<ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY>
These are the various texts and resources I have engaged with while doing my (ongoing) research.
Some of them are behind institutional barriers or paywalls (and some can be located online despite those barriers), while some are publicly accessible. I’ve hyperlinked to the source where I can. If you would like a resource that isn’t linked or that you can’t access/find, feel free to email me and I can help. To quote McKenzie Wark, “People spontaneously produce the commons every time they forward documents or make mix-tapes of mp3s for each other. It’s a radical expansion of the gift economy, with all of the procedures of prestige and mutual recognition that the gift always entails, but on a more abstract plane”. <3
The first paragraph of each annotation situates it within my research inquiries, and the second paragraph is more of a brief analysis of the source’s construction/biases/etc.
A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon: Playing with Reality
Berkowitz, Reed. “A Game Designer’s Analysis of QAnon: Playing with Reality”. Medium, September 20, 2020. https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
This article breaks down the methods of QAnon, from the perspective of a game designer–specifically one with a background in ARG (alternate reality games, which are designed with the intention of immersing the player in a constructed narrative while simultaneously occupying real, physical space, often sending the player down rabbit holes to solve puzzles). This was a really useful piece in re: to my research, as it makes really clear links between the “logic” behind QAnon and why it’s so engaging for the people who follow it. Of particular interest was the term apophenia, “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”, and what Berkowitz refers to as “guided apophenia”, or “misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding” – which he then frames as, “a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology”.
This piece is really well constructed, with just the right amount of humor and poetics, a really clearly organized analysis of what within QAnon’s structure does and does not conform with game design, and a wealth of hyperlinked text within the piece: to everything from online mythologies that the reader may not be familiar with, to scientific studies backing up and contextualizing what happens in the brain when we learn new information through puzzle-solving versus being told.
Understanding Folk Culture in the Digital Age
Blank, Trevor. Interview with Julia Fernandez. Understanding Folk Culture in the Digital Age: An interview with Folklorist Trevor J. Blank, Pt. 1. The Signal, The Library of Congress, June 30, 2014. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/06/understanding-folk-culture-in-the-digital-age-an-interview-with-folklorist-trevor-j-blank-pt-1/
This interview, which was cited by Curlew in “The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture”, and visibly lays some of the groundwork for how she frames hybridization in digital folklore, which is crucial to my research. I was particularly struck by his framing of how we process our digital interactions, “...the cognitive boundaries between the corporeal and virtual have been blurred. When we send text messages to a friend or family member, we typically think ‘I’m sending this text’ instead of ‘these glowing dots of phosphorous are being converted into tiny signals and beamed across several cell towers before being decoded and received on a peer’s phone’”. This interview was additionally relevant to my positionality and research practice, in the argument Blank makes for why folklorists are necessary in examining digital vernacular expression: “whereas other humanities and social science fields may favor statistical analysis, data mining and text collection/comparison, folklorists employ interdisciplinary approaches, often using ethnographic methods, that strive for a more holistic representation of research subjects. At the end of the day, the emphasis remains on individuals and groups– even if they’re united in an online venue”.
I also read Pt. 2 of this interview (linked within Pt. 1), which focuses on the preservation of digital folk culture, but was valuable to me in how it touched on whether folk culture can circumvent institutional constraints (to which Blank responds with the insight that they “unavoidably intermingle” but can play off one another and become hybridized in the process of generating folklore, offering the example of the “emergent digital tradition of crafting and publishing humorous, fake product reviews on Amazon … circumventing the institutional constraints and participation expectations imposed by Amazon, using the site’s official structure to stake out a means for vernacular expression to come through”.
Encrypted Enclosures//Glitching Visibility
Blas, Zach with Legacy Russell. Encrypted Enclosures//Glitching Visibility: Zach Blas in Conversation with Legacy Russell. Guggenheim Museum, 2021. http://youtube.com/watch?v=GAaAylHaO7o.
In this conversation, Blas and Russell discuss Blas’ projects, with a specific focus on abstraction and obliteration–towards something generative and productive–as a queer act. Building off Blas’ work with surveillance technologies and Russell’s glitch, they discuss a fracturing of the binary between visibility and invisibility. Most exciting to my thesis research was their dialog around utopia–particularly Blas’ practice of “utopian plagiarism” (creating something new out of an existing text), and Russell’s description of utopia as nonspecific, non-site, non-arrival, challenging space and time–directly conflicting with the straight imagination. In the vein of all the above, I took particular note of Russell’s questions, “what would queer biometics look like” or “the liminality of those traces”?
This conversation was a pleasure to watch, it’s really energizing to witness two individuals so genuinely excited by the other, and eager to build off one another’s ideas.
Virus, Viral
Blas, Zach. “Virus, Viral”. Women Studies Quarterly, Viral, Volume 40, Numbers 1 and 2, Spring / Summer, eds. Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar, The Feminist Press. 2012. https://zachblas.info/writings/virus-viral/
In this essay, Blas builds upon previous discussions around the virus and the viral to build a speculative poetics of what these terms might mean in a queered context, later applying this logic to barebacking. Of particular interest to my work were Eugene Thacker’s concept of “the unhuman”–speaking to “the emergent, unexpected, and challenging interactions, engagements, and limits between the human and nonhuman (29), Michel Foucault’s “ascesis”–the creative work one performs to transform and develop a way of life (31), Jakob von Uexküll’s speculative concept of the “Umwelt”–the “perceptual world of an animal or creature”, and Ian Bogost’s “alien phenomenology”–a piece of “speculative realism”, which “argues for an ability to speculatively gain access to that which exists beyond or outside the correlation of being and world” which Bogost sees as, “the philosopher’s duty to speculate on these unknown unknowns” (34). I was also particularly interested in how Blas frames the virus (building primarily off of the work of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker), as rooted in replication and cryptography–therefore producing illegibility and incalculability.
This article just borders on being too dense for me (and I suspect Blas’ referenced sources would be difficult for me to parse), but it’s written accessibly enough that the openings it creates feel really exciting and generative. Being familiar with Blas’ artwork but not having read his writing prior to this was also really interesting for me–to see the overlaps and differences in approach to what is clearly a singular individual’s inquiry.
Beware the Slenderman
Brodsky, Irene Taylor, dir. Beware the Slenderman. New York, NY: HBO Documentary Films & Vermilion Films. 2016.
I had initially seen this documentary prior to my thesis research, and it is what set me on this path of inquiry. While it is looking specifically at the 2014 Slenderman stabbing crime (involving two 12 year old girls who assaulted a third 12 year old girl in an attempt to win the favor of Slenderman), Brodsky does an incredible job of contextualizing belief in online folklore, bringing in numerous specialists including: an evolutionary biologist, a literary critic, multiple psychologists–including a neurodevelopmental psychologist, a digital folklorist, and the editor in chief of knowyourmeme (an online meme database). Together they paint a picture of why the Slenderman myth has proven to be an especially viral one, citing its malleability (as a collectively constructed and literally faceless figure), an inherent inability to prove or disprove folk belief “beyond a shadow of a doubt”, its genealogy in tales like the Brothers Grimm’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, the adolescent brain’s desire for kinship, a messy cultural concept of what’s “real” made even “messier” by technology, shared belief as stronger than individual belief, and “peer-to-peer horizontal transmission” or “virus of the mind” (an empirical fact, where when something fascinating is picked up by the brain, it wants to spread it).
This film feels really effectively and compassionately created (especially considering that it is a true crime documentary), with the second half of the film centered largely around one of the two offender’s rare diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia (and the differences between belief and delusion, hallucination, and psychosis). Of interest to my research, it also contains a large amount of the constructed and performed “evidence” around the Slenderman myth, including: images and text from the original thread, YouTube videos of “encounters” with the Slenderman, games inspired by the narrative, discussion threads from 4chan, art from DeviantArt, etc.
Open Sourcing Horror
Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. “Open Sourcing Horror”. In: Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology, Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, 61-75. NY, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
In this chapter, Chess and Newsom use the Slenderman construction as a case study for the influence of the open-source and free software movements on the collective negotiation of narrative construction in online spaces (particularly building off of Carolyn Miller’s work around rhetorical genres and exigency). I found most useful 1: the framing of why horror as a genre was primed for this type of social negotiation because of existing reusability and modifiability to infinitely build new contexts (using vampires as an example, which have a wide set of characteristics, and as long as enough of them are included, a character will read as “vampire” even if it does not have all), and 2: the alignment of open-sourcing with (while not explicitly stated) anticapitalism, through this intentional transparency around creation, desire for openness and collaboration, and existence outside of the cycle of mainstream media construction (for financial gain), “the open sourcing of storytelling thrives on reuse, modification, sharing of source code, an openness (and transparency) of infrastructure, and the negotiation and collaboration of many individuals … additionally, like open-source software, the Slender Man mythology and its iterations (including Marble Hornets, the other web series, blogs, novels, and other fictions) are positioned outside of, and constantly in response to, mainstream media” (64). In this vein, something I really appreciated were examples of collaboration pulled from the original Slenderman thread, such as a case where one user had an idea for images but didn’t know how to use photoshop, so they offered to write a story, for which someone else could create the images, which as Chess and Newsom state, “this compulsion to collaborate (and to check with others about the limitations of that collaboration) illustrates the open-source collaboration style” (69) –and is also just joyful and exciting to read.
Having read a good half-dozen essays on Slenderman at this point, one might think there would be nothing new to encounter, but Chess and Newsom’s contextualizing of the Slenderman narrative through a lens and history of open sourcing is one that makes a lot of sense, and that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. It’s a really well-written chapter in a larger (but short) book using the Slenderman narrative to talk about folklore on the internet.
Gothic Digital Technologies
Crawford, Joseph. “Gothic Digital Technologies”. In: Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 72-86. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Crawford states that “digital gothic” makes use “of the technological possibilities of online media to find new ways of constructing and distributing Gothic narratives” (72). This claim is then thoroughly explored, following the history of chain email urban legends of the 90’s, to the misinformation marketing campaign of The Blair Witch Project in 2001, to the horror memes of the mid 2000’s. I was particularly interested in 1: his framing of technological “serial infection” –a horror trope perhaps most famously used in the Japanese films Ringu (and the American adaptation The Ring) and Kairo–and the unique ways it activates fear when employed on the internet. 2: his exploration of hyperlinks as a way of dislocating the reader from linearity of narrative and time and 3: a reference he makes to Shira Chess (from Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man, a book that I may now need to read) in which Chess likens the collaborative story-building process that takes places on these online platforms to, “a form of open-source debugging applied to fiction rather than code” (78) – all gesturing toward the “technological possibilities” specific to internet storytelling.
I almost didn’t read this chapter, having read Tosha R. Taylor’s “Horror Memes and Digital Culture” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic days earlier, but I’m really glad to have read both, as they highlight and focus on different components of horror memes and the gothic genre, which brings even more resonance to the places of overlap. I also appreciate this piece for the ways in which it brings in contemporary cultural context, discussing how snopes.com began as a way to track online narratives and has become primarily a way of fact-checking political stories–and this as demonstrating, “the cultural continuity between the online urban legends of the 1990s and the ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories of the Trump era: both thrive on the speed with which narratives can be propagated through online environments and the difficulties involved in verifying whether or not they might actually be true” (74), as well as gesturing toward the state of the internet and what possibilities it may hold, saying “The anarchic digital landscape of the 1990s has, to a great extent, now been tamed, mapped, indexed and integrated with the global capitalist economy … At the same time, however, the modern internet is difficult to police effectively because of its scale, and widespread anxieties remain about the awful things which may lurk in its hidden corners or on the ‘deep web’ beyond the reach of traditional search engines” (83).
The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture
Curlew, Abigail. “The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture”. First Monday, 22(6). 2017. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i6.6901
In this paper, Curlew argues for an emergence of a “folklore of surveillance”, using the fields of digital folklore, sociology, and anthropology to explore the Slender Man legend as “a monstrous cultural artifact representative of cultural anxieties around surveillance, social control, and secretive agencies” in order “ to understand how participants of alternate reality games (ARGs) exhibit anxieties about ubiquitous surveillance through uncoordinated collective storytelling”. Of most relevance to my thesis work was her framing of the Slenderman narrative as “monstrous hybrid legend”, hybrid legend’s main features being 1: it “blurs the distinction between coporeal and virtual expression … moves seamlessly from actual, physical life to virtual, digital life”, 2: it “blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman actors … mediated through a series of codes, algorithms, fiber optic wires, and servers … there are numerous and constantly proliferating non-human actors that influence how the folklore is produced and consumed” and 3: it “blurs the distinction between old media and new media … not just in terms of material mediums, but in terms of cultural understandings”. I also really appreciated her statement that, “code is both a tool of empowerment and a tool of discipline. Folklore, in this sense, may be enhanced in empowering ways over the Internet, but it is also subjected to new forms of surveillance and social control”. Some other key terms that came up for me in the paper were, “convergence culture”, “digital ubiquity”, “vernacular performance,” and “techno-monster”.
This is perhaps one of my favorite things I’ve read during this research, and I wish I had read it early-on, rather than toward the end. Not only is her focus on surveillance culture and social control interesting (and not traversed in my other research), but the paper is really clearly written and organized; Curlew does not build upon concepts until they’ve been clearly defined, and having her well-stated and well-researched definitions (such as characteristics of and distinctions between: legend, folklore, and hybrid folklore) would have been really useful to help contextualize some of my early research. The paper is also rad in that it provides actionable information (for example: providing links to browser extensions and other tools to resist the capitalist practices that overwhelm just using the internet).
21st Century Transmedia Storytelling: Experiencing Narrative Transportation
Dal Pian, L.F., M.C. Dal Pian, and M. Dal Pian. 2019. “21st Century Transmedia Storytelling: Experiencing Narrative Transportation.” 11th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Palma, Spain, July 1-3, 2019. Valencia, Spain: International Academy of Technology, Education and Development.
This paper does a really clear job of defining and grounding (in both practice and in neurological science) some essential terms for my thesis work, including: 1: “narrative transportation” –when one is transported into a narrative by virtue of performing the narrative, a “convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narative” (10073, emphasis my own), 2: “elaboration” –a divergent process, “in which persuasion leads to an attitude chance via evaluation of arguments (10073), and 3: “transmedia storytelling” –where a single universe is expanded, “through different and well-structured story pieces that users are invited to get in and out” (10073), which is dependent on user performance, “with new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (10076) intended as, “a continuous dialogue between the involved publishing platforms and the consideration of creative and consumer spaces that belong to each of them” and “necessarily starts from the audiences, at all times” (10077).
The primary goal of this paper is to propose a “homeostatic transmedia structure” to be used for critical, storytelling pedagogy. For an only 8 page paper, it does a really great job of identifying and contextualizing an issue (the way our thinking becomes less analytical when we are absorbed in a story, and our current digital culture of constant immersion in stories, often including untrue information, or with the intention of consumerism and illusion of control), and proposing a possible solution (one which interrupts the immersion in a story, inserting space for the more critical process of “elaboration”) –all of which feels like space for me to play with and employ with intention.
Reading the Cyborg in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Fuller, Sarah Canfield. “Reading the Cyborg in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14, no. 2 (54) (2003): 217–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308625.
This piece is a really interesting read of Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” alongside Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs”, in order to push against Haraway’s direct distancing of her cyborg from Shelley’s creature. While its structure (really as just a close reading of the two texts) in some ways limits my ability to apply it to my research inquiries, I was interested in Fuller’s discussion of Frankenstein as an “unstable text” because of its multiple significantly different manuscript and published editions, “with little clear evidence for precisely which elements are Shelley’s own” (vs of various editors) (223). In this same section, I was struck by Fuller’s framing of Frankenstein as “cyborg writing”, stating, “this lack of closure–either in the novel, which omits both the Creature’s death and the closing of Walton’s final letter, or in interpretation, whose unifying authority is consistently undercut by the text–creates what could well be the first instance of “cyborg writing” as well as of science fiction”, bringing back in Haraway’s manifesto which states, “not about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time-wholeness…[but] about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (223). I’m really curious about this concept of cyborg text as it may apply to collectively constructed digital folklore.
I found this really compelling, and a well-made argument. While I understand the directness of the scope, its argument for Frankenstein’s monster as cyborg (and the text as cyborg text) did have me longing for the inclusion of Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” as a sort of evidence for how the creature is functioning exactly as she describes.
You Can't Kill Meme
Garrigus, Hayley, dir. You Can’t Kill Meme. [s.l.]: [s.n.]. 2021.
This film does an effective job of framing the role of belief in magic practices within a few small subcultures, most applicable to this thesis research being: online “chaos magicians” and alt right bros on the /pol/ 4chan channel. Particularly relevant was 1: background information on how magical thinking came to be associated with the alt right, 2: the explanation that for them it’s most often a satirical belief, “blurred by a mixture of desperation for change and an underlying sense of alienation”, and 3: the observation that algorithms create a sense of magic or synchronicity simply by doing their coded jobs effectively.
Despite having value for me, this isn’t a particularly well-assembled documentary, my primary concerns being 1: what is meant by “magic”–either by the interviewees or when Garrigus herself is narrating–is never clearly defined, which feels problematic as it seems to be rooted solely in a white American lens, yet is spoken about as broad truths, and 2: Garrigus seems to try to remain neutral as a filmmaker (as to not alienate her unusual interviewees) and together these two issues fail to build a larger context, and cause interviewee statements and memes themselves go unpacked, so issues (like the dangerous racism of the “ebola-chan” meme) go unaddressed.
Spread the Word: Creepypasta, Hauntology, and an Ethics of the Curse
Henriksen, Line. “"Spread the Word": Creepypasta, Hauntology, and an Ethics of the Curse.” University of Toronto Quarterly 87, no. 1 (2018): 266-280. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689102.
Henriksen applies lenses of Donna Haraway’s virtual, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and justice, and Carolyn Dinshaw’s queerness of time and deferral of the “now” (looking especially at how to build an ethics around an unstable now) to the creepypasta myth of “Smile.dog” (briefly: a narrative hoax written in first person as an academic who has discovered an image of a grinning dog which must be passed on in order to be survived) to ask questions about what it means to write and perform (and to do these things in a way that respects a spectral future). “By showing hospitality toward the unknown and unpredictable in the form of the monstrous arrivant, the world may turn – if just a little – toward a horizon of change. It may even change the spectre of the traditional scholar as he is unnerved and forced to respond to something he did not predict, which has come back to teach him about the non-linearity of time” (278). The piece covers a lot of ground and a lot of depth in a short space, but connects aspects of my research that I’d been reaching to find the links between, namely digital folklore (and particularly creepypastas), ghosts and/or the occult, monstrosity, belief, and glitch (though not directly spoken about, I believe it’s another way to contextualize the way she speaks about collapsing the past/present/future). It’s difficult in this limited space to include everything I found valuable.
An essay that dips in and out of surprising density for something grounded by a creepy dog meme–this is one that I believe will be a major touchstone for my thesis work. Henriksen not only (poetically) discusses difficult concepts that feel integral to my exploration of storytelling, belief, and “reality” (digital or otherwise) –but also is a writer I feel I can trust, calling criticisms of the academics she’s citing (such as Derrida’s “performance” of older, male academic) and of current culture (“The culmination of such a global, fast circulation of information has so far been the introduction of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” which have gone from curiosities to political tools to even potential crimes. Such times have made it clear that hoaxes are not harmless; they do not merely describe but also seem to make things happen” (268)) and employing a tone that is more enthusiastically inquisitive than anything else.
Q: Into the Storm
Hoback, Cullen, dir. Q: Into The Storm. 2021.
In his search to unmask “Q”, Hoback traces the history of QAnon and 4chan, primarily through direct contact with their primary players. Despite having a level of embarrassment that I stuck through all six melodramatic episodes, I did, in the end, find it to be essential viewing for my thesis work, as I knew next to nothing about QAnon, and it is deeply connected to (very white American) construction of belief on the internet. It was interesting to hear its genealogy as related to Anonymous (the collective) and early online puzzles/gaming.
While (alarmingly) fascinating, it was disappointing that this documentary does minimal work analyzing the societal roots of what led nearly one in five Americans to believe something Hoback was able to essentially debunk, spending most of its time falling into the middle school-level drama of the unfortunate men it follows (one will note that women are almost entirely absented from the film outside of archival footage). Thankfully (unlike in You Can’t Kill Meme) Hoback does include important contextualization, bringing in: Gamergate, the multiple white supremacist assualts that were tied to 4chan, histories of white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism in the US, as well as the role of algorithms on Facebook and Youtube as huge drivers of violent radicalization.
QAnon, Slender Man, and Our Paranoid Surveillance Society
Horgan, Colin. “QAnon, Slender Man, and Our Paranoid Surveillance Society”. Medium. Aug 28, 2018. https://gen.medium.com/qanon-slender-man-and-our-paranoid-surveillance-society-b3d44075ba87
This article (which was written ~one year into the Q narrative) takes the argument built by Curlew in “The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture”, and applies it to QAnon. This bridging is useful to my research for obvious reasons, but I also found useful Horgan’s inclusion of the term “ostension” (which he defines as “how urban legends are enacted in real life”, and is an important concept more broadly within folklore), as well as the specific way he situates the shifts in our perception of society since 2008, “This confluence of events has resulted in a scenario where people are technically more connected socially, yet at the same time completely disconnected from one another, confused and anxious, and suspicious of the the traditional power structures that hold society together”, and his references to the psychological impact of the constant awareness of being monitored.
I found this article because it references Curlew’s. It doesn’t go particularly deep, but is a good, short read.
Found Media: Interactivity and Community in Online Horror Media
Mello, Jax. "Found Media: Interactivity and Community in Online Horror Media" (2021). Master's Theses. 145. https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/theses/145.
This is a rad master’s thesis in which Mello identifies a category of storytelling which they dub “found media”, with roots in epistolary novels, alternate reality games, and found footage films–but with a great importance on audience engagement. They then go on to use two examples of found media (the Marble Hornets web based series, which consisted of two YouTube channels and one Twitter account, and The Magnus Archives, a podcast) identify the components of found media that make it compelling for audiences to engage with (often over periods of years). These felt very relevant to my research inquiries, and include: 1: the presence of a “mediator” who reveals components of the narrative, 2: an ongoing, serial nature, which creates a temporal context that allows for a feeling of real time, as well as a sense that the audience is “witnessing the creation of a mythos” (16). Together these things build a sense for the audience that they exist in the same world as the narrative (which makes the monsters feel more real, too, an important part of engaging in horror narratives), and also helps foster a sense of hope and community (whereas in found footage films, for example, there is always an understanding from the beginning that the characters will all already be dead–hence how their footage was “found”).
One criticism (and perhaps gap in their framing of the effectiveness of “found media”) is that Mello claims that Night Vale is not as scary as other podcast-based horror projects because of the “intimacy” of a radio program–but I would argue that given the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast (infamous for inciting panic that it was a real unfolding situation rather than a live theater adaptation of a novel) –what they’re actually discussing here in regards to audience buy-in is the connection between how new a technology is, and our likelihood to believe the “truth” of narratives that are delivered through that technology.
Social Cognition in the Cyborg Age: Embodiment and the Internet
McCall, Cade. “Social Cognition in the Cyborg Age: Embodiment and the Internet.” Psychological Inquiry 24, no. 4 (2013): 314–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43865656.
Here McCall is in conversation with Sparrow and Chatman’s “Social Cognition in the Internet Age”, incorporating social embodiment and its cognitive mechanisms into their inquiries around our digital interactions. While McCall’s intent is primarily to pose questions and argue for where research needs to be done, I did find value in re: to my research (and also in re: to my practices of art and game making) in much of the neuroscience research cited that look at how the tools we use to interact with digital space (whether that be physical: like our phones, keyboards, or game joysticks, or digital: like cursors or avatars) become an “extension of our body”, stating, “recent research also suggests that our own mobile phones (and not those of others) may actually have neural representations that overlap to some degree with neural representations of our own hands” (315). McCall also gestures towards (without naming) the proteus effect, discussing the impact of avatar representation on embodied feeling and behavior.
Some criticisms I have of this piece are 1: in laying out the differences between web interactions and interactions in physical space (314), assumptions are being made about the commonality of those physical interactions that I believe could be easily challenged with a disability or neurodivergent lens, 2: citing the Milgram experiments without much critical analysis of how they were conducted is typically a red flag for me (McCall suggests that since we have enough tools to be having empathetic interactions digitally, that perhaps we often do not because “we are so far outside the room” –as a direct reference to the Milgram experiments, which is essentially a throwaway argument to me unless you are going to get into the power dynamics and ethics within and around those experiments) and 3: there is a focus on positive social interaction (ie: empathy) and how it does or does not appear in digital interactions, while aggression is almost viewed as a failing to create empathetic interactions, rather than something that is actually possibly being intentionally and independently fostered.
Tall, Dark, and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age
Peck, Andrew. “Tall, Dark, and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age.” The Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 509 (2015): 333–48. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0333.
Peck uses the collective, online construction of the “Slender Man” legend as a case study to discuss “emergent performance”, the ongoing feedback loop wherein the audience and “performer” (in this context, the individual sharing and contributing to the digital folklore’s narrative or “evidence”) are informing and affecting one another, as well as future “performances” (335). In the essay, Peck argues “Digital media affects the emergent nature of performance in four ways: (1) by occurring asynchronously; (2) by encouraging imitation and personalization while also allowing perfect replication; (3) by combining elements of oral, written, and visual communication; and (4) by generating shared expectations for performance that enact group identity despite the lack of a physically present group” (334). Through this lens, Peck is able to address a shift in the construction of folklore: from something ephemeral (oral), to a hybrid, mixed modality (digital). One final place with particular resonance for my research was Peck’s exploration into what it means for the Slender Man myth to have a collective ownership that refuses systematization–resulting in varied performances, “informally locating ownership of the creature across the community” (344).
Peck’s analysis (which I selected because it was highly referenced by other interesting pieces I was finding related to Slenderman and digital mythologies) was clearly directly relevant to my research inquiries around the collective construction of digital folklore, but it was also a really well constructed and informative essay (rooted in screenshots from the original thread where the Slender Man was created), as well as an enjoyable read.
I'm A Villain-Coded Queer: Adopting the Asthetics of Evil as a Gesture of Queer Pride
Price, Devon. “I’m a Villain-Coded Queer: Adopting the Asthetics of Evil as a Gesture of Queer Pride.” Medium, February 28, 2020. https://devonprice.medium.com/im-a-villain-coded-queer-5b98e01dd6c8
In this piece, Price articulates their understanding of why queer and trans people might choose to identify with our culture’s “villains” over our “heros”, speaking primarily to a sense of pride in defiance of our society’s harmful structures, and a chosen alignment with much of what queer-coded villains are able to proudly inhabit; not only their queerness, but their aesthetic darkness (often a way of coding Blackness), their disability, their complex backstories, their isolation, their rejection of white supremacist and capitalist ideas of authority, justice, and heroism. This feels relevant to my thesis work because it speaks to a construction of internal vs. external identity, and while the connection isn’t made within the article itself, I believe this experience and line of thinking have a lot of implications for the identities that marginalized young people gravitate towards and construct online.
I initially read this article in my first semester of this program, while researching a presentation on queer-coded villains in cartoon media, prompted by viral social media content created by queer and trans teens (primarily tweets and TikTok videos), self-identifying with the monstrous and villainous as a sort of cheeky ownership of complex marginality. I’m including it here because it provides a really accessible and contemporary companion to some of the more dense theoretical text about monstrosity and queer bodies.
Play Profound
Rethorst, Susan. “Play Profound”. A Choreographic Mind : Autobodygraphical Writings. Helsinki: University Of The Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy Helsinki, 2016.
In this piece, Rethorst discusses the evolution of her approach to dance–becoming an intuitively-led, play-based process of making-as-thinking. This chapter was recommended to me by artist/teacher/game designer Tabitha Nikolai, and while it is not relevant to the content of my thesis, it is absolutely relevant to my approach. I was particularly interested in 1: her framing of arrival–“Arrival rests on the idea that the dance’s premise and content will be made manifest through the making, that I will arrive at where I want to go, at what I want to be doing with this dance by following my dance’s lead. It rests on the belief that the ideas that are in me inform what I do and make, even as I am unaware of how that is operating. How what lies under my conscious decisions is leading those decisions. But also that working in such a way will add layers to those issues and that content, i.e., the dance will engender knowledge–that my dances are smarter than I am.” (71), and 2: her reframing of pleasure and rigor–as non-mutually exclusive, explorative processes that can be rooted in instinct.
This was a quick and enjoyable read that really hit the nail on the head re: how I want to engage with my various practices.
Glitch Feminism
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2020.
The space Russell builds out in Glitch Feminism is one of the primary places where (in this work) I am thinking through the muddying of digital vs. AFK (“away from keyboard”) space, and the queer implications of this. While I could pull a quote from any page of this text, I feel particularly relevant are: 1: their framing of “nonperformance” as refusal within systems where the performance does not serve us, 2: multiplicity as a right, 3: the concept of digital dualism (the idea that your AFK person and online identity(ies) are separate or operate in isolation from one another) - and their push against this, “the production of these selves, the digital skins we develop and don online, help us understand who we are with greater nuance … the body itself is an architecture that is activated and then passed along like a meme to advance social and cultural logic” (31), 4: their response to Rindon Johnson’s question, “what’s the point of having a body if I theoretically could make or step into so many?”, that, “perhaps, then, as we work toward ghosting the binary body, we also work toward dissolving ourselves, making the boundaries that delineate where we begin and end, and the points where we touch and come into contact with the world, disappear completely. In this, perhaps our factual fragments can be scrambled, rendered unreadable” (68).
Glitch Feminism is one of the grounding texts of my grad school experience. While I do wish that, as a “manifesto”, there were a part of it that resembled that structure more (just in re: to accessibility of the concepts, thinking of the young people in my life who would benefit from this text but would not be able to make it through), I am in awe of what Russell is able to pack into such a short text (as well as everything that expands outward from it, from interviews to other essays to curatorial work). It’s something I continually revisit.
My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage
Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”. GLQ (1994) 1 (3): 237–254. https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article/1/3/237/69091/My-Words-to-Victor-Frankenstein-Above-the-Village
I included this piece in my research because it is a touchstone for me, and because it adds an important layer to my other readings around contemporary gothic literature (and obviously, more specifically, Frankenstein). It is useful to my thesis work in the ways Styker speaks about embodiment, the monstrous, humaness, identity construction, being remade, the trans body as “technological construction” (238), and the transformation of anger. I am interested, also, in the way Stryker talks about the desire to, “lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself” (240), and I wonder how this might relate to my desire to (through this research) locate an ethics for transmedia storytelling.
As I mentioned this is an important piece to me. It is interesting, too, that it was initially encountered as a performance, not a text piece.
Horror Memes and Digital Culture
Taylor, Tosha R. “Horror Memes and Digital Culture”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, edited by Clive Bloom, 985-1003. Ilford, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
In this chapter of a larger collection contextualizing contemporary gothic media, Taylor identifies the internet as a gothic space, “largely lacking geographic or temporal boundaries” (985) and horror memes as mirroring and occupying this space even more deeply, providing the invitation for the interactivity that is essential to their growth and spread. Particularly useful to me was 1: her framing of the role of and play with “truth” in horror memes, using the phrase “artificial truthfulness” (992) to describe “...a performative sense of truthfulness invites others to share in the story’s evolution and transmission” (993). 2: the (while not explicitly described as such) inherently anticapitalist way that Taylor understands ownership within horror memes, “Participants in the creation and dissemination of such media do not seek commercial gain from their work. Nor is ownership prioritised. The explicit or implied claims to truthfulness at the start of many memes’ development discourage departures from the conceit that would require creators to claim ownership. Likewise, a creator discouraging others from borrowing, manipulating, and sharing their original text or image disrupts the participatory nature present in many early stages” (995). While less fleshed out than other parts of the chapter, I was also very struck by her statement that, “Creepypasta about cursed media reflects not only fears about the power of cultural objects but the gothic tradition itself, which often reflects and invokes the destructive power of knowing … In the Western context as it manifests in horror memes, this may be owed to particular anxieties about the power of the image. Cursed images such as Smile.jpg confront the reader/viewer with the double revelation that they cannot simply reject this new knowledge: once they have seen it, the damage is already done.” (998).
I wish I had read this earlier on in my research, Taylor really clearly situates horror memes (using roughly a dozen specific examples), covering a lot of ground, from introductory background about memes (broadly and specific lore) to more complex concepts like the nature of horror memes as “multimodal, transmedia manifestations” (990). It got me really excited to explore more of this book (which has over 70 chapters and an entire section on Interactive Gothic–which is where this chapter is located)
The Slenderman Stabbing Shows Girls Will Be Girls, Too
Traister, Rebecca. The Slenderman Stabbing Shows Girls Will Be Girls, Too. The Best American Magazine Writing 2015: Columbia University Press, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2015.
While this article does not hit it out of the ballpark for me (I was hoping for a thoughtful reflection on how belief functions in close intimate relationships between adolescent girls, using the Slenderman stabbing as a case study), it does touch on the psychological concept of “social mirroring, the unconscious sharing of symptoms and affliction” –which is related to deep empathy and rooted in a longing for belonging. If anything, it raised questions that I would like to explore more deeply.
This piece (which was written in 2014, two weeks after the Waukesha Slender Man stabbing) lacks the important context that the primary perpetrator was later diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia–which is not to say that people with schizophrenia are dangerous–but that in this particular case, her undiagnosed and untreated disorder was a major element in the construction of her belief system, which contextualizes her behavior. This is important to this particular piece of writing, because the piece lacks a clear through line–she states that her intent is to “move beyond the (hetero)sexual framework we’ve come to accept as defining the norm of adolescence”, and while roughly a third of her examples (which range from Joan of Arc to Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme to Thelma and Louise) focus on the relationship between two girls, about a third are about singular girls, and an additional third focus more on girls who experienced visions–which feels relevant, considering that Traister didn’t even have the full context of the crime in Waukesha (which includes that the second perpetrator’s court diagnosis was “schizotypy”, which has a severe impact on social relationships). I’d love to read this piece re-written with more direction and updated information.
Occult Cybernetics
Treister, Suzanne. “Occult Cybernetics”. Interviewed by Erik Davis and Maja D'Aoust. Expanding Mind, September 2013. https://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/expanding-mind-occult-cybernetics-091513/
This interview with Suzanne Treister for the Expanding Mind podcast primarily examines Treister’s artistic practices (and particularly her Hexen 2.0 project, which includes a tarot deck, diagrams, a text, and other materials) as a type of “esoteric contemplation on power politics”, where she engages in a practice of “sampling” from the real world, finding correspondences between things, as a type of enigmatic research (which Davis separates from a postmodern practice of simple appropriation and collage). I am interested in Treister’s use of diagramming as a pedagogical tool that also operates as art object, and the hosts’ framing this as an alternate methodology, which has a sense of the alchemical and play. A part of the podcast where I was most struck was actually in the very beginning, when Davis is situating Suzanne’s work and interaction with the occult (as separate and even uninterested in belief) by saying that rather, it is a dialog with the idea and tools of the occult/magic, “to try to grapple with the situation we’re in now, this insane world, technology, media, transformation, mutation, this mixture of science fiction fascination with what’s coming, and this kind of knee-jerk horror and desire to return to a simpler world–that in some ways the best way into that is precisely through the enigmatic mind of esotericism and the occult, the strange world of correspondences which suggest patterns which point to possibilities…”.
One note on accessibility is that the audio recording is very tinny, and there is no transcript. While nothing in this podcast (or in what I have seen of Treister’s work) crosses these lines, I am also just personally a little wary of the thin lines between occult exploration, new age beliefs, and conspiratorial indoctrination and cults (like QAnon, which has a direct pipeline from new age wellness), and I am unfamiliar with the hosts’ positionalities in this regard, beyond what is expressly stated in this individual podcast episode.
The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior
Yee, Nick and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior”. Human Communication Research, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2007). http://web.stanford.edu/~bailenso/papers/proteus%20effect.pdf
In this paper, Yee and Bailenson term “the Proteus Effect” –when deindividuated online users “adhere to a new identity that is inferred from their avatars … or more precisely … to the behavior that they believe others would expect [that avatar] to have” (274), through a large amount of existing research around social behavior (on and offline), and their own two experimental studies using avatars. This term is integral to my research inquiries, so it was really interesting to see the work that went into constructing it. I was particularly interested by 1: their exploration of the mutability and plasticity of our online identities, 2: identity cues, 3: behavioral confirmation (when the behavior of someone who is being perceived is impacted by the behavior of the person who is perceiving them, based on that perception), and 4: deindividuation in online space.
While I found their argument, research around their hypothesis, and call for further research really interesting, I was very put off by their two studies–which predicted and observed the Proteus Effect in action by using avatars of varying “attractiveness” and height. While I understand that a relatively short termed Stanford department of communication study into a new concept isn’t likely going to make participants’ avatars into their fantasy alter ego, or an identity/belief set they do not hold–I think they could have chosen more interesting and less problematic avatar differences. “Attractiveness” and height are weird white supremacist/colonial/heteronormative metrics, especially when it isn’t assessed within that context (which they don’t, they really just contextualize these metrics within their own data collection, and mention without criticality that they only used white people as a basis for the avatars).