"EVERYTHING IS TRUE HERE, EVEN IF IT'S NOT": SOCIAL MEDIA HORROR AND READING THROUGH CONSENSUS

Abstract

The text-scape of online literature is today peculiarly saturated with what one might call social media horror (SMH). Collaboratively produced and consumed in niche social media communities, these amateur horror fictions have been studied variously for their cultural relevance to digital folklore and, according to Daniel Powell’s technohorror, for their constituency in contemporary expressions of humanity’s historically complex fears of its technologies. While these and similar paradigms account for why SMH texts are important, accounts of how they “work” are fewer and further between. Accordingly, this thesis examines the mechanics of SMH consumption and production; in so doing I propose that the horrific effectiveness of SMH is really sourced in the idiosyncratically socio-digital forms of literary engagement such texts demand. I suggest that SMH texts—emerging out of Web environments undergirded by digitally mediated socializing and communal meaning-making— engender consensus reading which generates ontological anxieties for usersubjects both consuming and producing SMH texts. Specifically, my analysis of SMH textual construction and, moreover, of complex user-reader-text-user-author interactions reveals that consensus reading conscripts user-readers into codependent social systems so as to be bereft of true subjective individuality. From the nebulous and anxious discourse between SMH user-subjects, one infers these interactions represent Selves that are ontologically vulnerable by virtue of their invested engagement with the SMH text. Indeed user-readers, through a form of reading best described as investigative roleplay, evince their sublation by the horrific narrative environments—the diegeses—of the texts they consume, and bespeak the overall contingency of their Selves to both the text and other reading user-subjects. These conditions describe an uncanny consensus-oriented ontology whereby SMH ultimately “works” by causing user-readers to exist in an existential horror that is concomitant, furthermore, to the horrific goings-on narrativized by the text at hand.