Forms of fiction and literature underwent a process of disembodiment and cross-fertilization during the revolution from the Gutenberg Galaxy (printed paper, mass distribution) to the McLuhan Galaxy (new media, hypertext, cooperative writing). The dimension of literacy has moved from a semioticallymeasured geometry to a dislocation and a deconstruction of contents and channels that give expression to new products. The impact of social media on narratology has redefined the meaning of readership and authorship. The author not only loses his/her traditional role, but becomes an icon of himself/herself, a collective-minded producer that is self-perceived through the extroflexed eye of the amniotic network in which he/she defines his/her narrative experience. Transmedia culture defines a new cross-networked and amniotic literacy, considering that we are not facing a simple adaptation of different narrative forms from one media to another: different media and languages participate and contribute to the construction of a transmedia environment. The first issue of the IJTL seeks to shed light on transmedia literacy according to the epistemological crisis of authorship and the new dimension of participation and relationship offered by both the Web and New Media. Moving from the state of the art, the aim is to investigate the interdisciplinary relations in the field of transmedia literacy, in order to favour a pattern recognition about theories, technologies, and social dimensions of the phenomena to offer a critical toolkit to understand and map out the emerging knowledge and practices created by this new field.

Matteo Ciastellardi, PhD in Communication Design, is a Professor of Sociology of Media at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is the co-founder of two start-up companies for social and technological innovation. He was previously a researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute directed by Manuel Castells in Barcelona; his research interests focus on media culture, swarm intelligence, and transmedia literacy.

Giovanna Di Rosario, PhD in Digital Culture, is a researcher (Marie Curie Actions) at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She is the Associate Director of Hermeneia Research Group (Spain). She has worked and taught in Denmark, Finland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Her research interests include digital literature, new narratives, digital rhetoric and hermeneutics, and transmedia literacy.