Dream-Book on the Internet: “Blue Whale”
“We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.” Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
text was published at Political Critique, Ukraine, 12.04.2018
Urban legend, digital folklore, moral panic, by-product of post-truth — this is all about the “Blue Whale”, an online game the goal of which is to commit (or not to commit) suicide. Falling under all of the above categories, this information phenomenon goes beyond each of them. Having emerged in Russia, the Blue Whale spread to Ukraine and other former USSR states, continued on to the EU and USA reached Middle and Far East, Australia, South Africa and Latin America. It was not held up by the economic, ideological and political peculiarities of the different countries, neither was it stopped by linguistic and cultural barriers nor by civilizational differences. Each community fought in its own way the “digital epidemic” transmitted through the Internet and spreading predominantly among children and teenagers. There are isolated cases of positive resolution of the problem, and an immense number of extreme and impotent measures which only aggravated the situation. Today, in April 2018, the Blue Whale continues to be a matter of intense discussion in the media in Tunisia, India, Algeria and Egypt — meaning that a comprehensive vision of the phenomenon still has not been formulated although the absolute pervasiveness of the Blue Whale seems to imply it. This text contains a brief summary of the phenomenon’s developments since its emergence, information about successful and unsuccessful endeavors to address it and about its formative elements, and also an attempt to research the Blue Whale itself. The outcome of the study is interpretation of this meme as a manifestation of the virtual collective unconscious. This approach could be a key to transforming similar phenomena from a new form of technophobia into a tool for analyzing collective processes in the social media.
Werther Effect
While the panic was in full swing in the Blue Whale’s homeland, Russia, Philipp Budeikin, aged 21, and Philipp More, aged 20, both users of VKontakte social network, gave their own version of the online game creation when interviewed by Lenta portal. Both guys administrated groups on this social network. According to them, starting 2014 there had been hundreds of communities focusing on suicide topics. The groups enjoyed a new wave of popularity after Rina Palenkova, a student from Ussuriysk, committed suicide on November 25, 2015. Several days after the incident a photo of the suicide scene was posted online which by all appearances caused the “Werther effect”.
This effect was first registered in late 18th century after Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” had been published, and is observed when active media coverage of any suicide brings on a wave of copycat suicides. Subsequent research conducted in the USA, Europe and Australia confirmed a surge in suicide rate following heavy media exposure of similar cases. It was also revealed that teenagers are the most susceptible to this kind of imitation.
It is still not known who posted the girl’s photo online but Rina Palenkova eventually became the most popular meme on the Russian Internet. Multiple “investigations” of her death undertaken by online users mostly resulted in various mystifications. One of the proposed versions was that Rina had been a member of a secret suicide sect. The Blue Whale image became one of the components of this suicidal aesthetics, largely due to widely known cases of whales perishing when stranded on the shore. The same name was given to an online game whose “curators” assigned “creepy” tasks to players to be completed within 50 days. Those tasks included viewings of scary videos, self-harm through scratching whale patterns or hashtags on the skin, visiting potential suicide locations etc. Completion of each task had to be supported by photographic evidence sent to the “curator”. As the legend goes, the game’s last task is suicide. According to Philipp Budeikin and Philipp More, the groups’ popularity gradually subsided but the situation changed drastically after an article in Novaya Gazeta.
The general public had first learnt about the Blue Whale in May 2016. Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta journalist Galina Mursaliyeva published an emotionally charged article about the suicide of a 14-year old Elya from Krasnoyarsk. The journalist wrote that the girl’s mother initiated her own investigation and found out about so-called “death groups” or “suicide groups” on VKontakte. Having created an account on the social network to get more information, the woman discovered that her daughter had been a member of such group and played the Blue Whale game. She believes this the cause of her daughter’s suicide. Furthermore, Galina Mursaliyeva said in her article that participation in the “death groups” had incited 130 teenagers in Russia to commit suicide. Just in one week the article was read by over one million and a half users. Mursaliyeva’s colleagues criticized her for lack of ethics and inciting panic. It was later revealed that the text contained multiple errors of fact, inaccuracies and the author’s personal emotional assumptions misrepresented as realistic information.
Following Mursaliyeva’s article some of the “death groups” were blocked. It was then, according to Philipp Budeikin, that he started to manage one of the groups duplicating the activities of the “suicide groups”. In an interview given to Lenta in May 2016 he talked of the plans to draw in subscribers using the popular content, and, when the number of subscribers reached 5000, to change the group’s theme to a music-related one in order to “promote his creative work”. He added that all that had been happening was just a game for him.
Neither Russian law enforcement agencies nor Russian and foreign journalists confirmed the death of 130 teenagers due to their participation in “death groups”. But this figure is still mentioned in journalists’ materials worldwide as authentic data.
Moral Panic
The map shows the popularity of search queries according to the Google Trends website for queries “синий кит игра” in Russian (red color), “blue whale game” in English (yellow), “ballena azul juego” in Spanish (violet), baleia azul jogo in Portuguese (green) and “(نهنگ آبی (بازی” in Persian (blue). For each of the above queries and for 25 connected variations Google records super popularity (meaning that the interest rate for this trend has grown for over 5000%). The popularity dynamics graph, spreading sequence and other details related to those queries over the period from March 1, 2016 to March 30, 2018 are available here.
The “moral panic” peak in Russia was observed in November 2016, and in the former USSR — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — in February and March 2017. The Ukrainian police’s attempts to warn parents contributed to the escalation of moral panic. For instance, employees of Ukrainian cyberpolice did not only advise parents to go carefully through personal messages, videos and photos of their children but also published a list of teenagers participating in the so-called “death groups”. Furthermore, following the meeting chaired by Valeriya Lutkovska, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, it was recommended to conduct country-wide medical inspections in schools to check up children for self-harm. The hysteria was largely exploited in Ukraine by supporters of online censorship, including public discussions of the blocking of multiple Russian online portals. In addition to the arguments of national security against the background of Russia’s invasion of Donbas, the argument of child safety online, namely the mass involvement in the “Russian game” Blue Whale on the Russian network VKontakte became the core one. The decree on the blocking of a number of Russian online resources in Ukraine was enacted in May 2017, the sanction list including 1228 individuals and 468 entities. No online resources had been previously blocked in Ukraine due to their content (with the exception of child pornography).
Russia made it a criminal offence to run “death groups”. The Criminal Code amendments provide for up to six years’ imprisonment for group creation and up to three years’ imprisonment for those “engaging teenagers in the games”. In the summer of 2017 Philipp Budeikin was sentenced to three years and four months in a minimum security prison. He was initially accused of inducing 15 people to suicide and inciting 5 more persons to do that. Two cases of instigation were proven. Another trial is now conducted in Russia billed as the “case of Blue Whale curator”. Ilya Sidorov, 26, is suspected of inducing a schoolgirl to suicide and also accused of money extortion from the victim.
Yetkulsky District Court hearing the case sent it back to the prosecutor’s office, having “identified contradictions between the description of criminal acts and their classification”. In April 2018 Chelyabinsk Regional Court overturned the judgment and remitted the case to the District Court which shall now consider it without additional investigation but with another panel of judges.
In April 2017 the virus penetrated Europe and quickly spread to the USA, Brazil, England, Italy, Spain and South African countries. The Blue Whale topic was covered not only by tabloids but, for instance, by Britain’s The Sun which actively followed up on the developments in different parts of the world. CNN, BBC, Bloomberg.view and other reputed resources also featured materials on the subject.
In August-September 2017 the Blue Whale reached the Middle East and proceeded to India. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India addressed major online companies — Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Microsoft and Yahoo — with a request to immediately remove all links to the Blue Whale game from their platforms. The companies stated that were already doing their best. Schools in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh prohibited children to bring smartphones to school while in Punjab a requirement was introduced for children to wear short-sleeved clothes in class so that teachers would be able to notice cuts and injuries children may inflict on themselves while participating in the game. In 2018 Indian authorities announced training of additional 27 thousand police officers with a view to preventing cybercrimes against children and women.
The Iranian government, notorious for its Internet censorship, once again cited “Satanist ideas” spread by the Blue Whale, and warned about forthcoming online censorship measures. Indeed there were later new cases of online censorship but those were connected with the protests of December 2017 — January 2018.
The Chinese police also addressed the citizens with a warning. Beijing Internet Information Office and Public Security Bureau held a meeting with 8 Internet companies to caution them against the Blue Whale. The Party’s youth wing announced the Project Whale Hunt campaign aiming to discover players. In May 2012 Tencent, China’s major online portal, shut down 12 groups associated with the Blue Whale game on QQ, its social platform.
In Morocco and Algeria the talks about the Blue Whale started in 2018. The parents of victimized children in Tunisia filed a request to prohibit the game. A court in the city of Sousse obligated the Tunisian Internet Agency to ban the game. The country also imposed a ban on the sale of Mariam game’s mobile application in App Store and Google Play. The authorities and mass media consider the game a derivative of the Blue Whale, while the developer denies the charges and thinks the current developments a hysteria.
In Kenya the court had earlier obligated Internet providers to ban the game. “But this is not a game in the sense of being a video or an app or a website or any structured product. It is an activity, just as ‘Truth or Dare’ has been a ‘game’ played by teenagers over the decades,” Ben Roberts, chief technical officer of Liquid Telecom Group and chairman of Liquid Telecom Kenya, told Business Today in connection with the game being blocked in Kenya.
Solutions
All centralized attempts to address the situation actually involved a refusal to recognize the problem. Russian authorities, for instance, conducted show trials instead of performing a real investigation; Ukrainians demonstrated the shaping system’s inability to tackle significant information security issues; Indian authorities went into patriarchal hysterics breaching the privacy of their citizens, while Kenya and Tunisia exhibited helplessness and incongruity of populist decisions.
But there were also effective examples of overcoming the panic, those mostly being decentralized responses.
A Bulgarian public organization “Safer Internet Centre” promptly compiled and distributed a detailed guidance on how parents should conduct themselves in situations like this. The group also disseminated awareness-raising materials online — regarding fake news, emotional content and mass media integrity. They dispelled every rumor, taking the trouble of careful fact checking. In two weeks the action group showed that united prompt and competent actions can help curtail the wave of panic. Those activities are efficient in the early stages when each message can be checked “manually” and each specific case can be rebutted, holding down the panic before it spreads beyond control.
In Italy a single person — journalist Andrea Angolino — coped with the same task. As soon as the Italian media had reported the death of 130 Russian teenagers, he started his own investigation and put a halt on the panic wave by providing a series of detailed materials, also describing the experience of Bulgarian colleagues. The journalist notes that the lack of alternative opinions on the media scene played into his hands. Anxious users began searching for some extra information and quickly came across his texts, contributing to their subsequent dissemination. This is an example of how important it is to understand the operating principles of the media scene, and also a demonstration of the persuasive force of the Italian audience’s media literacy.
IT industry representatives and medical activists in India proposed an interesting solution. The Color of Grey Cells jointly with Banjara Academy launched a campaign to “highjack the search query”. The activists intend to fill the Indian internet with teenager mental health texts and support their relevancy by paying for Google ads. The program is aimed at Indians aged 18 and older. So when parents google “Blue Whale”, they will first see websites offering guidance on the mental health of teenagers to help the parents address the problem. Anyone may contribute to the payment for such advertisements.
Collective actions hold a special place in impactful responses.
For instance, the online community of Russia tackled the Black Whale problem in a peculiar way. VKontakte users launched a trolling wave for those participating in the game, be that curators or players. Thus, the mystic charm of the Blue Whale was broken by the rush of trolling. What we observe here is the traditional reaction of the laughter element described by Mikhail Bakhtin and its relaxing power.
This response solved the problem for Ukrainian users since the same information field — VKontakte network — was used. But this way of overcoming rather represents a refusal to address the issue: cleansing with laughter relieves stress but does not eliminate the root cause.
Another collective reaction is the most effective one. Many Russian teenagers who had previously participated in the game or for various reasons considered the game improper organized their own community. They called themselves “whales” sometimes to attract their peers and warn them against committing suicide. One of those groups in Russia was run by Philipp “Sea of Whales”. He and four other “whales” told Lenta about their suicide prevention work on VKontakte network. Corresponding privately with the “players”, they discussed their problems and offered moral support — in fact, they provided psychological counseling to their peers. There were cases of the kind in Ukraine too. Children and teenagers formed “dolphin” squads and engaged in psychological volunteering.
A similar initiative was recorded in Brazil where a user launched the Baleia Rosa (“pink whale”) campaign. He set up a website and called upon anyone willing to join. Participants paint pink whales and hearts on their hands, make posts on the social media about why they love life and encourage in various ways the Blue Whale fans to join the group.
And today, with all the experience gained and knowing about all the attempts, one may assume that a comprehensive approach might prove to be the most effective one: collective user empathy, professional prompt actions by activists, centralized media literacy programs for parents and psychological counseling for teenagers, accountability of journalists and rigorous fact checking. But, taking into account the outcomes and all the events, the most efficient solutions can only be a study of the Blue Whale’s nature.
Creepypasta as Digital Folklore
The Blue Whale is intrinsically a creepypasta.
Creepypastas are mystical stories supported by media materials (images, video or audio) spread by users online. The name derives from the words “creepy” and “paste”. Those stories generated by users themselves tell about murders, suicide and supernatural phenomena and are aimed at scaring readers. In a sense they are very similar to “horror stories” usually told around the campfire.
One of the most well-known creepypasta characters is the Slender Man, conceived and created in 2009 for a mystical content competition organized by an online forum. The Slender Man is a slim tall man dressed in a black suit, faceless and with tentacles growing out of his back. He is often depicted as hiding in the forests and hunting down children. The character eventually became extremely popular, giving rise to a number of popular YouTube channels, video games and films, including a feature film to be released in May 2018.
The Slender Man caught the attention of the mass media in 2014 when two 12-year old girls from Waukesha, Wisconsin, read about him on Wiki Creepypasta. Having got so imbued with idea that the character really existed, they wanted to become his followers to protect their families. The girls decided that this can be achieved by committing a murder. On May 31, 2014 they lured their classmate into the forest, stabbed her 19 times and ran away, leaving the girl to die. The victim managed to crawl onto the road where she was found by a cyclist who called the ambulance. The girl survived, and the attackers were sentenced to 25 and 40 years of compulsory psychiatric treatment. During the trial both were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Americans were shocked by the case. Accusations were hurled on Wiki Creepypasta. Its creators made a statement saying they were very sorry about what had happened but stressed that they are “a literary website and not a crazy Satanist cult.” Access to the website in Wisconsin was blocked.
Shira Chess, Associate Professor of Mass Media Arts at the University of Georgia, USA, believes that creepypastas are no more dangerous than zombie and vampire stories. According to the researcher, creepypasta represents modern digital folklore. She identified three common features in creepypasta and folklore: collectivity (the work is created by a collective, not a single person), variability (the story changes depending on the storyteller’s needs) and productive capacity (the storyteller changes the plot to provide answers to the audience). What is different between creepypasta and folklore in Shira Chess’s opinion is that folklore is shaped during several generations while creepypasta is created online within hours or days.
The Blue Whale is one of the artifacts of contemporary digital folklore. It was created collectively, it is constantly changing to satisfy the storyteller’s needs and those of the audience. Even just that makes the attempts to find and punish the perpetrator absurd and unsuccessful. But the fact that digital folklore creation is so quick-paced also has its advantage — accessibility of materials enabling its further study. In other words, an analysis of collective fears so closely associated with the current reality opens up wide opportunities for influencing their causes.
Urban Legend
Thanks to Mursaliyeva’s article the Blue Whale migrated from the new media to traditional ones — it became urban legend provoking moral panic.
The notion “urban legend” was introduced by Jan Brunvand, an American folklorist, in 1980s. Brunvand defines urban legend as “a close relative of myths, fairytales and hearsay.” Legends, unlike hearsay, have plots. And unlike myths and fairytales, they should be topical and believable, with the events accelerated into the daily reality; they can happen. The convincing appeal of a typical urban legend is its elements of mystery, horror, fear or humor. They often function as admonitory stories whose protagonists are children and teenagers.
Jan Brunvand believes that one of the peculiar features of urban legend dissemination is the FOAF principle (“friend of a friend” acronym), meaning that in cases like that it is practically impossible to identify the origin because “this horrible story” happened to “a friend of a friend.” With the Blue Whale, “those horrible stories” “happened” to children of friends of friends, to classmates and, due to the general moral panic, to children on the news.
If the internet meme of the Blue Whale as a creepypasta is about unconscious and non-verbalized teenager issues, the Blue Whale urban legend is about the fears of their parents. The moral panic around the phenomenon has classical foundation.
The appeal “to think about children” had repeatedly been raised as the discussion topic. Its application should be considered a rhetoric method in the fight for children’s rights but calling so often on sympathy and emotional manipulation it could ultimately be perceived as a logical mistake. Replacing reason with emotions, this practice deprives of the ability to make decisions at all, making man easy prey for manipulators.
Anthropologist Vivienne Wee in her work “Children and Politics of Culture” underscores that even a sincere fight for the “child rights” has an inherent risk of extra pressure on the children “for their own sake”. According to the researcher, “Those alternative cultural interpretations of children’s vulnerability will create their own political and psychological consequences.”
If one considers the interpretation of “moral panic” by Stanley Cohen, one of the concept founders, there are two types of moral panic participants: moral entrepreneurs and folk devils. Parents, journalists and other people requesting order in the society usually act as moral entrepreneurs, while the folk devils must fulfill the request. The latter are often represented by subcultures and youth movement participants. In the context of the Blue Whale, the participants of “suicidal” groups also act as “folk devils”. Meaning that, irrespective of the common appeal to “think about children”, the situation is all about a generation-wise opposition and not about concern.
Another thing: almost in all countries the spread of the moral panic was boosted by a surprisingly unanimous prejudice of data resources — ageism. Novaya Gazeta in Russia, 1+1 Channel in Ukraine, BBC in England and CNN in the USA refrained from getting teenager commentary, while the Blue Whale participants are in this case more reliable sources than frightened and clueless parents whom the journalists preferred to interview as a first-hand source. Teenagers were represented in the media either as victims who needed urgent help or as witless persons who could not make their own decisions. Out of the massive data collections, the very few interviews given by children and teenagers look the most informative and adequate ones. The common prejudice of the mass media reflects the universal unpreparedness of the world’s “adults” to recognize the legitimacy of children’s and teenagers’ problems.
Suicide Before 18
The Blue Whale became especially wide-spread in countries with historically high teenager suicide rates. According to the WHO’s 2014 data, Eastern Europe and South Eastern Asia are the world’s leaders in suicide among teenagers aged 15–19. The listed causes of the high suicide rates in the Eastern Europe include family crisis (which accounts for 90% of suicide), alcohol consumption and undervaluation of the issue of teenage suicide in the community. For post-Soviet countries there is also common social tension which is manifested for children and teenagers as insecurity of the future and lack of opportunities for self-fulfillment.
In India the Blue Whale had the most complicated and resounding progress. A research published in The Lancet revealed that suicide was the second cause of death for people aged 15 to 29 in the country. Here, 40% of young men and 56% of women die by suicide which is different from the WHO global data: on the average, men commit suicide more often, while women are more prone to suicidal moods. Researchers attribute this to an extremely patriarchal society where women, regardless of dynamic globalization processes and technological updates, are often bound to stay at home with children even though many would like to continue their with their education and career. India and Iran reported that the “suicidal game” was “played” not only by children and teenagers but by women aged 20 and above. The Blue Whale caused a real hysterics in the Indian media and was dubbed the main evil in connection with teenager mortality.
In January 2018, however, the employees of Computer Emergency Response Team, the national agency for investigating cybercrimes in India, announced that their investigation had not ascertained any connection between the Blue Whale game and the suicide of Indian teenagers throughout the period of content distribution in India.
The Blue Whale continued in countries with higher living standards as well, probably because the issue of teenage suicide is relevant worldwide. According to the WHO’s research, suicide is the primary cause of mortality for men and women aged 15–19 all over the world. Depression is one of the major causes of suicide among teenagers. It can be set off by chemical imbalance in a growing organism, difficulties with social engagement with peers, academic pressure in educational institutions, bullying and cyberbullying, unstable family patterns, gender or sexual self-identification issues — all this and multiple other factors can not only cause depression but also become the full-fledged standalone reason for the hard decision. Therefore, the accessibility of psychological counseling for children and teenagers is acquiring even more urgency, and the inaccessibility thereof automatically puts children and teenagers at risk. An analysis conducted by the WHO revealed that the overwhelming majority of regions in 66 countries outside Europe and Northern and Southern America do not have any mental health services for children and teenagers. Less than a half of the countries studied have a national child protection policy in place. To this day, there is not a single organization conducting extensive research of suicidality in the age groups of 10 to 15, although international organizations, including the WHO, talk increasingly about the need for such research.
Hence, we may once again draw the conclusion that the Blue Whale simply reflected the existing serious problems in the society and our reality, and did not create them. Moreover, it is reasonable to suppose that the Blue Whale was an unconscious attempt to address those problems through a virtual collective practice.
Blue Whale as Ritual
The whole meme set of the Blue Whale — from the very image to the related media, tasks and the ultimate goal — remained unchanged for all countries, even when transformed linguistically. Синий кит, blue whale, ballena azul, baleia azul и نهنگ آبی — it’s all about the archetypical image of a whale or a big fish.
The whale’s image traces back to the Old Testament and Jonah, the prophet, character of the biblical Book of Jonah who was sent by Yahweh to the Assyrian capital Nineveh to preach to the Ninevites of their coming destruction for their sins. Jonah refused to do the bidding and fled on a ship to Tarshish. God stirred up a great storm, and frightened sailors cast lots to determine who was responsible for this calamity. The lot fell on Jonah forcing him to confess that he had disobeyed the God’s will. Jonah offered to be thrown into the sea to save the ship. After some reluctance sailors fulfilled his wish, and the sea calmed down. Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish (a whale in the English translation) in whose belly he remained for three days and three nights. Jonah repented and asked for mercy. The God answered his prayers and ordered the fish to vomit Jonah onto the shore.
In the New Testament Jesus Christ prophesied his death and subsequent resurrection on the third day, assimilating the events to Jonah’s three days in the whale’s belly.
“For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12, 39–40)
This saying was traditionally interpreted and repeated in art as a symbol of resurrection, and the theme of swallowing by the fish — as something preceding renewal.
Carl Jung in his collected works Archetype and Symbol wrote: “Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness,” adding that “the descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.”
In the Jungian concept of collective unconscious, “absorption” can be represented by such symbols as a Whale, a Wolf, a Witch eating children or a cannibal Giant (also correlating to the Slender Man’s image).
The very process of performing 50 tasks before “falling up” or “running ashore” is similar to a deep immersion into the darkness of the collective unconscious on the path towards individuation.
“This is a synthetic process which I have termed the “individuation process,” Jung writes in his article The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. “This process follows the natural course of life — a life in which the individual becomes what he always was. Because man has consciousness, a development of this kind does not run very smoothly; often it is varied and disturbed, because consciousness deviates again and again from its archetypal, instinctual foundation and finds itself in opposition to it. There then arises the need for a synthesis of the two positions. This amounts to psychotherapy even on the primitive level, where it takes the form of restitution ceremonies. As examples I would mention the identification of the Australian aborigines with their ancestors in the Alcheringa period (“dreamtime”, an ancient era of first creation in the mythology of Australian Aranda tribes — author’s note), identification with the “sons of the sun” among the Pueblos of Taos, the Helios apotheosis in the Isis mysteries, and so on.” (page 182).
Using the analogy one may assume that the Blue Whale was a “healing ritual”, therapeutic identification with the archetypical image and plot for thousands of children and teenagers who were going through a crisis in the course of individuation.
One cannot overestimate the role of technology in this ritual. Blue Whale participants say that they mostly created anonymous accounts for the game to avoid their family’s suspicions. Faking suicide in the social media — a symbolic “running of the whale ashore” — also was quite a popular practice. In this case the ritual was in fact performed for the virtual doppelganger.
Jung points out that the task of a professional conducting therapy under those circumstances is to bring the unconscious content to the consciousness and achieve a synthesis of that content with the consciousness in a cognitive act. And although with individual cases this cognition per se does not lead to actual change or meaningful practical application thereof, it could have a decisive impact for collective practices in the social media. The nature of consequences — tragic or therapeutic — depends on the level of understanding of those processes.
Virtual Collective Unconsciousness
The notion of “virtual collective consciousness” was first mentioned in Glen Boire Richard’s article On Cognitive Liberty in 2000: “The trend of technology is to overcome the limitations of the human body. And the Web has been characterized as a virtual collective consciousness and unconsciousness.”
The first empirical studies of the VCC (virtual collective consciousness) are associated with 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Yousri Marzuki and Olivier Oullier in their article Revolutionizing Revolution describe the VCC as a new variety of the collective consciousness emerging thanks to such communication tools as social media. According to their theory, when people possess some internal knowledge which is shared by the general public united by “civic media” like Twitter and Facebook, people start acting as a single organism. Protesters in Egypt and Tunisia functioned as one driving force without having any centralized management. It was the “civic media” that marked the beginning of “leaderless revolutions”. It was proposed to identify a theoretical framework of the VCC as a phenomenon covering online behavior which leads to the virtual collective consciousness. Any such collective consciousness starts with a spark that causes a series of events and, ultimately, a great number of interactions.
Yousri Marzuki and Olivier Oullier list other examples of manifestation of the virtual collective consciousness, including the Harlem Shake and Bitcoin protocol which in the researchers’ opinion may be a foundation for new algorithms of such interactions in the psychology of social media. And with Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir which gathered over 8 thousand vocalists from all over the world, the researchers consider it an example of the virtual collective empathy.
The Blue Whale is also an illustration of virtual collective actions. But while “leaderless revolutions” are produced by the virtual collective consciousness, the Blue Whale is a product of the virtual collective unconsciousness. Prevailing in regions with high suicide rates among children and teenagers, the Blue Whale is directly indicative of the issue. Moreover, it is an unconscious attempt to address the issue through virtual group practices — a “healing ritual” for the virtual twin.
In fact, having gained a unique chance to understand those collective unconscious processes — possibly with more vividness than ever due to the social media’s descriptive potential — the masses recoiled, responded with aggression and enacted various instruments of prohibition and punishment.
But every reaction is symptomatic in this dialogue between the collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness. Depending on their culture and tradition, and specific local and global trends, the communities revealed weak spots in their organizational systems and ways of negation, and strong spots in meaningful responses.
For instance, the reflex of performance-focused authorities prompted Russian enforcement agencies to take pointed police measure; however a segment of Russian VKontakte users generated a wave of collective empathy towards the “players”. The Indian government demanded a “ban on the game”, prohibited schoolchildren from using smartphones and standardized clothes “for safety reasons”, while Indian IT professionals and psychologists proved the efficiency of interdisciplinary approaches.
It could take ages to collect and analyze country-specific data. And this is one of the primary appeals of this text: to use digital media and technologies largely for self-observation.
Blue Whale as a Dream
In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan proposes his own interpretation of the Narcissus myth. In contrast to the wide-spread traditional conviction that Narcissus was entranced by his own reflection and in love with himself, thus becoming the perennial symbol of an “egotistic man” and all manifestations of self-admiration, McLuhan insists that Narcissus took his own reflection in the water for another person:
“He was deaf and dumb. He adjusted to his own extension of himself and turned into a closed system.”
“Extending oneself” is one of McLuhan’s key concepts. Guided by the research of medical professionals Hans Selye and Adolf Jonas, the researcher says that anyone experiencing physical or psychological shock as a consequence of physical falling or a sudden mental blow is stripped of feelings in order to deal with the shock. That means that people “self-amputate” themselves to bear the physical or psychological pressure. McLuhan believes that man also “self-amputates” in his inventions or, in other words, “extends outside”. Thus, clothes are an extension (self-amputation) of skin, and a photo camera — of vision. The paradox is that it is the accelerating technological progress that represents the pressure which makes people invent new technological parts of themselves all the time. For instance, the alphabet which significantly accelerated commodity relations prompted the man to invent the wheel. The wheel in its turn put its strain and accelerated exchange processes with new inventions. To endure this infinitely growing pressure, the man blocks his perception. And this is what the Narcissus myth is about according to McLuhan: “The image of a youth (Narcissus) is self-amputation, or an outward extension caused by irritating strains. As a counterirritant, the image causes general numbness or shock reducing the ability of recognition. Self-amputation blocks recognition of oneself.”
McLuhan believes this is the reason for the man’s “blindness” regarding his technology. Even though our technologies mirror us, people “block the cognition of themselves”, becoming a “closed system”, and our era turns into an “era of unconsciousness and apathy”. But the good news is that having practically foreseen the creation of the Internet, McLuhan also described its unique feature — contribution to cognition. Facing the “immediate total realization of the field” of which the Internet is the media, man gains for the first time the opportunity to become aware of technology as an extension of himself.
In other words, the question of Werner Herzog, the German director, “Does the Internet dream about itself?” may have this answer: “Yes. And online phenomena like the Blue Whale are its dreams.” Representative, carefully documented and publicly available dreams yet to be deciphered.”
Lera Malchenko.
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