Category Archives: Digital

“It’s 11:11, make a wish.”

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Irvine, California
Performance Date: Mar 2007
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

The informant first heard this phrase at the end of his 8th grade year in school, year 2000, from his female cousin.  It was 11:11 A.M., although this phrase can be said at either 11:11 A.M. or 11:11 P.M., and his cousin told him that if you spontaneously look at the clock and it is 11:11 A.M. or P.M., then you can make a wish inside your mind and then it will come true.  “It’s 11:11,” she said, “make a wish.”  The informant remembers it clearly because he remembered thinking, “What is this? I’ve never heard it before.”  It remained in his mind and he likes to use it whenever he sees 11:11 on the clock because it helps to lighten the mood and he believes deep down that everyone like to make wishes, even though they might not believe that 2 times a day a person can close their eyes and make two wishes that will necessarily come true.

Though being Vietnamese does not really have much to do with the 11:11 saying, the theme of making a wish does seem transcend different cultures.  Similarly, it does show that everyone has a child within them.  Though hardly anyone would admit to believing that making a wish at 11:11 would actually result in the wish coming true, many people still say “make a wish” and silently make a wish themselves, for fun or sometimes just for the sake of seeing whether or not it will come true.  Also, typically this type of saying is between a boy and a girl, though it is not restricted.  Generally, however, girls are more likely to say it to their own sex than are boys.  As in the informant’s case, family relation has nothing to do with the saying, though in some cases this saying can be used flirtatiously between boys and girls, when they can wish that the boy or girl that they like will like them back and maybe ask them out or something similar.

“Don’t use your cell phone at the gas station because you can cause an electrical spark and everything will blow up!”

Nationality: Asian-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Marino, California
Performance Date: February 2007
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

Since the boom of cell phones, my informant’s dad has been telling her to take precaution and not to use her cell phone when filling up at the gas station.  As a very informed physicist, Dr. Loo is always up to date with new information that he reads in the paper and on the Internet.  He passes on any information that he believes his daughter must know.  This urban legend is one of the few pieces of information that she actually attempts to remember because it actually affects her when she thinks about using a cell phone.
My informant, a very cautious teenager, never takes too many precautions.  She believes in any information that could have any element of truth, even if it’s not likely.  Whenever she goes to the gas station with a group of friends, she never lets a friend use a cell phone while at the station even if the person who wants to use his or her cell phone isn’t the one filling up the car.
She spreads this legend around because she thinks it’s possible, but not entirely true.  She believes that it’s a safety issue, so people can never be too safe.  The reason she tells people to avoid using cell phones at gas stations is to let them know the possibilities of danger.  She doesn’t want her friends to die at the gas station over a silly cell phone call.
I believe that this urban legend is in fact realistic.  It makes sense that cell phones can be a danger at gas stations.  According to a CNN article published in 1999, “a cell phone’s battery could spark and ignite gasoline fumes if the cell phone were dropped in proximity to a gas pump.”  Just the possibility that dropping a cell phone near a pump could cause a spark is enough information to say that using cell phones at gas stations is dangerous.  Because people are so busy with so many places to go, they tend to be more impatient, which sometimes make them more clumsy and careless.  They try to do several things at once, like filling up and talking on the phone at the same time.  There’s a risk of accidentally dropping cell phones, which relates to the legend.  Even cell phone manuals are taking caution and warning people to switch cell phones off when refueling.  The Nokia 6133 User Guide states to switch cell phones off at refueling points.  If cell phone manufacturers are warning the public that using cell phones at gas stations is a potential hazard, then I believe that this urban legend is definitely legitimate.

Annotation:
“Exxon warns dealers of cell phone risks.”  CNN.com  24 June 1999.  19 Feb 2007     <http://www.cnn.com/US/9906/24/exxon.cellphones/index.html>.

Cyberlore: 4chan, porn, and the internet at large

Nationality: American; ethnicity self-identified as "half Filipino, half mutt-Caucasian"
Age: 23
Occupation: recent USC Archaeology grad; now works part-time for a CRM firm
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “I was just thinking about this the other day where, you know, I was just surfing the internet and I came across some like forum talking about just really grotesque porn, and I was like completely unfazed. Cause I feel like I’ve always grown up knowing about 4chan, and 4chan has become this like weird underbelly of like not only the internet but everybody’s imagination, it’s like–well the internet is basically the distilled version of people’s thoughts because like, you don’t have to interface with anybody, there’s no body language, you can create images from whatever you think–it’s like 4chan is kind of this cesspool for everyone’s imagination and then influencing everyone else’s cesspool, um, so I’ve always known about 4chan.”

[Can you describe what it is, in a little more detail?]

“4chan is, uh, it’s a message board that is more or less unregulated–I think they do have moderators that are silent, you just never know who they are. And moderators are mostly there for one reason, and that’s to make sure there’s no child pornography, and that’s it. That’s the only thing that’s off-limits on the internet–child pornography. So it’s just a message board that’s mostly unregulated but there is a particular board, like within them, called the b-board. And that’s just where everything goes, it’s the random board where people just say really foul shit, post really foul images, like just things that you would never think of. And you’re like, okay, I didn’t need to see that, that’s enough internet for the day, I’m done *laughs* I need to like walk away right now–and so I’ve always grown up with that and like, I’ve never really ventured over there, cause the few times that I have, I’m like, pfff, I really don’t need to see this right now. But knowing that it exists, I think, I’m like what am I going to tell my kids–like when my kids get on the internet, like, what am I going to tell them? Like, they’re gonna grow up with that shit everywhere, and how do I protect my kids from the internet? I like how I’m already thinking about this *hah* but like, it’s terrifying! I feel like because I wasn’t introduced to it until I was like 12, and very gently kind of like got into–the internet didn’t become this like massive machine that it is now.”

[I’ve heard it be described in terms of “internet natives,” which is like the generation that grew up with it already there, and we’re like the ‘immigrants,’ but we’re like the first-generation immigrants whose parents didn’t have it until we did–like you have people who ‘immigrated’ when they were really really young, and then you have the much older internet immigrants who have a harder time adjusting. In a lot of ways, like culture.]

“Yeah, that’s interesting, I like that immigration analogy.”

[I remember you saying to Seth that time on our hike, he mentioned something from 4chan and you were like, ‘That says so much about you.’ What did you mean by that? What does it say?]

“It’s like, um, it’s the same as you can infer when someone’s like, ‘I like Coldplay.’ And I feel like, wow, you must be a 30-something year old soft-rock loving, working in an office or you’re a graphic designer, and you think–well like, it has so many implications that may not even be true, but they do have a kernel–a lot of stereotypes have a kernel of truth. And the thing about 4chan, when people say ‘I saw it on 4chan,’ I’m like ohhhkay, if you frequent it enough, to where you say ‘I saw it on 4chan’–like none of my friends even if they do go on 4chan ever say that they go on 4chan. Because it is something that is like, it’s foul, and it’s like, why?”

[But everyone secretly has a 4chan in their minds.]

“Yeah, I mean the internet is kind of the–less so now than it was when I had dial-up, or I wanna say 2005/2006 is when things started cleaning up, so to speak–before that I feel like it was the wild wild West, where it’s like anything goes. [Lemon party. Meatspin.] Yeah, like Blue Waffles–what? All this random shit just happened and most of the internet to me was like forums. Run basically like, people wanted to interact in chat rooms and forums. Forums still do exist, like mostly in the comment sections of publications that have all moved online now. Um so basically with the movement of like the material world onto the internet, there’s becoming a framework for how the internet is working, but before that it was all forums and chat rooms which is like very free-form–it’s not Facebook, where you’re limited to messages, chats, and wall posts, there’s poking. [And every option has a very specific function that frames what you’re saying.] Yeah, it all has its own implications. [Everything is interfaced for us and the interface governs the experience of using it. Almost like passive consumption of the internet.] Yeah it’s a lot more interfaced than it used to be, and I just think that the way 4chan is, is it still kind of hearkens back to that old wild wild West theme–like if you go to 4chan, it’s the most simple looking HTML website. It’s just like the logo and the letters for each of the boards. It goes like A through Y or something like that, and none of the letters have anything to do with–I think it’s like M is the video game board and it has nothing to do with the actual content–B is random, B is random, and I don’t know why instead of R for random.

[And that’s something you just figure out by navigating the website?]

“Yeah, I still don’t know why it is that way or how it works, um, but I know the founder of 4chan was like, yeah, the internet shouldn’t be regulated. And that’s just what 4chan is. It just exists. And that’s like the only thing that’s impressive about 4chan is that it exists and it’s a forum. You never log in, and everyone is anonymous. You’re all anonymous, and the post is assigned like a number, and every reply to that post has a number. And the B-board generates so quickly because everyone’s on it and everyone’s moving that content through so quickly. But it’s like, because people can post whatever they want and expect to be unregulated, you’re hiding behind a mask of anonymity, and also because of that you just end up finding the sickest shit. Like I said, the only thing that’s off-limits is child pornography. You can put whatever you want on there. 4chan made up ‘Rules of the Internet’–the most memorable one being like Rule #34 which is, ‘If you can think of it, there’s porn of it.’ And then Rule #35 which is kind of a corollary of Rule #34, but shouldn’t really exist if Rule #34 is true, but Rule #35 is, um, ‘If there is no porn of it, you have to make it.’ Like it’s your duty to make it and put it on the internet. So like that’s the 4chan rule, is just like anything goes, really, and then there’s gonna be porn of it. It’s really sexualized and fetishized. It’s like the dark side of the internet. You can put the gross shit on there and you don’t have to pretend to be kind to anybody.”

 

The internet operates according to similar divisions of official/unofficial culture that we see in the world. Even though almost anyone can publish on it, there are online “institutions” that set the standard for the way we interface, or, in terms of content, are recognized as more credible than others. The lines are much blurrier on the web, however, and boundaries much more fluid.

Thinking about the web in terms of folklore presents several challenges. First off, everything on the internet is “published” as text and image, so new lines have to be drawn about the defining role of performance in folklore and its resistance to authored literature. A key difference is that literature on the web is not held to the same obsession with authorship that books and movies are–something can get out there on the internet without a designated author–so there have to be different ways of determining “official” content, and this is no simple task. And it is also difficult to identify traditionalized forms on the internet because there is such a diverse and ever-increasing pool of content. I would argue, however, that an online message board is a traditionalized form at this point. Its use sees great multiplicity and variation, but the general purpose is always the same. There’s no standard way a message board can be structured, and it develops according to the people who are posting on it. It’s like a log cabin.

On it, people share and pick up ideas from each other, generating phrases and visual motifs that are widely repeated for a while (memes) and then replaced with new ones. 4chan, in particular, is a message board that represents marginalized sensibilities–“the sick shit”–in an unregulated and anonymous space. It enables the strangest and filthiest recesses of the imagination to be indulged in a rather direct way, which is something even the most clever joke, which has the capacity to express sinister sentiments in a masked way, can’t provide.

Internet Predator

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 41
Occupation: Quality Assurance Manager
Residence: Harbor City, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English

“…Just remember there are a lot of fucking sickos and psychos and rapists and other terrible people that will say and do whatever they can to get you to meet up with them to hook up or do bad things to you or whatever. It worries me that you spend so much time on the internet. I heard just the other day from a guy at work that some guy was found dead in his apartment after he got some kid he had met through the internet to come over, and it just goes to show that you can’t trust anybody you meet like that. Not even if they aren’t old.”

My informant for this piece is a concerned father lecturing his daughter on the dangers of the internet. There are many tales circulating, many of them quite true, about internet predators that meet people throught the internet and do terrible things to them. This particular warning stands out in that it’s the younger party that’s the actual attacker. This may be a sort of comment on how it’s the younger generation who have a firm grip on today’s technology and maybe a subconcious fear of the young taking advantage of the old in a reverse of the usual “elderly man takes advantage of a young teen” story.

It’s certainly a vague story, but there is something threatening about the open-endedness of it.

Annotation: This particular story, though vague in detail, is brought to life in a chilling horror movie by the name of Hard Candy (2005), in which a 14 year old girl (Ellen Page, leading actress of Juno) turns the tables on a pedophile she met through the internet.

The Purple Pants Man

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

From interview with informant:

“Um, something called the purple pants man, which is a man who wears purple spandex. We don’t know his age. He could be immortal, he could be eighty, he could be forty. He’s old-ish. And he wears spandex pants. He always has a sharpie in his mouth. He can’t see very well so he has like big-ass glasses. He’s basically like a really old punk/goth, uh, think of somebody from a club in like, Blade Runner. He’s always like in the public library walking around. I don’t know if he has a job. I think he’s a drug dealer. I’m not exactly sure. We don’t know what he is.”

“So basically if you spot him, you have to inform everybody else that you made a sighting. Eventually there was a Facebook group called ‘I’ve Seen the Purple Pants Man.’ There was like a secret photo someone took of him in the library on a computer, like sharpie in his mouth. He has like, I don’t even know, there’s so many weird things about this dude. He has like a cart he moves around sometimes. He has like an old, beat-up car. His mental faculties probably aren’t all there. And, um, what else? I think he tried to sell somebody drugs sometime? I’m not sure exactly. But he’s like, he’s just a character we see all the time. And we’re like ‘Oh, it’s him.’ Nobody knows who it is, nobody talks to him.”

An entertaining bit of folklore with enough detail and flavor to convince me, at least, that the purple pants man exists. I especially like the creation of the Facebook group to spread word of the Purple Pants Man’s activities, keeping him firmly in the minds of the community.