Keeping the Story Afloat: Transmedial Narratives and Counter-Narratives Weaving the Story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
摘要
In this essay we begin by exploring the impact of WikiLeaks as part of convergence culture insofar as, although founded in 2006, it achieved worldwide recognition only in 2010, when it collaborated with traditional media in making available leaked classified documents, sourced from whistleblowers, relating to US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The initial focus, therefore, is on the phenomenon of WikiLeaks and its presence on a range of diverse media sites and multiple platforms, at first in the United States and Europe but, eventually, on a global basis. Our focus then shifts to the person of Julian Assange himself, an Australian symbiotically identified with WikiLeaks, as he is variously vilified and sanctified in countless mainstream and grassroots media outlets. The influence of Assange and WikiLeaks is then traced in a wide variety of media, mainly linked to a politics of resistance stimulated into action by the perceived injustices visited upon Assange. In this way, the “Assange/WikiLeaks narrative” is seen to take shape across varied media platforms, including film and video, books, computer games, artworks, comics, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and X (Twitter) accounts. A selection of these is examined and located in a series of oppositional narratives, partly reflecting WikiLeaks’s own strategy of seeking media partnerships on a global scale. Reference is also made to Assange’s continuing entanglement in the British legal system and the omnipresent threat of his extradition to the USA.