This post isn’t (on the face of it) directly relevant to community engagement but is all about ways in which web technologies are changing the way our society tells its stories. I think it is important that we understand these changes because so often good community engagement is about facilitating the telling of the stories of the community.

This weekend I came across the story of Slender Man – apparently the most scary videos ever. With that I will hand over to my daughter Alex who has agreed to act as a guest blogger here….

Slender Man is something that many of the people reading this will have never heard of. It was originally a thread on ‘Something Awful Forums’ about creating paranormal images. There are a number of pictures that people posted, but eventually someone with the screen name ‘Victor Surge’ posted a picture of a tall, thin man with numerous extended limbs in June 2009. These went down well with the community on this site, and eventually people started posting their own images of ‘Slender Man’. Eventually the only thing that was in the thread was Slender Man, and everyone kept telling the creator to turn him into a horror story.

A story was created by ‘Marble Hornets’, a channel on YouTube. It started out as a simple series about a college student watching tapes about his friend slowly breaking down and disappearing after being stalked by a tall thin man with incredibly long limbs and no facial features. At first I began to watch it thinking it was a simple series, but it began to evolve.

There is a comment system on YouTube. As well as that, one can reply to the poster of the video by sending a video response to the original video. When I started to watch this I ignored the video responses, all of them from a user called ‘Totheark’. As the series progressed though, I eventually realised that the story wasn’t just the video that was in front of you, but the video responses from ‘Totheark’ are a part of the story, indicating that there is a lot more depth to the story than I previously anticipated. Being a bit of a twitter nerd I also decided to follow @MarbleHornets on it, to find that in between entries of the series the main character ‘posts’ what’s going on in his world. This story doesn’t stop. It started last June, and every day since then the Story of Slender Man has new meaning, new stories, new images and new theories.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to relay by saying all this. The world, or more the internet, becomes more and more complex each day, and people use various forms of media in order to tell their stories. People create new ways to enjoy entertainment, like Blu Ray or the iPad, but I think that many people, at least the teenage population, are using multimedia as their main form of entertainment. Why settle with reading a book or watching a movie when you could enjoy both while viewing a live feed of the main character’s thoughts? It feels like you’re a part of the action, which is an illusion that only the very best movie directors and writers can create.

Alex Crozier