Content area
Full Text
The faceless, tall, eerily long-limbed humanoid clad in a black suit emerged in an online forum as a pair of photoshops and a half-dozen lines of text. Soon, this so-called "Slender Man" began appearing in images, videos, stories, and blogs across the Internet. By sharing, discussing, and commenting on these artifacts using participatory media, users create legendary narratives and audio/visual "evidence" that present researchers with a new kind of digital folk practice. Enabled by the affordances of digital and social networks, this digital legend cycle serves as an example of a new form of digital folklore that combines the generic conventions of oral and visual storytelling with the collaborative potential of networked communication.
Keywords
AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Slender man, contemporary legends, digital media, internet, performance
ON JUNE 8, 2009, USER GEROGERIGEGEGE STARTED a thread on the SomethingAwful. com forums dedicated to photoshopping paranormal images with the intent of hoaxing paranormal discussion boards. two days and several posts later, user Victor Surge replied with a pair of images. The images were black-and-white and featured children playing in the foreground while a faceless, tall, eerily long-limbed humanoid clad in a black suit lurked behind them. under the second photo, Victor Surge supplied the following "authentic" text: "one of two recovered photographs from the Stirling city library blaze. notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as 'The Slender man'. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer: mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986."
Although details were sparse, the character gained immediate popularity. Soon other users started sharing their own creative interpretations of the Slender man. Within days, the thread was dedicated almost entirely to performing and discussing "authentic" legends of the creature. but why did users find the creature so appealing? how did users interact with each other to create these performances? And what might this process reveal about the collaborative potential of networked communication?
The Slender man is a crowd-sourced monster. As users told stories, shared images, and theorized as to the nature of the nascent lovecraftian horror, they also participated in its creation. each performance added to and subtracted from how the...