Digital Legend and Belief

With Digital Legend and Belief: The Slender Man, Folklore, and the Media, Andrew Peck makes a significant contribution to the quickly evolving field of digital folklore. The book erases the development of the legend genre into the digital age, while consistently exemplifying this development with the Slender Man legend cycle, which is native to the digital age. Throughout the book, Peck makes a strong case for the claim that “digitally mediated legends are simply contemporary legends,” thereby representing the changing nature of contemporary legend and not a subfield (p. 172).Peck grounds his framework for studying digital legend in classical legend scholarship, most notably leaning on the work of Bill Ellis, Linda Dégh, and Andrew Vázsonyi, elucidating the development of legendry into the digital age through highlighting how underlying technologies and media are integral to understanding continuities and changes in folklore. Grounding the arguments in the classics also makes the book an excellent introduction to legend scholarship for a new generation of students. Peck presents the foundations for the study of legends and their relevance today, while also pointing forward to new paths to tread as digital communications continue to evolve.The book contains five chapters, each discussing a distinct aspect of legend scholarship, entitled “Creation,” “Circulation,” “Commercialization,” “Ostension,” and “Sensation.” Each chapter begins with a short narrative to set the tone before building a theoretical argument combining scholarship on legends and digital folklore and illustrating the theories with examples from the Slender Man legend cycle. The chapter “Creation” most clearly exemplifies the new aspects of digital legend, pinpointing precisely where and how the Slender Man legend cycle originated. Here, Peck foregrounds performativity and contemporary studies of digital folklore, showing how folklore theories elucidate the debates over origin even when we know the actual origin of the legend cycle.The chapter “Circulation” aims to make sense of the convergence of social and algorithmic filtering in digital tradition processes, showing ways that humans and technologies work in concert to alter processes of transmission and circulation. The chapter “Commercialization” reiterates a central tangle in folklore theorization, the converging and diverging relationships between folklore and popular/mass culture. Peck demonstrates how the affordances of the internet and social media further blur the lines between commercialization and folk expression by providing spaces for the vernacularization of institutional messages. The chapter “Ostension” traces the relevance of another central concept in legend studies into the digital sphere, showing how digital devices and connections contribute to the expansion of and connection between the traditions of enacting legends. Finally, the most disturbing chapter—“Sensation”—thematizes the overlap between the social internet and the institutionalized mass media through a discussion of the role of digital legends in contemporary rumor panics, as exemplified by the attempted murder that helped spread the Slender Man legend cycle into worldwide mass media.Although the book mainly contributes to the theorizing of legendry in digital cultures and is not an in-depth case study of the Slender Man cycle as such, the choice to consistently exemplify each part with the same legend cycle effectively provides readers with a common theme through the many diverging aspects of legend scholarship. Admittedly, limiting the examples to one cycle caused my own thoughts to constantly stray off to other examples, both similar and diverging. Nevertheless, I also feel that the effect of focusing on one example is one of the book's strengths; motivating readers to keep jotting down “new project ideas” is surely a sign of success for a book that aims to theorize. The book is equally suitable as a stepping stone for students’ theses, as it illustrates how to study a single topic of interest in many ways.The book's main vantage point for understanding digital legends is through the performance lens, and Peck applies the concept of affordances to make sense of the various ways the digital legend cycle diverges from the pre-digital. In so doing, he draws on established perspectives from folklore studies and cross-disciplinary studies of digital culture. Yet as these concepts most clearly address the theoretical development of the field of digital folklore, Peck might have more closely scrutinized the analytical categories and more in-depth conceptualizations in order to carve them into more precise tools for analysis. For example, while the introduction acknowledges the alternating passive and active role of a tradition's participant, the five chapters foreground performance, thereby highlighting the active aspect. The performative is obviously the most visible aspect of digital communication and makes for a stringent use of examples throughout. However, because the book arguably aims to break new ground in the study of digital folklore, I missed throughout the chapters a more thorough discussion on the roles of recipients, lurkers, and silent participants. Likewise, Peck uses affordances as a main concept throughout, although mainly in the sense of an overall explanation for the new behaviors and communications enabled by the digital sphere. I would have liked a more precise conceptualization of the term, which might have enabled a deeper understanding of the digital legend cycle by specifying what these affordances are in different cases, and in what ways the many different affordances of the digital sphere contribute to change and continuity in folklore and tradition processes. Employing the concept of affordances as an overall term to understand how technologies shape behavior also leaves little room for understanding the role of dynamic technologies such as algorithms and artificial intelligence in digital folklore processes. Making this distinction could be worthwhile, as AI and algorithms are more dynamic and codependent parts of digital communication than interfaces and internet connections and, in that sense, somehow represent a different dynamic from the traditional understanding of affordances.Overall, this critique arguably reflects the state of the field of digital folklore as emergent and in development and does not take away from the overall quality and importance of the book. Digital Legend and Belief effectively and accessibly synthesizes scholarship on digital folklore to date through the specific lens of legend scholarship. It provides an indispensable introduction to the field of digital folklore for students and an important vantage point for further theorizations of digital folklore as an integral part of understanding folklore processes in connective cultures. Peck also shows that folklore studies have much to contribute to interdisciplinary studies of digital culture in general

Art · Folklore · Legend · Literature · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Digital Games and Media · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History