In an era of convergence, consumers become hunters and gatherers pulling together information from multiple sources to form a new synthesis. Storytellers begin to exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling; advertisers began to talk about branding as depending upon multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their intellectual properties across many different channels.

Transmedia stories at the most basic level are stories told across multiple media. At the present time, the most significant stories tend to flow across multiple media platforms; the same can be said for the most significant social activities. This dispersal of information represents one important source of complexity in contemporary popular culture.

These transmedia practices depend on what we might call multiliteracies -- that is, the ability to process multimodal representations. Multimodality has interested educators in part because different kids learn better through different channels of information -- some have visual or aural or tactile biases which are under-served by the text-based focus of traditional classroom practices. At the same time, the ability to follow information across multimodal representations becomes an ever more important skill in terms of coping within a workplace focused on multitasking.