence, and authenticity.