Charles Fort would have loved the internet. It has, throughout its history, been a breeding ground for weird science, conspiracy theories, mass panics, 'pseudo' science, hauntings and even viral crypto-zoology. On a wider level, the very nature of the internet, through collective intelligence, collaboration and user generated tagging is decidedly Fortean.
I was inspired to start this blog by this post - Abominable Snowman 2.0 - by Bruce Mason on the Production and Research in Transliteracy blog, and the discussion that followed. It seemed to me that it might be worthwhile to gather evidence and ideas relating to the Fortean internet, a virtual Cabinet of Curiosities.
Please feel free to send me examples of any internet Forteana you find, and I'll post them here!
Find out more about Fort here, at the Fortean Institute; http://www.forteana.org/
Gareth
6 comments:
will do gareth - though should we try to avoid all the noise and heat that surrounds the attacks on September the 11th 2001 in the USA and the current 7/7 conspiracy theories as many of these appear to be entirely internet generated and spread and in their collision of culures, ideas, ideology and seeming fact/illustrations/video footage begin to collect a kind of trail left by the plough in a field for seagulls to feed from: in this detritus various errors, from misinformation to typos, from glitches and digital drop out to blurring, begin to take on theories of their own - who is conning who, who is conspiring against who.
In essence I would like us to try to avoid the obvious conspiracies unless people can see how technical misinformation or poor technical knowledge has allowed people to form whole cultures of theory viewed as fact - for example - time code errors on footage that don't take into account second and third generation mastering.
and so on.
i will instead search out all that is weird. Perhaps concentrating on imagined film and video that exists out there, creating a lot of discussion but rarely seen by anyone. if ever.
ps - zombies must be out there - when I set up this account to post comments it asked me to spell the letters and numbers out that i could see for verification and it spelt: UNDED
ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Hi Chris
I think it's a difficult one. Conspiracy theories aren't the things that I'm personally interested in, but they are very Fortean and very Web, especially in the coming together of those clashing cultures/ideas and ideologies. If a conspiracy theory mixes and mashes online in a way that creates a new 'object', then I think that has to qualify - it's well worth reading the blog post that Bruce Mason refers to in the PART article (see link in intro).
It does beg the question of what might be considered forteana 2.0 - for example, the other week I was reading various blogs exposing Most Haunted, and which linked to YouTube to show clips recorded from TV which showed slip ups (Yvette Fielding making a scary noise, thinking she is off camera, and then saying 'Did anyone hear that?!' being my favourite!). Does the fact that someone has taken recorded TV and uploaded it to YouTube make it Forteana 2.0? Possibly not, as it's simply repurposing existing media (albeit re-siting it in a 'Web 2.0' context), but an examination of the online WebCams used on Most Haunted Live shows, and the audience reaction to them ('Craig from Bolton says he can see a white shape on Camera 3'), definitely is.
My thought for the moment is that I'd like to concentrate on things that are internet/web generated, which possibly couldn't exist in other contexts. So, pictures of the twin towers which originate elsewhere (TV/Newspaper etc.) may not be Forteana 2.0, but a new 'entity' which is created from sharing and discussion online of those images would be... I know that is a fairly open definition, but I'm happy to continue to try and understand what Forteana 2.0 might be.
For example, is this Forteana 2.0?
This is a great idea and I'll contribute if I can think of anything interesting enough to add!
But why 'of the damned'? Those pseudo-religious horror film overtones seem unnecessary. What do 'the damned' have to do with the uncanny? Also, things that are weird and uncanny are not necessarily bad or dangerous. That's my problem with programmes like Most Haunted and the X-Files - they are xenophobic. Please don't be xenophobic!
hi sue
it's just a pun - Fort's most famous book is called The Book of the Damned.
From Wikipedia;
The title of the book referred to what he termed the "damned" data - data which had been damned, or excluded, by modern science because of its not conforming to accepted guidelines.
Hi Sue
Not sure if Most Haunted is, within itself, xenophobic? They may have histories relating to various supposed haunted sites that generate fear of the other that has nothing to do with the supernatural/ghosts/hauntings etc, but that's the esception not the norm, I think...
It would be interesting from a purely phenomelogical perspective to look at the way new objects, proofs, evidences etc are generated from the rumour mill that internet is. It creates a political object that is purely its own.
But I take your point Gareth that what you are looking at/for are objects within the Web 2.0 context and not those created from outside that world or mere references to it - though I suspect many 'objects' have been created by repetitive downloads, transfers, uploads etc.
Instead what about looking for the things presumed by people - the myths of the web, the folk law of the net, the sought for, the rumoured to exist, etc.
And I will see what I stumble across as I go.
One of the things that reminds me of the Ghost watch thing about mass observation of monitors and the belief people are seeing things is that past chain of haunted photographs that people sent out as emails warning of an evil curse to those that didn't chain mail it - but of course the sinister picture of a sinister child thing lurking in the shadows of a family photo was an artifact of the real world not web 2.0.
But there must be plenty out there.
will see...
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