Things That Go Bump On The Net

Folklore and the stories we tell about technology

Presented at Electromagnetic Field 2018.

Books and papers

• The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics by Jack Zipes
• God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology by William A. Stahl
• Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television by Jeffrey Sconce
• Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space

Gef, the talking mongoose

• Wikipedia: Gef
• Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose
• Gef: The Eighth Wonder of the World
• The Talking Weasel of Doarlish Cashen, Jeffrey Sconce
• The Strange Story of Gef The Talking Mongoose

Titvillus

• Wikipedia: Printer’s devil
• Printer’s Devils - The American Bookbinders Museum

Tsukumogami

• Wikipedia: Tsukumogami

Gremlins

• Wikipedia: Gremlins
• The Real Gremlins of WWII
• WWII Pilot Speaks Out: Gremlins are Real!

Slender Man

• Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology by Shira Chess

Mythopoeic thought

• Wikipedia: Mythopoeic thought
• Culture and Human-Robot Interaction in Militarized Spaces: A War Story, Julie Carpenter
• Wikipedia: Geomythology
• Geomythology: geological origins of myths and legends, Dorothy B. Vitaliano

Alchemy & AI

• Wikipedia: Brazen head
• Brazen Heads: The Curious Legend Behind Fortune-Telling Automata
• Witch, Warlock, and Magician, William Adams
• AI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy
• Reflections on Random Kitchen Sinks

Miscellany, leftovers and as-yet untrodden paths

• SCP Foundation - a giant collaborative fiction project, written by its users.
• Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
• Wikipedia: Electronic Voice Phenomenon
• Wikipedia: Confabulation theory
• Wikipedia: Spilt brain
• The Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

Slide images

• Modern Practice Of The Electric Telegraph by Frank L. Pope, fig. 10
• Kate and Maggie Fox, Spirit Mediums from Rochester, New York 1852 daguerreotype portrait by T. M. Easterly
• typesetting by Jenni Konrad, Flickr
• The Ghost of Oiwa (Oiwa-san) by Katsushika Hokusai, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Electrodes touch a frog, and the legs twitch into the upward position
• A World War II gremlin-themed industrial safety poster
• A B-17F of the 99th Bomb Group, with the nearly frameless clear-view bombardier’s nose
• SlenderMan by TheTuneOfTurbo on DeviantArt
• Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head
• Orthodox priest blessing the server room
• Cover art for The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition by Andrea Dezsö

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the following friends, comrades and fellow-travellers who helped shape this talk in one way or another. All mistakes, however, are most certainly my own.

• Bill Thompson, whose fault it mostly is that I finished this talk.
• Garrett D. Tiedemann, who also shares a lot of the blame.
• Tom Armitage
• Natalie Kane
• Honor Harger
• Barbara Zambrini
• Alyson Fielding
• David Paliwoda
• Kim Plowright
• Ben Bashford
• Lydia Nicholas
• John V. Willshire