Tall, Dark, and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age

Abstract

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.

Man-Eating Teddy Bears of the Scrub: Exploring the Australian Drop Bear Urban Legend

“…Following this process of categorisation, sources were examined through a digital ethnographic lens. This final analysis uses Peck's (2015) concept of the 'digital legend cycle', Wikipedia's revision history, discourse analysis, and social media to explore how the internet is helping spread this particularly Australian vampire legend.…”

“…Archives of discussion forums, and image or video hosting sites, also maintain digital drop bear narratives for posterity; while contemporary communicative conventions such as hashtags enable easy tracking of drop bear related media. Through this multitude of posts, threads, definitions, videos, and images the drop bear has become part of the digital legend cycle (Peck, 2015). This cycle combines features of urban legend, such as the presentation of fact as fiction, with the specificities of networked communications, such as asynchronous interaction and iterative, collective, textual and audio-visual storytelling.…”

“…The comments provided on this and similar videos exemplify how drop bear narratives are co-constructed online through processes of asynchronous communication. Similarly, discussion threads and forum posts provide spaces where users co-construct and negotiate details and motifs of the narrative in a process that Peck (2015) refers to as the digital legend cycle.…”

“…Other colloquial terms specific to the Australian folklore context, include: scrub (bushland area lying beyond a farming community), yarn (a story, tale or anecdote passed on via oral traditions), and watering-hole (a local hotel, bar, pub or similar establishment where Australian's gather socially) (Johansen, 1996). Peck's (2015) concept of the "digital legend cycle" to online reference materials and social media.…”

The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities

“…These platforms are often assumed to be global in reach, but they often make use of traditional knowledge and social conduits that are concentrated in the United States. In addition to finding unique manifestations of folk behavior in cyber-environments such as hackers injecting legendary characters (e.g., "The White Lady of Perion" in MapleStory video games based upon "White Lady" lovers' lane legends), "creepypastas" and collective creations (horror-related legends posted around the Internet such as the Slender Man and Ted the Caver), virus hoaxes ( e.g., Goodtimes, Dance of the Pope, and An Internet Flower for You), viral "memes" (Grumpy Cat, U Mad Bro, But That's None of My Business), the comparative microfunctions of communicative topics in analog and digital culture provide material for analysis of joking, legend tripping, and ritualizing off-and on-line (Frank 2011;Kinsella 2014;Ellis 2012;Blank 2013;Boyer 2013;Chess and Newsom 2015;Peck 2015;Henriksen 2016). With these expressions in mind, a revised definition of folklore emerged to cover analog and digital as well as historic and contemporary culture of "traditional knowledge put into, and drawing from, practice" (Bronner 2016).…”