Abstract
This chapter states that the communal construction of the Slender Man demonstrates genre negotiations in online spaces, and identifies the influence of the open-source software movement as a guiding ethos in those negotiations. Story elements and assets were openly shared, reused, modified, and debugged by the Something Awful community, with iterations being both built from and contributing to the collective story. Thus, the early mythos of the Slender Man was built not by a single author, but collectively negotiated through social action and exigency.
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© 2015 Shira Chess and Eric Newsom
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Chess, S., Newsom, E. (2015). Open-Sourcing Horror. In: Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491138_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491138_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50522-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49113-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)