• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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LA Times’ Zachary Pincus-Roth wrote a great introduction of Henry Jenkins, the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC. Jenkins just arrived at USC, after 20 years at MIT.

For what it’s worth, I love it when people find ways to apply their wisdom in new contexts. Going from techie MIT in Cambridge, Mass. to pop-driven USC in Los Angeles is quite a culture clash.

Jenkins has been studying what he calls “transmedia” storytelling, “in which a story spans multiple media in a coordinated way.”

In the traditional Hollywood model, the novelization, video game or website simply restates the characters or the plot of a film or a TV show. In transmedia stories, the creators of the entertainment will use those extensions to, say, fill in the gaps in a narrative or look at events from a minor character’s point of view — all of which combine into one big story that audiences have to piece together. “It appeals to the hunting-and-gathering impulses of fans,” Jenkins says. For instance, “District 9″ has online documentaries, websites for fake alien-rights organizations and, yes, benches, all of which help drive home the human-alien divide in the film’s fictional Johannesburg. “Those benches are designed to shape our experience of the film,” Jenkins says. “They’re not just designed to get us into the theater.”

Transmedia is certainly an emerging method for maximizing the plethora of media options available to storytellers and marketers.

Jenkins acknowledges that transmedia has its challenges. Does it exclude moviegoers who just want their films to begin when they enter the multiplex and end two hours later? What if some people watch the TV show first and the webisode second, when the reverse would be much more gratifying? And can the satisfaction of piecing together these bits of storytelling ever measure up to the simple pleasure of watching the hero defeat the bad guys? “It may be that you try some interesting stuff,” Jenkins says, “but at the end of the day, our grandest ambitions aren’t going to be realizable.”

Definitely a subject and conversation I’ll be following…

Almost every week for the past many years, my patient wife will hear me utter an exasperated jumble of words that are just as much rhetorical as they are self-incriminating. “What am I going to do with my life?” has been my sentiment de jour for way too long. My reoccurring cries are not meant to minimize or marginalize any of the fantastic failures or meager momentum I’ve experienced the past 30 years. Rather, my question echoes out of my deep search for a meaning-filled life I long to live.

However, lately, I’m becoming more and more convinced that purpose and meaning are not meant to be figured out or pursued. Instead, I think I’m supposed to be pursuing conflict. Purpose and meaning will follow.

Am I the only one who gets joyfully depressed when I read stories like those of Jim Stockdale, Tyndale & Luther, Wyclef Jean, and John Wood? Joyful because of their significant sacrifice and ability to overcome conflict. Depressed because I’m pretty good at reading books about stories I can’t tell.

Someone once said: “When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

When kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up, we often hear responses like “firefighter,” “doctor,” “astronaut,” “spiderman” or “superman.” I wonder if at the core of these responses lies a desire that all of us have to be part of an epic conflict. We want to rush into the burning house and save everyone inside. We want to defy the laws of physics and explore planets we know not of. We want to scale huge buildings and fly over big cities destroying the bad guys and rescuing the good ones.

But the older we get, we replace our epic desire for conflict with an epic appetite for comfort.

Donald Miller’s latest book talks a lot about this idea of conflict, and what makes for a good life story. “If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died,” he says.

Roy H. Williams talks about passion and commitment in this week’s Monday Morning Memo. He said that “Passion does not produce commitment. Commitment produces passion.”

I want conflict.
Conflict I am passionate about.
Which will result in my commitment to overcome such conflict.

The question is, what conflict should I be running toward?

Time magazine’s Nancy Gibbs is one of my favorite writers. I envy how she is able to mix words and metaphors in such a simple and significant way. Her essay in the November 9, 2009 issue of Time is no exception. “The Case for Modesty, in an Age of Arrogance” is an open invitation for this generation–people of all ages–to be a courageous contagion of a virtue that has been absent far too long.

Modesty in private life is attractive, but in public life it is essential, especially now, when those who immodestly claimed to Know It All have Wiped Us Out. The problems we face are too fierce to accommodate arrogance. Humility leaves room for complexity, honors honest dissent, welcomes the outlandish idea that sweeps past ideology and feeds invention. We want to reimagine the health-care system, confront climate change, save our kids from a financial avalanche? The odds are much better if we come to the table assuming we don’t already have all the answers.

Read the full article on Time.com.