Conclusions & Considerations
The way forward is clear: as Alan Dundes predicted, the cooperative nature of the Web has allowed for the creation of what can only be described as cultural icons, living pieces of folklore that we can access anytime, anywhere, and that we have the power to change. While traditional mythology is the result of humans trying to explain the nature of themselves and the world that shaped them, cyberlore tries to explain the technological tools that we use to build our own online communities. BEN and Herobrine both arise from glitches in popular games, so it felt more productive to believe that they were supernatural entities who have control of a realm that usually belongs to the autonomous player. Petscop as an investigation is filtered through several layers of performance, the minute details of which are parsed out and codified by devoted followers, who seek a complete and total understanding of a fictional game’s hidden depths. Slenderman, who was explicitly created to grow and adapt to the whims of the Web, is a multiplicity of stories, none of them any more “true” than the other; instead, his true purpose as an archetype is to speak to each viewer on their own “monsters” and their ability to rein them in.
With the latter case in particular, it is quite easy to see how Internet folklore informs an online culture and both online/offline behavior. Myths are not told just for the sake of a good story, but to explain our own feelings back to ourselves and to validate them. Malinowski emphasizes the importance of understanding the social organization and context of the culture being studied for the corresponding myths to really make sense – similar to how one cannot brush off the Internet and its capacity to connect and enthrall if they hope to understand its lore. An alluringly unexplained story fresh for analysis in the Information Age is meant, like the Web originally intended by Berners-Lee, to unify humanity, not further divide it. In this context, our ability to turn our back on reality is, as Strauss noted in The Savage Mind, an effective way of preserving “methods of observation and reflection” that were originally meant to help us survive and thrive in the “sensible world” (2:16).
But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to dismiss the Web as its own virtual reality. While there is a certain unspoken milestone that is reached when a piece of cyberlore makes it into the “real world” – where it is referenced by developers in patch notes or, in Slenderman’s case, made into a feature-length film – the validity of the subcultures and the cyberlore that’s embedded in the social consciousness of its members suggests that it can have its own inherent cultural value without ever being acknowledged offline. As noted in David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet’s introduction to Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience,
“Extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple realities – or at least multiple ways of experiencing the world, depending upon time, place, and circumstances. “ (5:8)
If future anthropological studies were to approach the Web seriously, they would find a lot more than the penny-dreadful creepypastas told around pixelated campfires. There are modes of identity and brands of reality unique to this virtual space, almost completely divorced from the version of ourselves we see on the streets of the physical world.
