The Slender Man made his debut on Coast to Coast AM *the night before* the stabbing. Darkness Dave was talking to a guest about how people were having real sightings of this fictional character - meaning that probably hundreds of thousands of people were hearing about this story for the first time.
O there's a *techlash * coming. Maybe something like leave your phone in your car before entering restaurants or a dropbox right beside your front door.
May we also consider the medium that resulted in the very first boomer-shooters and compare them to our Lost Children: the postal worker. In many ways they WERE the physical embodiment of what we know as now the Internet, connecting people from anywhere and across time. Every day, waking up and ‘logging on’ to a network to deliver information and media all day 6 days a week in route patterns. Comparable to routine Internet users habits today, certainly. Both mediums encompassing everyone and yet only ‘realized’ by those already overtaken by the organizations/hierarchies within. It’s enough to drive the vulnerable to deliver the Ultimate Post.
I've been waiting for the creepypasta episode on this blog for a long time, glad to see it.
The description of the online as "semi-fictional" is excellent, but Kirby's description of a user's relationship to the online text seems incomplete. I've never interacted with his worked before, this line makes me feel like I should, but can Joe clarify if Kirby is being a determinist about this relationship?
There is another path open to an online user that is analogous to how Kierkegaard used his pseudonyms the in print. That the user recognizes his posts as the contents of a character he is creating in the semi-fictional space of the online. This path is one that many internet users seem to adopt intuitively, particularly anon's.
I also agree that the digital presents a particular challenge to understanding how real a given piece is, of understanding what genre we engage with at any time. However, this challenge existed in all previous technologies as well. It's fascinating to me that the internet exhibits this danger of confused hermeneutics most strongly, but at the same time it might be the most obvious case of this danger. During the age of radio there was the "War of the World's" broadcast, in literature Borges played with this trope his whole career. Don Quixote is an extremely early example of a character who misunderstood the "reality" of his books.
Kirby is, if I'm honest, a deeply frustrating writer. Digimodernism is a remarkably useful text with a lot of surprising foresight, especially for having been written in 2010, but the examples he uses aren't the best to illustrate his theories. There is a whole section on social media about the "apparently real" nature of online space that is remarkably useful, especially in terms of the sincerity needed for these platforms to function.
I certainly agree that this challenge has existed in previous technologies too - it's what informed my PhD research and I find the relationship between communication media evolution and leveraging it to create a story that appears "real" utterly fascinating. You can argue that through the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, such an attitude is a core feature of horror and the Gothic.
Where the digital realm differs from previous versions is in what I call ontological flatness. With books, radio, even film (thinking Blair Witch or Ghostwatch), there is always a physical real 'you' experiencing the mediated text. There is an ontological heirarchy between the reality in the medium you are engaging with and the embodied self. Online, as Kat's intro puts forward, we are always partially 'in' that space, as people. This is new. We cannot close the book or find delineations between a storyworld and a mediation of a real person, and when this is a new layer of reality, we're in uncharted territory entirely.
I'll close with an eerily prescient passage from Kirby. He was writing from a place of speculation, but it's certainly something that has come to pass now.
"people will feel that the gulf separating their ‘real’ and their ‘textual’ lives has disappeared; the thoughts, moods, and impulses of our everyday existence will translate so immediately into the electronic, textual digimodernist realm that we will no longer be conscious of transference. It won’t be a question then of oscillating between offline and online, but of hovering permanently between those two extremes."
You're both right, the internet's use case is uniquely active, almost gravitational (in the sense it pulls you into itself) compared to previous mediums.
Creepypasta is such a solid case to illustrate it.
As it's part of the horror genre, its effectiveness hinges on suspension of disbelief, which must be collapsed with a method fitting the medium.
Lovecraft used case files and eye witness reports in his work, blair witch used "found footage", creepypasta uses the ambiguity of the online space itself. I've been fascinated by it as a synecdote for the internet's peculiarities since I found Ted the Caver more than a decade ago.
Do you have any more of your work online? If so can you post a link? This was a very fun and interesting piece which hits my own interests square on the head.
I do indeed. My thesis (which I'm currently in the process of adapting to a book) is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/32027/
A previous article that digs further into creepypasta as emblematic of a shift in our culture is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23603/
I have a forthcoming piece out with Routledge, but it's in review at the moment. The aim is to expand and set out an analytical framework from creepypasta to the forms of digital horror we see today.
"What happens when iPad babies become adults?" There's an episode of the 90s show SeaQuest DSV (with a talking dolphin as a main character, btw!) where they travel to the future and humanity has died out because everyone is just jacked in and interacting via computers, the world has become a playground for gaming. I think that's not too far off of where we're going.
I think tactile physical world interactions with other humans are going to become more fraught. I know you value mediated relationships, and I do too, but only to an extent. I think we still need to be in physical spaces with others because our presence helps regulate our nervous systems. But the more foreign that is, the more we might actually be anxious at the prospect of interacting with other people in the flesh. Thinking of the screenshot of the Tumblr post that says, "we need to invent sex for girls who are afraid," whatever nerves teens might've had in the past about taking chances with others will be multiplied tremendously.
Maybe that's super alarmist, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
I love all of your thoughts. I was talking to a friend the other day about the inability for Gen Alpha kids to form paragraphs and sentences (I'm a substitute teacher) and how far behind many of them are in math and language skills. He then mentioned that Gen Z men seemed like meat puppets unable to approach women in the gym. Both generations have in common the increased screen based childhood and I have long argued this affects neural development for sure. However, it also affects play. Gen Z is the first generation to be raised inside, either in daycare and then school with little to no recess (compared to us Gen Xers for sure). In addition, when home, they were watching TV or plugged into gaming systems, more so for Gen Alpha due to the iPad/Smartphone being there since birth. This reduces physical activity and PLAY with others. The bumping up against the other, climbing together, meeting in real space and the neurological growth associated with play. Playing as children, allowing imaginations to interact, feelings to be hurt, and feelings to grow is also part of learning to mate. If you didn't play together, how do you date later in life? How do you approach sex without the tumble of preschool. Adults have invaded the play spaces of children, either to remove them entirely or guide them with rules and regulations, to the point where children aren't given their time to be alone. So, online, where the adults aren't is where the children "play?"
This isn't your thesis, I recognize, but I've seen far too few people downplay how warped you can become by being too subcultural so I want to push back against the idea that niche communities are harmless. For example: I've cautioned my friends away from being friends with a group first and individuals second. You should not hang out in an environment where most people just know other people from that environment. You should have a diverse friend network that's not tied to one place. Also, for the sake of self-perspective you should know enough normal people to have a sense of when you're deviating from normality, even if your deviation is an intentional choice.
To your thesis, I think that fictionalization is a byproduct of suggestibility. Using the internet authentically is an effort to **avoid** fictionalizing your self or others; we are not ever fictional, but it's a comforting delusion to believe we can be. Subcultures, probably, aid this false sense of security.
The Slender Man made his debut on Coast to Coast AM *the night before* the stabbing. Darkness Dave was talking to a guest about how people were having real sightings of this fictional character - meaning that probably hundreds of thousands of people were hearing about this story for the first time.
The egregore reared its head.
O there's a *techlash * coming. Maybe something like leave your phone in your car before entering restaurants or a dropbox right beside your front door.
A brilliant post by both of y’all. Respect.
May we also consider the medium that resulted in the very first boomer-shooters and compare them to our Lost Children: the postal worker. In many ways they WERE the physical embodiment of what we know as now the Internet, connecting people from anywhere and across time. Every day, waking up and ‘logging on’ to a network to deliver information and media all day 6 days a week in route patterns. Comparable to routine Internet users habits today, certainly. Both mediums encompassing everyone and yet only ‘realized’ by those already overtaken by the organizations/hierarchies within. It’s enough to drive the vulnerable to deliver the Ultimate Post.
Nice play on McLuhan's work there.
I've been waiting for the creepypasta episode on this blog for a long time, glad to see it.
The description of the online as "semi-fictional" is excellent, but Kirby's description of a user's relationship to the online text seems incomplete. I've never interacted with his worked before, this line makes me feel like I should, but can Joe clarify if Kirby is being a determinist about this relationship?
There is another path open to an online user that is analogous to how Kierkegaard used his pseudonyms the in print. That the user recognizes his posts as the contents of a character he is creating in the semi-fictional space of the online. This path is one that many internet users seem to adopt intuitively, particularly anon's.
I also agree that the digital presents a particular challenge to understanding how real a given piece is, of understanding what genre we engage with at any time. However, this challenge existed in all previous technologies as well. It's fascinating to me that the internet exhibits this danger of confused hermeneutics most strongly, but at the same time it might be the most obvious case of this danger. During the age of radio there was the "War of the World's" broadcast, in literature Borges played with this trope his whole career. Don Quixote is an extremely early example of a character who misunderstood the "reality" of his books.
Kirby is, if I'm honest, a deeply frustrating writer. Digimodernism is a remarkably useful text with a lot of surprising foresight, especially for having been written in 2010, but the examples he uses aren't the best to illustrate his theories. There is a whole section on social media about the "apparently real" nature of online space that is remarkably useful, especially in terms of the sincerity needed for these platforms to function.
I certainly agree that this challenge has existed in previous technologies too - it's what informed my PhD research and I find the relationship between communication media evolution and leveraging it to create a story that appears "real" utterly fascinating. You can argue that through the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, such an attitude is a core feature of horror and the Gothic.
Where the digital realm differs from previous versions is in what I call ontological flatness. With books, radio, even film (thinking Blair Witch or Ghostwatch), there is always a physical real 'you' experiencing the mediated text. There is an ontological heirarchy between the reality in the medium you are engaging with and the embodied self. Online, as Kat's intro puts forward, we are always partially 'in' that space, as people. This is new. We cannot close the book or find delineations between a storyworld and a mediation of a real person, and when this is a new layer of reality, we're in uncharted territory entirely.
I'll close with an eerily prescient passage from Kirby. He was writing from a place of speculation, but it's certainly something that has come to pass now.
"people will feel that the gulf separating their ‘real’ and their ‘textual’ lives has disappeared; the thoughts, moods, and impulses of our everyday existence will translate so immediately into the electronic, textual digimodernist realm that we will no longer be conscious of transference. It won’t be a question then of oscillating between offline and online, but of hovering permanently between those two extremes."
(Kirby, 2010, p. 123)
You're both right, the internet's use case is uniquely active, almost gravitational (in the sense it pulls you into itself) compared to previous mediums.
Creepypasta is such a solid case to illustrate it.
As it's part of the horror genre, its effectiveness hinges on suspension of disbelief, which must be collapsed with a method fitting the medium.
Lovecraft used case files and eye witness reports in his work, blair witch used "found footage", creepypasta uses the ambiguity of the online space itself. I've been fascinated by it as a synecdote for the internet's peculiarities since I found Ted the Caver more than a decade ago.
Do you have any more of your work online? If so can you post a link? This was a very fun and interesting piece which hits my own interests square on the head.
I do indeed. My thesis (which I'm currently in the process of adapting to a book) is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/32027/
A previous article that digs further into creepypasta as emblematic of a shift in our culture is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23603/
I have a forthcoming piece out with Routledge, but it's in review at the moment. The aim is to expand and set out an analytical framework from creepypasta to the forms of digital horror we see today.
"What happens when iPad babies become adults?" There's an episode of the 90s show SeaQuest DSV (with a talking dolphin as a main character, btw!) where they travel to the future and humanity has died out because everyone is just jacked in and interacting via computers, the world has become a playground for gaming. I think that's not too far off of where we're going.
I think tactile physical world interactions with other humans are going to become more fraught. I know you value mediated relationships, and I do too, but only to an extent. I think we still need to be in physical spaces with others because our presence helps regulate our nervous systems. But the more foreign that is, the more we might actually be anxious at the prospect of interacting with other people in the flesh. Thinking of the screenshot of the Tumblr post that says, "we need to invent sex for girls who are afraid," whatever nerves teens might've had in the past about taking chances with others will be multiplied tremendously.
Maybe that's super alarmist, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
I love all of your thoughts. I was talking to a friend the other day about the inability for Gen Alpha kids to form paragraphs and sentences (I'm a substitute teacher) and how far behind many of them are in math and language skills. He then mentioned that Gen Z men seemed like meat puppets unable to approach women in the gym. Both generations have in common the increased screen based childhood and I have long argued this affects neural development for sure. However, it also affects play. Gen Z is the first generation to be raised inside, either in daycare and then school with little to no recess (compared to us Gen Xers for sure). In addition, when home, they were watching TV or plugged into gaming systems, more so for Gen Alpha due to the iPad/Smartphone being there since birth. This reduces physical activity and PLAY with others. The bumping up against the other, climbing together, meeting in real space and the neurological growth associated with play. Playing as children, allowing imaginations to interact, feelings to be hurt, and feelings to grow is also part of learning to mate. If you didn't play together, how do you date later in life? How do you approach sex without the tumble of preschool. Adults have invaded the play spaces of children, either to remove them entirely or guide them with rules and regulations, to the point where children aren't given their time to be alone. So, online, where the adults aren't is where the children "play?"
This isn't your thesis, I recognize, but I've seen far too few people downplay how warped you can become by being too subcultural so I want to push back against the idea that niche communities are harmless. For example: I've cautioned my friends away from being friends with a group first and individuals second. You should not hang out in an environment where most people just know other people from that environment. You should have a diverse friend network that's not tied to one place. Also, for the sake of self-perspective you should know enough normal people to have a sense of when you're deviating from normality, even if your deviation is an intentional choice.
To your thesis, I think that fictionalization is a byproduct of suggestibility. Using the internet authentically is an effort to **avoid** fictionalizing your self or others; we are not ever fictional, but it's a comforting delusion to believe we can be. Subcultures, probably, aid this false sense of security.
Yes. If your loyalty is to the group identity, you will go to many lengths to maintain that connection. It's how cults are sustained and policed.
When I invoke the c-word it's usually headsanded, lol. Thank you for doing it for me!
I had such an experience so I feel alright defending my use of the word if anyone wants to quabble!
This is brilliant, thank you for the analysis.
Glad you liked it -- I love Joe's work.
They were born into fragments.
Pieces of worlds we broke
but never fixed.
We told them stories of meaning
while drowning in our own
contradictions.
They watched us
scramble for purpose,
build towers of distraction,
call the ruins progress.
They learned.
Not hope.
Not faith.
But the absence of them.
A cold clarity
sharpened by our failure
to answer what we passed down.
And now, their virus grows.
It’s not theirs alone.
It seeps backward.
Upward.
Sideways.
It learns our cracks,
our comforts,
our brittle certainties.
And it laughs.
They didn’t invent this.
We handed it to them,
wrapped in the wreckage
of lives half-lived.
Now it’s all of us.
The hollow spreading inward.
The silence
finally
consuming.
Haunting
next time someone says AI can't write poetry, just link them this.
#ghostinthemachine #everythingisenergy #hauntingvibes