How “East Los High” Provided Its Audience with a Transmedia Scaffold
Encouraging Your Audience to Access More of Your Multiplatform Narrative
Scaffolding is a way that you can use psychology to encourage your audience members to access more of the texts in your transmedia project and the platforms they are hosted on by specifically offering them incentives. These incentives can potentially maintain and increase the audience’s enjoyment of your project, including their understanding of its subject matter and their engagement with it.
These are critical factors to consider, especially when your audience members are making their media choices in congested media markets (aka mediaspheres) such as the one that the producers of “East Los High” (ELH) found themselves in when their project first began webcasting in 2013.
The following article illustrates and demonstrates Scaffolding, with examples, references, and commentary sourced or augmented from Patrick E. McNabb’s PhD Dissertation in Media Psychology (available for free at https://bit.ly/3vBy6AU ). Media Psychologists like Patrick study how humans use and are affected by media and mediated communication. Patrick’s Dissertation is an example of how Media Psychologists apply their expertise. It explores how Scaffolding was likely used in Season One of ELH in order to encourage its audience members to access more of the texts that comprised it, as well as the platforms that it was distributed on, the websites Hulu and EastLosHigh.com.
East Los High
ELH was designed to educate American Latinx adolescents and young adults about sexual health in order to help reduce the high rates of pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) that had been observed in that population. These problems were particularly acute for those that resided in Southern California in the early 2010s, which is where and when the project was set. In what has been described as a “teaching without preaching” approach, ELH was also designed to be entertaining. Together, this “entertainment-education” approach was used with transmedia storytelling in order to better engage (and keep) the project’s targeted audience as they consumed it within the saturated American mediasphere.
Scaffolding Explained
The concept called “Scaffolding” (Scaffolds/Scaffold) is a psychological concept that helps to explain how the producers likely encouraged audience members to access more of the project’s texts and platforms. (In this article, and the Dissertation it summarizes, “producer” means anyone who is responsible for the content and/or distribution of the official texts that make up a project, with official texts being those that are not produced by the audience members themselves, such as when fans create fan fiction.)
Scaffolding works with two related and complementary concepts — the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO).
A ZPD, in a transmedia project, is the choice that an audience member makes when they consume another text in your project using the guidance that you include in the project. Ultimately the choices that the audience members make are not under your control. And there are trends that will always naturally occur in a project that can encourage them to choose one text over another. Examples include the chronology of the storyworld’s timeline or the way that the texts are made available to your audience, such as the order that they are presented in a search engine.
Outside of this, there are choices that you, the producer of the transmedia project — who is the MKO in this context — may want to encourage them to make.
Scaffolds can be Direct and Indirect and You can Implement them Verbally and Graphically
Direct Scaffolds explicitly indicate, to varying degrees, which text(s) a producer would like their audience members to consume next. Indirect scaffolds are more implicit and in-kind.
One example of Direct scaffolding in Verbal form in ELH occurs towards the end of most of the episodes, right after the narrative concludes and right before the credits begin. A banner flashes onscreen for several seconds that says “Want More? East Los High.com”. (This is the website that the majority of the smaller transmedia texts are platformed on, whereas the episodes were primarily hosted on Hulu. These shorter texts are referred to as “extensions” in the Dissertation.)
An example of Direct Scaffolds that were formatted Graphically concerns the arrangement of texts on the webpages of EastLosHigh.com that were specific to each episode. There, links and descriptions for texts associated with those specific episodes, or aspects of those episodes, were displayed below a specific spot near the top that was designated for the featured episode. (The episodes were also made available on EastLosHigh.com for a time.) In addition, these texts were observed to be further grouped into repeated categories that formed a common boilerplate on those webpages. (For a demonstration of this see https://bit.ly/3hT2oXP in the Wayback Machine to view an archived webpage of the Episode 2 episode page.)
In terms of Indirect Scaffolding, it was observed that Verbally many of the texts were observed to be associated with each other Indirectly by various themes and/or topics that the texts shared. These could be related to the narrative of the project, such as those that are related to several of the plots that comprise the narrative, and to aspects to the storyworld, such as the project’s real-world setting and the actual production of the project itself.
Graphically, many of the texts were found to be associated with the project and/or aspects of the project as a whole on several webpages within the EastLosHigh.com website that collated several specific categories of transmedia texts of potential interest to the audience member. For example, there are articles, videos, and hyperlinks about the music and food featured in the project, there are videos that are hosted specifically by certain characters (especially those hosted by the characters Ceci and Paulie) and there is a webpage that is presented as the school’s online newspaper, The Siren.
A Great Example — Soli and Paulie’s First Kiss
A great example of where Direct and Indirect Scaffolding are used together involves the first kiss that Soli and Paulie have in the context of the project’s 12th episode. Soli and Paulie are major supporting characters in the project and the plot of their developing relationship was observed to demonstrate how audience members could productively incorporate many of the sexual health lessons conveyed in ELH.
This kiss takes place during the second party featured in the season. Viewers of episode 12, the anchor text that depicts the party, will see Soli and Paulie meeting up and then later see them intimately dancing together.
But the audience members will likely not know what transpired in-between unless they consume a certain extension featured on that episode’s page on EastLosHigh.com.
That extension is titled “Soli and Paulie”, and, in another example of Direct Scaffolding, its subtitle is revealed to be “…first kiss?” when the extension is clicked on and on its own webpage is revealed within EastLosHigh.com. If an audience member had consumed all or some of the texts concerning Soli and Paulie’s relationship prior to the kiss (which includes narrative depicted in both episodes and extensions) they may have learned that Soli and Paulie were growing closer romantically together. However, this extension, which is placed directly below the episode on its episode page in another example of Direct Scaffolding, specifically shows the encounter that leads up to and culminates in their kiss. Together, episode 12 and this extension are Scaffolded Indirectly by the theme and topic that they share — the events concerning Soli and Paulie having their first kiss.
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Want More?
Check out a more detailed summary of Patrick’s Dissertation on Medium.com at https://bit.ly/3hConBZ. Or, again, you can check out the Dissertation itself, which is available for free to read and download from ProQuest at https://bit.ly/3vBy6AU (Fun Fact: If you read the Dissertation, you’ll get to learn a lot of fun Spanish words that you likely didn’t learn in school (as well as some cutting-edge transmedia storytelling and Media Psychology scholarship).)
Special Thanks
Special Thanks to transmedia experts Jeff Gomez and Krishna Stott for their very helpful constructive comments which have assisted me in boiling down the lessons from my Dissertation to their essence! As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” After all, if I couldn’t accept — and apply — constructive criticism I couldn’t have completed my Dissertation and earned the first Doctorate in my family! In a way, this has all been kind of a “post Doc” in helping me learn how to explain complicated things simply — one of the main things I want to do with my PhD as I pursue opportunities in science popularization and journalism (among others). Stay Tuned!)
