In December I published a paper as part of Sonic Scope’s 5th Issue. "Isolated Together: The Online Sound of Digital and Analog Haunting" is an exploration of the ambivalent position that online social spaces place their users, specifically focused on online horror media. In this post, I want to explore some of the themes I covered in this essay from a slightly different angle.
Let's begin by establishing a term that is key to this paper - that of the “prosumer". "Prosumer" essentially describes someone who both produces and consumes media, often simultaneously. Which is to say: most social media users - most of us - are prosumers. To take part in dominant online social and culture spaces like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, users are required to perform the role of producer and consumer at the same time: consuming vast amounts of textual and audiovisual culture, all the while making their own videos, images, comments, and posts, often directly in response to the media they consumed. A comment under someone's post becomes its own form of performance, a video uploaded to Youtube claims to be a genuine 'reaction' to another piece of media, a group chat can become a horror story with a simple copy & paste.
In the 1960s, Guy Debord theorised about the Society of the Spectacle, a concept that gained newfound relevance in the 90s. He described a society that is moving away from commodity-capitalism, focused around individuals trading fetishised commodities, towards a sort of image-capitalism, based around a fetishisation and exchange of appearances. It seems to me that Debord was probably informed by the rise of mass marketing and commercialised “glamour" of his time, as described by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing TV series. However, Debord also picked up on a tendency in late capitalist culture that has only heightened with time, an amaterialist tendency of commodity fetishisation that would eventually consume the consumer, commodifying even their social interactions.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
As an artist and musician, I feel the commodification of social interactions every day, especially in social media. Instagram may be on its surface a space for me to blog with photos and videos of my everyday life, keeping up to date with my friends and family, bringing us all closer together. But really I am on there to be entertained, to hate scroll, to feel jealous of my friend's achievements, style or looks. To make them feel jealous or shock them with my achievements when I post. I am not just socialising, I am selling myself, I am competing for attention. I assess how much people care about me based on how much engagement my selfie receives. I assess my career prospects based on how many likes i get on a meme involving a hairless cat, impact font, and a chipmunk remix of Drake’s “One Dance”. I am assessing my sexual prospects based on who likes my stories and who is in my mutual follows. I am working out what I should buy based on the clothes my half-acquaintances are wearing. The adverts slip in so seamlessly between our self-promotion. So the vector of capitalist-led culture continues, from a society based on who you are, to one based on what you have, to one based on how you appear.
How does this relate to Online Horror? In quite a few ways actually, but first let’s step back in time a little bit and consider the internet before social media. In this pre-consolidated period, the internet was a darker and perhaps more mysterious place, a semi-networked constellation of niche forums, html webpages, news sites, online shops, instant messaging programmes that you had to download and use outside of the browser. All things we have now, but spread more thinly. Rather than gathering in specialised nooks and crannies, we interacts under the awning of a handful of websites and apps owned by Meta, Google, Microsoft and a handful of others. In the 90s up to the mid-noughties, anonymity was usually a given. There was often no pretense that the names you read on your forum related much at all to the real (irl) personalities of the people posting. In contrast, social media, in the standard set by Facebook, expects you to be your “real” self (with your real name, gender, age, and clear pictures of your face) to maintain a seamless relationship between your physical and virtual lives.
Contrast the worlds of Second Life, released in 2003, and Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. In the discourse around the former, the separation between the avatar and the user is encouraged, celebrated even. For example, in an article written by Eiko Ikegami in 2011, she explores the online existences of people she spent time with on Second Life. In this research she finds that the anonymity and ability to reinvent oneself offered by this online space allows its users to experiment with identities that are different to their “real” selves - “the world of socializing avatars questions our very notion of identity as fixed: perhaps the identity of a person or collectivity is not a preexisting entity but is fluid, revisable through interactions with others within the space of a digital public.” In Meta’s Metaverse, you may also customise your avatar (albeit with rather pedestrian options compared to Second Life or VR Chat). But importantly, there is an implicit expectation for users to have indentity continuity between their metaverse avatar, their facebook account, and their work-life. Meta’s Metaverse is not a place to embrace new identities, to become anonymous. This would make a good business model. Instead, users’s data need to be accurately tracked across all platforms to generate the best data to sell to third parties.
Early online horror often took advantage of the anonymity defining that period. For example, a user could roleplay as a government official with secret information, or perhaps appear as something less human, more malign. The user might even act as a vessel for strange pieces of media that spilled across websites, inhabiting thousands of users. Copypastas emerged as (often comedic) pieces of text which would be copied and pasted wholesale into forums, comment sections, emails, live chats, etc. It was not long before a subgenre of copypastas - creepypastas - were in circulation. These are horror pieces which often invoke the curse-like language and impetus to re-post that chain letters carried in a physical media era. Many of these creepypastas would begin with “DO NOT READ THIS” or a similar warning, before informing the reader that they have been cursed to a horrible fate if they do not paste the selfsame text to a certain number of other chatrooms, forums, or comment sections. So the curse would spread. The line between the reader and the author blurs, the audience becomes the poster, the source of the stories becoming more obscured with with every post, lurking behind layers of anonymity.
Soon this anonymity started to express itself in different ways. Instead of coming across nameless strangers weaving curses, inhabiting other users, or sharing their dark backstories, these online horror spaces began to be occupied by anonymous media, eerie “found” objects purportedly unearthed in a networked age, archived online. These fictional horror pieces reflected niche and lost media that suddenly found notoriety online after decades of obscurity. The degraded analogue nature and naive production of this often-amateur work carries an unsettling quality. A good example lies with Ella Flowers’s 90’s homemade children’s cartoon series, “Pink Morning”. The low quality 3D animation, untrained voiceover, and strange synthesised melodies merge with the decayed VHS audiovisual texture to make a slightly nauseating and unnerving experience.
Seeking to exploit the eerieness/loss and the strange and horrifying power of the analog medium, artists began uploading horror media that mimicked these degraded found audiovisual objects. Examples include Kris Straub’s L O C A L 5 8, Slender Man, and the whole phenemenon of “The Backrooms” (all of which probably deserve blog posts in and of themselves). Due to the historicity of the analog medium, often coming from a pre-globalised, pre-internet era, I think that these pieces of media often carry quaint and nostalgic sadness, as well as the itchy unease. I expand on some elements of how these horror media reflect modern and post-modern ideology in my paper for Sonic Scope, but I may expand on the political implications of this media further in a future post.
But what is the relationship between the contemporary internet user and online horror? As I hinted at earlier and expand on further in my essay, the community around these pieces of media drive the production of the media itself. The perhaps most well known online horror worlds, Slender Man and the Backrooms, were both formed in a decentralised manner - across various forms of media, by various authors, and often in conversation with the comment sections, forums, and social media reactions to the stories themselves. This media is often about community, of a sort, while also stemming from anonymity and isolation.
This relationship between isolation and togetherness was expertly explored in the 2021 film “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”, inspiring me to dedicate a third of my paper to this film, and produce various pieces of audio-visual media responding to it, incoporating some of my own experience online. There is a lot to explore in this film (some of which you can find in the Sonic Scope paper), but I want to highlight the feeling being “isolated together” that it explores so well. In “World’s Fair” neither of the two onscreen characters even meet each other, nor anyone else in the online horror community they are a part of. We never see them speak in person to anyone at all, be they family or friends. They only talk directly to each other twice throughout the whole feature length film, over Skype. The rest of the time, they vaguely aim responses to each other through the videos they upload to YouTube.
Even though Casey and JLB barely reach one another, they get uncomfortably close, their voices inhabiting each other’s spaces, sharing some of their most emotionally vulnerable sides with one another. They address each other in videos uploaded for anyone to see. Although JLB, a middle aged man (over twice Casey’s age) never shows his face, hiding behind the anonymity of hand-drawn avatars, Casey, in one of her sleep vlogs, approaches the camera, looking through the screen at JLB in his office, whispering “I see you there, watching me…”
The relationship of prosumers to other prosumers is an ambiguous, paradoxical one. One of simultaneous disconnection, and hyper-attachment to one other. One where parasociality, the non-reciprocal, phantom relationship between audiences and creators, can go both ways, with both parties can feel a deep connection to one another, all the while knowing nothing about each other. These types of relationships appear in my own life, in how I connect to others on instagram, over email, or even face to face. A symptom of an appearance-based culture, we struggle to reach the true version of one another.