Transmediated Magic: Sociality in Wizard Rock

As people adopt and adapt new technologies, it is increasingly important to understand the ways in which people create and maintain social relationships through new media. Popular, and sometimes academic, discourses tend to speak of the transformative power the Internet has had over the ways we socialize. An emerging form of sociality in which interaction takes place across several types of media can be called "transmediated sociality." This paper borrows theories of convergence and transmedia from media and fan studies to explore one such transmediated community, wizard rock. It argues that participants in wizard rock interact across multiple types of media, thus demonstrating transmediated sociality, and that through their design of these interactions wizard rockers are not passive consumers of technology but rather are active agents who manipulate technologies for their own social purposes.