A dinâmica transmídia do meme Slender Man no Tumblr : circulação e transformação de sentidos na internet

Abstract

This research investigates the Slender Man phenomenon, a character who was born in a forum on the web in 2009, has expanded through several online platforms, mainly through the textual production of networked users, and reached such popularity on the internet that it got appropriated by mass media. We consider Slender Man to be an internet meme whose expansion throughout different platforms configures a transmedia dynamic, which we see as a tangible expression of this meme’s semiosis. Due to the importance of Slender Man’s fans in this process, Tumblr, a platform known for hosting intense activity of fan communities, was selected as the research locus. We seek to understand how the transmedia dynamic of the Slender Man meme is configured and how this narrative is expanded by collective action on Tumblr. The empirical corpus, composed by 141 posts tagged with the term “slenderman”, published in the platform between August 2010 and June 2020, was obtained with the help of Tumblr Tool, and the concepts of internet meme and transmedia dynamic, understood through the lens of peircean semiotics, guided our analysis. The analytical efforts started with the identification of references to different narratives, that belong or not in the Slender Man specific universe, in our empirical corpus. This movement culminated in the production of “meaning clouds”, that show the meaning networks that proliferated around Slender Man throughout the investigated period. We verified, through them, an intense crossing of different narrative universes, a practice known as crossover, which is a sign of users’ involvement in multiple fan communities. We moved forward to the characterization of the modes of engagement involved in Slender Man’s expansion, through the identification of the network of emotional, energetic and logical interpretants, according to the peircean semiotics approach. We identified the prominence of the affective engagement, related to the emotional interpretant, in the expansion of Slender Man on Tumblr. Such engagement manifests itself in actions of posting and sharing, which demand intellectual elaborations from the users, aspects that refer, respectively, to the energetic and logical interpretants. The articulation of these three modes of the interpretant materializes the users processes of signification in actions of communication throughout multiple platforms, characterizing a transmedia dynamic, one which we seeked to describe using the seven principles of transmedia storytelling. We have identified manifestations of all the principles in our empirical corpus, however, we have encountered obstacles related to the focus of this approach on commercial narrative production and distribution strategies. Thus, we consider that further studies on objects similar to Slender Man can help systematize and update these principles, to extend their scope to transmedia phenomena that do not come from the traditional entertainment industry.