INTRODUCTION

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he said that it was a no-brainer, “just because I needed it, really, because it was so frustrating that it didn’t exist.” He envisioned a collaborative world that was open to anyone and everyone who wanted in, and the precious data within would “last longer than the systems themselves,” given meaning by the nodes they interconnect with and interpretations they spark. Today, hundreds of millions of people inhabit his “social creation”, introducing new innovations and leaving behind meticulously-recorded legacies. There’s a somber reverence when you come across a page with ancient HTML, or click into an abandoned forum from over a decade ago, of questions never answered and statuses never updated. The Web is woven with a criminal number of loose threads, of digital graveyards irreversibly entangled with pages more visible, bringing you back again and again to the site of abandonment, of blankness and bleak mystery. You don’t have to travel halfway across the country to visit such a place; it’s here in your hands.

When there is such a space to be explored, stories will be told about what we find. The Bogeyman, Dracula, the Jersey Devil, elves and fairies – perhaps you’ve heard of them, but what do you know of Jeff the Killer, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Unedited Footage of a Bear? Are you similarly versed in these tales of cyberlore?

Nine years before Berners-Lee’s creation was unleashed to the world, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley was struggling to prove that his field would not become obsolete as the years wore on. Alan Dundes began to explore the possibility of folklore of and about the computer, and suspected that rather than stamping out folklore, technology was “becoming a vital factor in the transmission of” and “an exciting source of inspiration” for a new generation of folklore.

While culturally-specific myths are usually passed from person to person, the Internet proposes a new form of hyper-communication: many things are written down to be uploaded, passed around, and discussed, even if it is known not to have any bearing in the real world. On the Web, places such as Reddit forums are where word-of-mouth transference takes place; sites like Wikipedia, where information must be objective and verified following a set of rules, are treated more as concrete texts. “Wikis” specific to a certain community are more loyally tended to by members of that community, serving as miniature cultural texts. They often act to explain phenomena observed in the digital world, be it glitches in games, disturbing images on Imgur, or hushed speculation of what lies in the “Dark Web”. These urban legends that were born on the Web are often found in repositories such as creepypasta.com and snopes.com.

The scholarly negligence of the Internet and its communities as a field of study reveals more than a generational divide, but an academic one as well; the rabbit holes of forums, videos, and datamining are afresh with anthropological meaning. Even more difficult to pin down is this sense of a placeless place that is not geographically bounded, but exists solely on the meaningful connections that pages make to pages and people to people. We are instant, but anonymous. Some of these connections prey on our darkest fears – you can find pages of animal cruelty or the fastest methods of suicide – while others, ironically, spin up fantastical tales to explain away some phenomenon that not even the all-knowing Google search can shed light on. After all, myth is how we explain ourselves to ourselves.

How this translation has occurred from physical to virtual, as well as which common elements of traditional folklore (and how it’s passed down) were carried across with it, will be explored through the use of several case studies. The first, Petscop, is a chilling webseries that is being carefully picked apart on Reddit forums; the second looks at two widely-circulated beliefs in spiritual entities that have corrupted popular video games; the third showcases Slenderman, an instantly-recognizable figure for all who have regularly used the Internet in the last decade.

Those Who Came Before

Sir James George Frazer – an accomplished Scottish social anthropologist most well-known for his work with mythology and religion, Frazer published The Golden Bough in 1890. His most famous work compares similarities among the numerous magical and religious beliefs, and concludes that human belief systems pass through three main stages: primitive magic, religion, then science.

Bronisław Malinowski – hailing from what is now Poland, Malinowski defined myth as the collection of stories (regarded with reverence) that function to explain the core aspects of a society. There are three main categories of myth: (1) on the origin of mankind, society, and social rankings (2) on cultural change, heroic deeds, cultural customs and social institutions (3) on stories directly associated with concrete magic (60). Most of his famed anthropological work was based off of his early 20th-century ethnographies of the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of New Guinea.

Claude Lévi-Strauss – this French anthropologist focused mainly on structuralism, in which elements of human culture can only be understood by their relationship to a larger, overarching structure. This field of study searches for homologous structures in all belief systems, and that the “savage” mind was no different structurally than the “civilized” one. Hence his 1962 novel, The Savage Mind, studies totemic institutions of certain American and Australian tribes, and what this says about myth structures and humanity’s relationship to nature.

Carl Jung – while technically not an anthropologist, Jung’s work in the field of analytical psychology complements the kinds of structures and modes of thought being examined by the likes of Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss. He worked alongside psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud briefly, but was more a champion of individuation (the differentiation of the self) and the many psychological processes that help or hinder this lifetime goal.

*Note that many of the anthropological sources referenced are Western, which more often than not means that the conclusions reached were aided by the study of the “primitive man”, with very little self-reflection on Western lore. Future studies of cyberlore would do well to incorporate non-Western philosophies and tales.*

Keywords

Technological determinism – a 19th century reductionist theory (coined by American social scientist Thorstein Veblen, but elaborated upon by Karl Marx) postulating that a society’s technology in turn affects the development of its social structure and cultural values. The key mover in history is not an idea, but the technology that disseminates it. As a new kind of technology is stabilized, its design has a strong direct effect on its users' behaviors, thus diminishing human agency.

Folklore – embodies a wide range of storytelling modes, from folktales, myths, and legends to songs, dances, foods, or artistic techniques (hence the interchangeability of terms such as "myth", "folklore", and "folktale" in this project). While folklore is traditionally thought of as an oral tradition, Alan Dundes – who has professionalized the study of folklore in recent decades – argues that today’s technologies generate “new forms of communication” that still technically meet the other criteria for folklore. ‘Folk’, for example, can refer to any group of people who share something in common (such as an occupation, language, or religious identity) as well as its own traditions. There are countless communities on the Internet who meet this description, especially because they form solely because of this unifying factor.

Creepypasta – For those who aren't already aware, a creepypasta is a play on "copypasta" (which in itself is a play on the ability to spread large amounts of texts like wildfire thanks to the copy-paste functions of a computer keyboard), and is cultural shorthand for a homegrown horror story that is posted to creepypasta.com, a website that has been "scaring you since 2008 with paranormal stories and short horror microfiction."

Let’s Play – among the most common video styles of the content uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube, a Let’s Play primarily features the playthrough of a particular video game, often accompanied by the player’s voice and face (footage of which is squared off to a corner of the screen) as they react to the events of the game. On YouTube, the monetization of advertisements and the opportunity for sponsorships allow for the possibility of making a career out of releasing regular Let’s Play videos.