Everybody Loves to Fear a Bogeyman

In 1981, after seeing the film "Taxi Driver" at least 15 times and driven by a desire to get the attention of actress Jodi Foster, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. During the press conference that follows, the police draw attention to the Slender Man myth's influence on the attack and urge parents to be aware of the danger. In recent years, more than one scholar has argued that Slender Man is a manifestation of a new kind of myth-making gaining traction in the Internet age. However, anyone who had been wavering about joining social media before the pandemic struck would have been most likely to join during the early days of lockdown in 2020, so I’m hesitant to attribute any meaningful share of growth over the most recent 12 months to some kind of “COVID effect”. Language is the original vector for memes, but in the past two decades the Internet has sped the growth and evolution of memes a thousandfold.

Now add two more crucial ingredients: Photoshop and the Internet. In total, the latest numbers suggest that the world will spend more than 12½ trillion hours online in 2022 alone. Bytedance announced that the platform had passed 1 billion monthly active users back in September 2021, but the company has been characteristically tight-lipped since then, so that figure remains the latest “official” number. Indeed, Meta reports that more than 1 billion Facebook users access Marketplace each month, so there seems to be quite a big gap between total Marketplace users, and the share of those users that sees ads within Facebook’s commerce environment. Dig deeper: discover what YouTube users have been watching in our more granular analysis. Dig deeper: read more about TikTok’s rise and audience profile by clicking here. However, in contrast to the findings for Marketplace above, the data indicate that women account for a much greater share of Instagram Shop’s global ad audience. Instagram ranks fourth, but users spend considerably less time using the app each month compared with the rest of the top 5, at just 11.2 hours per month. Analysis from Ookla reveals that the median worldwide download speed via mobile connections increased by roughly a third over the past year, and more than half of the world’s mobile internet users now enjoy data connection speeds in excess of 29 megabits per second (Mbps).

For context, 29 Mbps is more than fast enough to stream a 4K video without any buffering. In many cases, work devoted to Slender Man claims not to be fiction but, rather, youtube shorts documentary material recording his existence. This "evidence" of his existence seems to have made Slender Man strangely real for some people. James Holmes, the young man who killed 12 people and injured 70 at a screening of a Batman film in 2014, claimed to be Batman's nemesis, the Joker. In the case of Slender Man, however, the people who became dangerously confused were 12-year-old girls. A short time later, the three girls play hide-and-seek. It wouldn't be the first time that a faux-documentary fiction would have real-world consequences. And this confusion between fact and fiction is what brought Slender Man out of the shadowy corners of the Internet and into the harsh glare of mainstream media. Children must be taught the difference between fiction and reality. Slender Man taps into a thread that's a near constant in folktales from Rumpelstiltskin to Hansel and Gretel: the fear of losing children.  Th​is data was gen᠎er ated with ᠎GSA Content Ge nerator DEMO᠎!

But blaming Slender Man misses the mark. This is Slender Man. That so many kids are drawn to the tales despite the fact that they make up the bulk of his victims speaks to children's preoccupation with mortality as they grow into adolescence. But despite these new elements, it seems that Slender Man, along with other digital folktales, fulfills a function in people's lives similar to that of the old-fashioned stories. Mix all these elements together and you've got a cultural phenomenon - a nightmare figure appearing in multiplying stories by multiple authors. App Annie’s new State of Mobile 2022 report reveals that the typical mobile user now spends an average of 4 hours and 48 minutes per user, per day using their phone. Far back in the mists of time, in 2009 to be precise, a Photoshop wiz named Eric Knudsen, using the nom de guerre Victor Surge, decided to post some of his work on the comedy website Something Awful. Of course, suspension of disbelief is still necessary, but for those already predisposed to engage, at least temporarily, in magical thinking, Photoshop helps.

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