Ken Eklund’s “World Without Oil,” may give us a window. The project built a massive, original narrative by posing a provocative question to an online community: What would happen if we ran out of oil today?

Hundreds of intrigued participants responded with text, images and video, creating an immersive, cross-platform story that grew more textured as new prompts (”what will $4/gal gas do to your finances?”) garnered further additions each week.

The end result is a kind of citizen journalism of the near-future, an activism that forces users to engage in concrete terms with an abstract (yet realistic) eventuality.

This was one example in the emerging field of “Transmedia Storytelling” — the organizing concept behind the fourth Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT last weekend.

For Henry Jenkins, the conference’s organizer and author of Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006), Transmedia describes a new approach to telling stories given:

1. The growth of “participatory” media, like blogs
2. An explosion of new devices that allow you to both consume and produce media socially
3. The persistence of “Old Media”

“Transmedia Storytelling,” then, spreads a unified fiction across these old and new media, where each medium plays a part in unfolding the tale. It expands a story between the digital and the physical, the premium and the free, the creative and the passive.

Other, and perhaps more developed cases are the recent “Alternate Reality Games” agencies have created for a whole range of media. WhySoSerious.com, an extension of The Dark Knight, allowed people to get privileged information about the film, flesh out its back story, and win prizes by collectively contributing to online puzzles, playing online games, or documenting real-world activities.

Similar kinds of Transmedia extravaganzas have accompanied campaigns for video games like Halo 2 (I Love Bees), and albums like Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero.

Granted, as these Alternate Reality Game instances reveal, Transmedia has often targeted the ultra-geeky. Indeed, the relentless expansion of the Star Wars universe may be a canonical Transmedia storytelling example, where video games, fan fictions, films, novels and blogs all work to produce a rich and sustained narrative.

Yet the booming production of these types of deep, participatory fictions suggest that they’ll soon break free from the cloisters of nerd-dom.

World Without Oil, for instance suggests a new terrain of Transmedia storytelling that appeals to a creative community of non dorks, using politics as a locus.

Of course, with such new approaches come new problematics:

Because it requires elements of user participation, Transmedia confuses the distinction between author and reader. On the continuum ranging from total authorial control to complete audience control over the course of a story, where is the best place to set the dial for a given project?

Moreover, as these techniques become more sophisticated, what does it mean when the marketing campaign for a movie becomes more compelling than the movie itself?

We can easily imagine an entertainment industry of the future oriented around story nodes, in which a film shown to a small audience at a makeshift video theater in someone’s basement might play only a small role in an overall narrative arc. Is this suggestive of a cultural world in which there is no seam between the advertising and entertainment? Is this as nefarious as it sounds?

Perhaps most germane for TrendWatch: Can these techniques be employed by goods and services brands?

Fullsix’s own participatory show for Sprite (shameless plug), Green Eyed World may hint at this, as does 42 Entertainment’s Alternate Reality Game Vanishing Point for Microsoft.

Are there more compelling examples of this? Is what’s termed Transmedia indeed central to the ‘future of entertainment’?

Last weekend a motley assortment of tweedy academics, game designers, jargon-slinging marketeers, artists, and communications gurus, collected in Cambridge, MA for the fourth “Futures of Entertainment” conference at MIT. Over the next few days, I’ll aim to unpack a few of the more interesting ideas that came up during two days of panel discussions.

The operation is simple. You open Photosketch, draw a primitive doodle showing the basic location of objects you want in your composite, describe the objects in captions, and sit back. Photosketch automatically does the photo research, cutting out, arranging and color correction for you. The result is surprisingly decent:

At last, no hypothesized scene of animal versus helicopter carnage will go unrealized.

The implications of this fact (aside from being AWESOME) are surprisingly profound.

As image manipulation becomes increasingly democratized, anybody with a computer will be able to make convincing, simulated photographs with the click of a button. The effect will be a radical change to the economy of images: Suddenly, all pictures, no matter how casually snapped, will be fair game for fakery.

This is already apparent in many of the examples that the developers show. The scenes they depict are almost laughably mundane — a woman throwing a Frisbee to a dog, or a wedding photo on a beach.

This sense of the mundane, ironically, is what’s really weird about this. Previously, time and difficulty (the arduous hours I’ve spent tracing the Photoshop pen tool around objects) made it prohibitively hard to use — especially toward prosaic ends. No longer.

Making subtle adjustments to the content of a photo — or hell, adding a shark — will be as commonplace as the ubiquitous iPhone apps that add “film-like” filters to stills. Inevitably, a mobile version of Photosketch will multiply this effect.

Will the little faith we still have in pictures to depict some semblance of objective reality fall away entirely, as on-the-fly, automated image manipulation becomes more sophisticated?

Perhaps more interestingly, what does this mean for memory (both personal and historical), given that photos are largely constitutive of what events we remember, and how we remember them? In a sense, Photosketch proposes a kind of “augmented memory” in which fictional objects and scenarios can be effectively overlaid onto records of our day-to-day histories.

Even as this technology threatens to baffle the historian, it may prove an aid to the futurist: I propose that a computer program be developed to create an endless series of composites based on random parameters. Inevitably, such a program would begin to create images that precisely depict future events. It could be the job of a specialized surveillance analyst to decipher which of the simulated events are likely to occur.

Here’s a video of the thing in action:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

A funny thing happened when droves of people started signing up for Twitter: nobody could quite explain why.

Unlike a great number of personal technologies that arise to meet a highly evident need, the appeal of Twitter was always a bit nebulous. What’s the use of jotting down 140-character fragments of your life into a machine all day?

To the uninitiated (I was, until relatively recently) the compulsion was often described in vague terms along the lines of “you won’t get it until you try it.”

Fair enough, but shouldn’t we be searching for a more concrete explanations to what has become a surprisingly profound social phenomenon?

I believe that Matt Hackett’s project “Tweet Radio” in the latest edition of The New York Moon — an online journal to which I contribute design work — provides one answer.

At its most basic, Tweet Radio siphons off Tweets from the massive, perpetual stream, and converts their text into a “spoken” MP3 using a text-to-speech synthesizer. These files are then played in sequence on an audio player on the Moon.

The result is a hypnotic sound collage, juxtaposing the surprisingly personal with the political, and the political with the banal. All of it, of course, flows in nearly real-time, in doses that are small enough to be digested in sequence.

In a sense, these elements put together — breadth, randomness, timeliness and size — produce what we could begin to consider an ongoing peek into the combined consciousness of humanity. Obviously that’s extreme hyperbole. Only around 6 million of the 6.7 billion people on Earth use Twitter. But it’s possibly the closest we’ve come yet to compiling a total aggregate of thoughts flickering through our consciousness.

Outwardly, Twitter appears narcissistic, offering millions of little channels running in parallel. But I’d suggest that part of the mysterious compulsion to use it comes from the seductiveness of adding one’s own voice to this strange, global stream of consciousness — a consciousness that Tweet Radio elegantly captures.

A new German company is offering innovative ways to buy and sell public discourse.

Cuddly sounding Magpie & Friends Ltd. will pay Twitter users to insert targeted ads among their regularly scheduled micro-blog dispatches. The ads are punched in automatically, and use text straight from the advertiser. Hence, a Twitterer’s musings on consumer technologies might be punctuated with, oh, let’s say, “I <3 Bic Coosh headphones!” Participants, naturally, get more cash based on the size of their audience and their rate of posting.

How much are we talking about? Not a lot. An advertiser might pay as little as a few cents per sponsored tweet, to as much as around ten bucks to co-opt a highly prolific and well trafficked Twitterer.

What is distressing and fascinating here goes beyond a conventional diatribe about treating what is supposed to be an outlet for genuine social interaction as a hyper-capitalist meat market. That’s no good, but it’s hardly unique. The singularity of Magpie is the way in which it functions as a parasite that, if it’s successful, may actually kill its host.

The only thing Twitter really has going for it is its earnestness — it presents itself as a surrogate for real conversation. As soon as it becomes clear that surreptitious manipulations are infiltrating its discourse, it loses its one social function. As such, Magpie’s attempts to cash in on it could drive enough people away to topple both endeavors.

As companies search for new ways to wring money from the internet, one can easily imagine a swarming of similarly short-sighted, parasitic “ad networks” attaching themselves to popular social networking applications, utterly ruining them in the process.

I think we’d be well advised to steer clear of these manipulative and potentially destructive practices.