'Don't Be a Dilbert': Transmedia Storytelling as Technical Communication during and after World War Ⅱ

摘要

Purpose: My goal was to determine whether the U.S. Navy's “Don’t Be a Dilbert” aviation safety campaign during World War II was a fully developed example of transmedia storytelling and whether it could be used as an illustration of transmedia storytelling intechnical communication. Method: I located and gathered primary sources in the Navy's safety campaign from archives, museums, and military and civilian publications, and then analyzed these artifacts according to the definition and attributes of transmedia storytelling inJenkins (2007, 2011). Results: From my analysis, I found that the Navy's use of the Dilbert myth combined multimodality with radical intertextuality in order to foster additive comprehension; it also employed a robust set of transmedia storytelling techniques.Conclusion: These findings suggest that transmedia storytelling was used to communicate technical information before the digital age and that the Navy's Dilbert campaign is a potentially useful historical example for illustrating transmedia storytelling techniques.