#scooby doo 50th anniversary | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dashboarddiaries · 2 years ago

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Dashboard Diaries is a production of Atypical Artists, hosted by Lauren Shippen (@thelaurenshippen) and Cherokee McAnelly (@overchers). Our theme was composed by Lauren Shippen and mixed by Brandon Grugle. Art by Shae McMullin. Transcription by Laudable.

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Transcript under the cut!

[intro music]

Lauren: Hello, Gonchers. I’m Lauren Shippen, a professional writer who once saw Goncharov on the big screen at an LA film festival.

Cherokee: What a privilege.

Lauren: Yeah.

Cherokee: What a privilege to see it on the big screen, Lauren.

Lauren: I feel really lucky.

Cherokee: Yeah. I’m Cherokee McAnelly, Head of Entertainment at Tumblr, who has watched Goncharov more than ten times. Unfortunately, never on the big screen. Adding that to the bucket list.

Lauren: Absolutely got to do it. You’re such a Gonch Head. And this is Dashboard Diaries, a podcast for you – the folks who are in this internet bunker with us. We talk about what’s going on in our favorite hell site, get into what we like to call “tumbl-lore,” do fandom deep dives, and share the times when we’ve gone feral over a new ship.

And today, we are having a hefty 50th anniversary conversation about Goncharov. That’s right! It’s been 50 years since Goncharov came out in 1973, which it definitely really did. And we’ve got some special guests-

Cherokee: It should be a national holiday.

Lauren: Yeah, it really should be. So, we are just going to go dive right into our main topic. So, here is that Goncharov celebration.

[game show trill]

All right, so we have very special guests to talk about Goncharov with us. We have Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus. Perry and Mason run an amazing, amazing podcast called Digital Folklore. Would you guys want to tell us a little bit about what Digital Folklore is?

Perry: So, Digital Folklore is a show that is all about our online lives and the way that we express ourselves. And we look at things through the lens of academic folklore. So, we try to ask very sociological type questions. But at the same time not make it too heady and too droll. So, we’ve wrapped things in a fictional universe and there’s very weird off beat stuff that tends to happen. Mason has a raccoon in the show. It’s a fun feast.

Mason: It’s a little bit like if Scooby Doo had a documentary shoe horn into it. So, it’s kind of cartoonish but with real information. So, it’s kind of a fun little playground to explore that. To teach and to learn about what folklore is, because it’s something that is not widely understood but is crucially important.

Lauren: So, to kick us off, we are talking about Goncharov today, which is a movie that does not exist. And so I thought it would be fun to do a little quiz. I’m going to give you four movie titles. One of them is real and I need you three to pick the real movie.

Mason: Oh gosh.

Lauren: So, the first one is a little bit of a gimme, because we’re talking about it, right? Goncharov from the 1970s, directed by Martin Scorsese, Shazam from the ‘90s starring Sinbad, Kazam from the ‘90s starring Shaquille O’Neal, Interview With A Vampire from the ‘90s based off of the book of the same name. Which of these is a real movie?

Mason: I hate to say this but I think it was Shazam, right? Because there was a whole Mandela Effect about Kazam starring Shaquille O’Neal and that was a whole thing on the internet that I feel like I remember seeing. And I think it was a Sinbad movie, right?

Lauren: Cherokee? Perry? What do you guys think?

Cherokee: Well, my thought was going to be Kazam. So, now I feel like I have been Mandela effected. (laughs)

Perry: For me the real one was Shazam, because I think I was old enough to see it when it first came out. But I could be remembering wrong. That’s how the Mandela effect works, right?

Lauren: We’ve got two votes for Shazam and one vote for Kazam? Is that where we’re at?

Mason: Which one had Sinbad?

Lauren: Shazam had Sinbad.

Mason: The one with Sinbad is the real one. The one with Shaq is the fake Mandela effect one. Or just the alternate universe one.

Lauren: So, the real movie in this is Kazam, starring Shaquille O’Neal. (laughs)

Perry: No!

Mason: No!

Cherokee: No way! Look at that! (laughs)

Lauren: Sinbad and Shazam is ... there is of course now a movie called Shazam starring Zachary Levi, that’s in the DC universe.

Perry: Right.

Lauren: The Interview With A Vampire was a little bit of a tricky one because this was a Mandela effect that happened to me earlier this year when I started watching the TV show. I’ve always remembered it as Interview With A Vampire. It’s Interview With The Vampire. Which I didn’t know. But you all seemed to understand that that was incorrect.

Cherokee: Yeah.

Lauren: But yeah, Kazam is a real movie, Shazam is not. But a lot of people do remember seeing a movie with Sinbad (laughs) but it doesn’t exist.

Mason: I got double mandela’d.

Lauren: You got double mandela’d. (laughs)

Mason: Darn.

Lauren: Would you guys want to quickly describe what the Mandela effect is? Because I have to think it’s something you encounter all the time in digital folklore.

Perry: Go for it, Mason.

Mason: That was something that threw me for a loop when I first heard about it. It was the, oh gosh ... it’s called the Mandela effect because a lot of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison, I think, in the ‘80s. And so but a lot of this is the communal mass misremembering of things.

So, the one that I related to the most was the Berenstein Bears. It’s actually the Berenstain Bears. And then people have been on the hunt for ... there’s a popular picture of an old video cassette of the Berenstein Bears that was spelled that way and that picture went viral as proof that we have shifted to an alternate universe in which this is now true.

Lauren: Yeah. The Berenstein/Berenstain thing really got me, too. That threw me for a loop. I still don’t really believe it.

Cherokee: Well, I still don’t know which is which. Every time I forget. I’m in too deep.

Lauren: We are all occupying slightly different universes.

Mason: Yeah.

Perry: I mean, you do get into a lot of the internet culture stuff and what one of the prevailing theories is for a lot of the Mandela effects is that with the large hadron super collider from ... Oh, which one is that?

Mason: Surin?

Perry: The one in Sweden. Yeah, Surin. The last time they did that they actually inflicted a multiverse on everybody.

Lauren: You know what? I believe it. And I like to think that there’s a multiverse somewhere where I can actually watch Goncharov. It’s a real movie that exists.

Mason: Right?

Cherokee: Oh, there are multiple, multiverses I think with Goncharov. There’s the Goncharov cartoon in one, musical in another, TV show in the next. (laughs)

Mason: Oh my gosh. But then what movie from our universe would they have made up in the Goncharov universe?

Cherokee: Titanic.

Perry: Oh, it would probably have to be- ... ooh, Titanic.

Mason: I was going to say The Matrix, because it would just be ironic.

Lauren: That would be, that would be very trippy. We should probably talk about what Goncharov is and how exactly it began. So, Goncharov is a movie by Martin Scorsese from the 1970s about the mob. It’s the greatest mob movie ever made. And it doesn’t exist. It is essentially a mass participatory hallucination that Tumblr had last fall that grew out of a post from a few years prior, actually.

Mason: Yeah, 2020.

Lauren: Yeah, of these boots that are knock-off boots that have a fake sort of movie poster on the tongue of the boot. And it says, “Martin Scorsese presents Goncharov,” and then a bunch of other information. And this post floated around the internet for a couple of years. There’s actually a Reddit post about it as well. And everybody is sort of speculating on like what it was trying to be. Most people agree that the real film it was trying to reference was Gomorrah from 2008. But then for some reason last fall Tumblr decided to pretend that this was a real movie and make it so.

Perry and Mason, what was the first thing that you saw about Goncharov? Were you aware of this before we started to talk about it?

Mason: I was not. You were the first person I heard about it from. And I have no idea how I missed it, because I love this so much.

Perry: Yeah. Well, I think ... So, we had missed it but in fairness, it’s really only been around a short amount of time. So, the first real inflection point was in November of 2022 and as we sit here recording this in early April, I mean, this thing blew up like crazy within weeks. And there were several other things competing for people’s attention at the time. Of course, holiday season but then also a lot of noise over on Twitter – because of somebody taking that over and kind of forcing it downhill a lot. Which I also think contributed to some of the stuff that was going on, on Tumblr, because you had this massive influx of new users trying to abandon ship from Twitter as well.

Cherokee: Yeah.

Perry: And looking for something to have fun with.

Mason: I have a timeline question. You said the first appearance, was it the picture of the boots in 2020 and the actual lore did not form until 2022?

Cherokee: Correct.

Mason: Okay.

Lauren: The original poster actually no longer exists, or the original post doesn’t. But it was from a Tumblr user called @Zootycoon. And then it got tossed around Tumblr a little bit. I remember seeing it, actually, 18 months ago on my own Tumblr dash.

Cherokee: Really?

Lauren: Because somebody commented, “This loser hasn’t even seen Goncharov.” And it was just like a joke and then for whatever reason in, yeah, November of 2022 I think the first post that really blew up was a movie poster that somebody made of a Goncharov movie poster. And then Cherokee, I mean, you got to see behind the scenes this thing take flight. What happened? (laughs)

Cherokee: Yeah. So, that movie poster, which cast the film and everything essentially created the framework in which everyone could kind of play with Goncharov. Right? So, I think that was really the catalyst. And I’m looking right now at our last six months metrics and the metrics for Goncharov is a line straight up in the air on the line graph – overnight. Genuinely overnight on the 21st of November it went from barely just a few searches for Goncharov. There were a few thousand starting on the 20th. And on the 21st there were over 133,000 searches alone. 12,000 posts made. 212,000 re-blogs.

Mason: Jeez.

Cherokee: And this is just on that one day. So, it really was just a powder keg just ... from zero to 100, zero to a million, genuinely, overnight. And that engagement kind of continued for about a week on a high level and then it kind of slowed down around mid to late December. But it was just such a huge moment that had happened. And I feel like I logged on one morning and was like, “What?”

Perry: Sorry, I’ve got a question on some of the stats. When you’re doing those analytics, do you have the ability to understand what population that’s coming from? To see if there’s some kind of effect due to age group or region or anything else? Personal interests? That would be really interesting to drill down into.

Cherokee: Oh, it’s not, unfortunately, something that at least I with my very basic statistics knowledge know how to access.

Lauren: What would you say, Cherokee, is likely the Tumblr user base demographics? Is that something that ...

Cherokee: Yes, I can share that with you. Tumblr is 42% Gen Z, 38% Millennial, and 20% Gen X and Boomer. Our gender split is 56% female, 44% male or identifying as. And our biggest user base is definitely in the US. One kind of interesting thing that we do track is duplication across platforms. So, for example, 74% of people who are on Tumblr are not on SnapChat.

Mason: Interesting.

Cherokee: 51% for TikTok. 48% for Twitter. So, Tumblr really is people’s ... for those who are really active on Tumblr, it’s their primary social platform.

Mason: Half of Tumblr users do not use TikTok!?

Cherokee: Correct.

Mason: That’s buck wild to me.

Lauren: That is wild.

Mason: Especially given the breakdown is almost have are Gen Z.

Perry: Yeah.

Cherokee: Mm hmm. I do think there was a big exodus from other social platforms TO Tumblr. I feel like this is not a correct characterization, but I always call Tumblr the Anti-social social platform, because you’re so much, you’re engaging about your passions with people you may not know, it’s kind of where you can go to dive in and geek out. And just really be unapologetically yourself. Often people are anonymous on there. And I do think that kind of drove a lot ... just like we see a lot of Gen Z ... there’s a movement for flip phones because people were saying, “I just use ...” People are starting to use their socials and other things just on their computers and keeping their phones to reduce their screen time. And so I do think it was very much like a rejection of the social aspect of social media, even though Tumblr obviously is a very social platform but in a completely different way, I feel, than others. I never see it as a competitor of other platforms, because I think it’s so different and unique. It’s just a completely different beast.

Perry: It’s very artist friendly.

Cherokee: Yeah.

Mason: This is a bit of a divergence, but I’m super curious, because I did not know that there was any sort of push from people moving away from smart phones as their primary way of interacting with social media. And back to computers. That breaks my brain a little bit, because I use my computer primarily and I feel old for doing that. So, you’re telling me the kids are doing that now? And it’s cool again?

Cherokee: From what I have heard – yes.

Perry: It’s cool to have a flip phone, yeah.

Cherokee: And I will say, I have seen more and more flip phones when I’m just out and about kind of in the world.

Lauren: Wild.

Cherokee: With the younger age groups, yeah. I feel like I sound very, “Hello, fellow kids, right now,” saying this. (laughter) But it’s true. I do, yeah, there has been a distinct kind of shift away from smart phones. And honestly I saw that and that sounds great. I would love to not be glued to my phone all the time!

Lauren: Yeah! I mean, Tumbler, too. The majority of users are desktop users, right? I mean, I know it’s split kind of 50/50, but I use Tumblr primarily on the desktop.

Cherokee: It’s actually about 80% in the app.

Lauren: I think that’s where it shines. Oh, it is? Oh, okay. So, I’m just completely wrong.

Cherokee: Yeah, really, really app heavy. Yeah. Which is interesting, Lauren.

Lauren: Oh.

Cherokee: Because I do feel like a lot of super users who are re-blogging-

Lauren: Super user!

Cherokee: ... dozens of things, or hundreds of things, do prefer the desktop experience. I definitely prefer using it on desktop, just because bigger screen. I can look at ... if I want to search a tag I see a grid of the tags versus just one at a time. So, you can see more content at once. So, yeah, I prefer the desktop experience. Also to see the themes that people pick out and have fun with. I just love that side of Tumblr. Yeah.

Perry: You should absolutely create a flip phone app, though. Just to see what consumption is like.

Lauren: Oh, yeah!

Perry: ... on that form factor.

Cherokee: We used to have text to post. You could text a number, what you want the post to say-

Lauren: Seriously!?

Cherokee: ... and it would post on your Tumblr. I think we sunset’ed that a few years ago.

Perry: There’s probably tons of regret posts. Yeah. There’s no take-backs. Yeah.

Lauren: That’s hilarious.

Perry: So, I’ll tell you a quick story because I’m in an upper demographic. I just turned 50 last year. Probably about the time Goncharov was going hot on Tumblr. And so I had used Tumblr a few years ago and it didn’t click with me at the time, but my kids are huge Tumblr users and I was like ... what’s going on with Tumblr? And my son said this is where all these very niche groups of people hang out. Both him and I are on the autism spectrum. So, he said there’s a whole bunch of neuro divergence there. They have a whole bunch of friends that are spread across several different communities and those communities represented there as well. And then he said, “Let me send you some of the best posts that I’ve seen.” And he sent this post about somebody that had a dream that they were working at a delicatessen selling clown meat. And just all the interaction about-

Lauren: I think I’ve seen that post. (laughs)

Perry: ... what is clown meat? Is it human? Is it not human? And what are the laws and the ethics surrounding this? And just the way everybody was piling onto this – creating this really interesting, rich discussion about clown meat. And I thought that was fantastic.

Cherokee: Look, only on Tumblr. (laughs)

Lauren: Yeah, I really do think that that and Goncharov in general is a thing that could only happen on Tumblr. Because of who the user base is and what they like to do and the way that they behave. And I think one of the things I really loved about Goncharov is it leaned into one of my favorite things about Tumblr. Which actually we talked about on our last episode, which is that Tumblr users will make fan art for literally anything. Like, there will be just a nonsense text post and there will be fan art for it all of a sudden.

Obviously, Goncharov was a huge wealth of just absolutely stunning fan art. But what was amazing and here I will drop this document in the chat here ... is that somebody compiled a document of all of the Goncharov lore, the script excerpts, the scoring that people made, the casting, the costuming-

Perry: I pulled this same document! That master doc is amazing.

Lauren: It’s incredible.

Perry: The level of detail that is in that is crazy.

Mason: Can I just bring something up? The first thing I saw ... is the act of adding lore to the Goncharov story referred to as Gonching?

Lauren: Is it referred to as Gonching?

Mason: Well, the very first line says there’s a Discord server now for Gonching.

Lauren: I think Gonching, I mean, I’ve seen Gonching used more generally to just mean participating in the Goncharov fandom. Right? So, I think that if you are just playing along with the joke I think you are Gonching rather ... you don’t necessarily have to be adding to the lore. And I also don’t know. I think there’s so much out there on Tumblr that’s not in this document that’s probably not in the Discord but that is on Tumblr of people adding to the lore, people putting their head canons forward, which in this case a head canon could easily become canon because there is no real canon.

And so it does become a sort of democratic system of, okay, well, what posts are getting big enough that people who are making these documents are hanging out and these Discords are sort of making them official Goncharov lore.

Perry: I mean, the cool thing about a master doc like that, and some of the other posts that have been out there, some of the other archival ways of managing this is that they are literally managing the canon in a lot of ways, of saying, “No, you can’t, or at least you shouldn’t try to create something that is directly competing with or conflicting with this other set of “facts” that we’ve established, or seen structures that we’ve established.” Or casting, or catchphrases, or anything else. I think that it’s fascinating to see the group agreement with that as well.

Cherokee: Yeah, it’s really interesting just given the fan casting power of Tumblr as well. I mean, I always think about how many movies and shows have been fan cast on Tumblr before they were cast elsewhere and they were completely accurate. Most recently Ben Barnes from Shadow & Bone as the darkling. That was a Tumblr fan cast that became reality. So, I do think Tumblr somehow has this kind of hive mind where everyone just agrees on the vibe or something. Because it really did feel like, yeah, this is the cast and this is the plot, and obviously there’s a big deal with clocks throughout as symbolism. Duh.

Lauren: Tumblr is yes/and personified. Right?

Cherokee: Oh ... YES. That’s it!

Perry: Hmm.

Lauren: One of the things that I’ve loved, too, is I’ve seen ... I’ll have to make sure to re-blog this next time I see one of these posts, but I’ve seen posts and certainly back in November when there was lots of Gonching going on that are like modern AU of Goncharov. And it’s people like doing posts about a fan AU of canon that fans made. And there’s over 500 fics in the Goncharov tag on AO3, the largest fan fiction website. So, it’s like, yeah, yes/and-ing just all the way down.

Perry: I think you hit on something there when you talk about AO3, is that the reason that something like this can take off so well on Tumbler is you do have a fantastic collection of creative people, creative writers, artists, people who can put these things together. And it’s an outlet for them. So, it’s not just trying to do something for the sake of doing it, it’s something for the creative process and the community that they’re wanting to get involved in. And it would come out some other way if it didn’t go into Goncharov.

Cherokee: Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren: Yeah.

Cherokee: And I feel it’s built with collaboration in mind. You know? It’s so easy for people to kind of pile on a post. Yeah.

Perry: We could talk about that in a second, too, because that fits into what makes something viral is that participation piece and there’s been a lot of studies on that.

Lauren: Well, I was going to ask – in terms of things like Goncharov, it is like a fake Mandela effect, right? Because everybody sort of knows that it’s fake and it’s this viral meme, but it’s more than a meme. Are there in your digital folklore studies things like this that you have come across before? And if there are, are there sort of any similarities across these different memes or viral things that sort of tell us about why people do stuff like this and how it happens?

Perry: Yeah, I think so. I’ll let Mason chime in on this because I know that he probably has some thoughts. But one of the really interesting things about studying folklore has been the way that we see things used and misused. And so one of the things ... and as I was looking through a lot of the Tumblr comments on Goncharov, is that there was kind of an understanding that this is also an experiment in disinformation – to kind of see what can be created and what some people might believe is real. And so you did have groups of people that were trying to make official Wikipedia entries or edit Martin Scorsese’s page to include it. And there was seven or eight times and Wikipedia was like, “Please, keep the purity of what is fact, fact and what is not, not.”

And so you had people within the Tumblr community saying, “We want to play by the rules. We’re trying to show what disinformation could look like, but we don’t want to pollute legitimate sites because we do want there to be objective truth out in the world.”

And I think when you look at 2015, 2016 on – we’ve seen the devastating effect that real disinformation can bring. And I think when you look at the population of Tumblr, you’re seeing people who have really been grappling with that for a good chunk of their lives. It’s not just the past few years for them. It’s a big percentage of the life that they’ve lived. And they’re seeing that and they’re saying, “How do we grapple with that?” And something like Goncharov is one interesting expression of it.

And as I was looking through it seeing kind of the way that people were trying to police that and say, “Please stop editing real Wikipedia.” “Please stop trying to edit IMDB.” And so on. But then they did get some head nods. There’s a TV tropes page for it. There’s several other expressions. There’s “official” soundtracks and sheet music and all of these other fun expressions that if somebody is not of the mind of ... if somebody doesn’t dig a little bit deeper, they may actually think that this is a real movie.

Like one of the things that we studied, which was Slender Man.

Lauren: Yeah.

Cherokee: Yeah. That is an interesting kind of alignment.

Lauren: Slender Man led to real life harm, which happens a lot with disinformation as you eluded to.

Perry: Yeah, I mean, Mason, what were some of the artifacts that were out there for Slender Man?

Mason: Yeah. I mean, my first thought was that there’s definitely parallels to Slender Man. Because that was also a lighthearted thing at the start. Horror themed, but it was just everyone contributing little bits.

Perry: Started in a comedy forum.

Mason: Yeah. And with Slender Man there was the German wood cuts, the faked German wood cuts, and old paintings and tapestries and people making that sort of evidence. But it was ... all the examples I’m thinking of are more decentralized in a way, whereas most of this happened on Tumblr. There was a central platform where everyone was working on this. Whereas Slender Man started on a comedy forum, kind of gained popularity there, and then spread to other places of the internet that then added more to it, like the YouTube series, Marvel Hornets, did a significant amount of lore and world building. Which included other people creating in the space. And so it spread really far off the initial platform really quickly.

In a way, memes are also an example of this. In the sense of, they gain so much social meta data as they’re passed around and new layers of meaning are added to them. But that again is so de-centralized. I don’t know what it is about Tumblr specifically that makes it such a magical little ground for growing this kind of thing, but because it all happened there and is able to have ... someone posts, “I’m making a Google doc and we’re going to add things to it,” and everything being available in the same space and worked on by this community. And it seems largely like its stayed there. I don’t know for sure, but it’s not like people on Twitter are now adding to it.

Perry: It spilled onto to Twitter a little bit and people on Twitter didn’t know what to do with it. So, some people thought it was fun and other people were like, “What the heck, dude!? This is kind of lame. I don’t know what’s going on here.” But one of the interesting things kind of thinking about this kind of grappling with what truth is and thinking about disinformation is in folk lore there is the concept of fake lore, which is where people will create non genuine folk lore, which is exactly what fake lore sounds like. But usually there’s a purpose behind that. That purpose is usually either creative, for the sake of writing a book and I’m going to create an alternative version of Little Red Riding Hood or my own version of anything out there, even something whole cloth. But then say this originated from some kind of German mythology when it never did.

But then the darker way of doing that is to kind of other people and to say that they’re trying to reflect some kind of dark prejudice or something like that in whatever lore they create. And folklorists and anthropologists really are struggling with that I think in the age that we’re in right now because as we saw with Goncharov and we saw with Slender Man and so on, it’s so easy now to pollute the real record of things.

And so you can potentially go in and on something that’s not policed well you could potentially go in and edit a real Wikipedia page or something else in an older post and make it look like this thing exists or that there’s evidence of something that reflects a much darker purpose than the fun-loving stuff that we see with Goncharov.

Cherokee: Yeah, it’s interested. First off, they have now locked Scorsese’s Wikipedia page. (laughs)

Perry: Fair.

Lauren: Jeez.

Cherokee: But it also makes me think of, when you were talking about going in and kind of replacing something and making it something new, it makes me think of back in the early Tumblr days when you could edit someone else’s post if you re-blogged it and switch out the image.

Lauren: YES.

Cherokee: And so there were a bunch of kind of Tumblr heritage posts that were getting cycled around. I think one was like Jensen Ackles in a gym uniform or something and people kept switching out the photo but changed it – and so people had no idea where this post started, which was the original, and there were just dozens of iterations, if not thousands just across Tumblr. So, yeah.

Lauren: That’s something that really can only exist on Tumblr, right? Because I think that Tumblr used to have this incredibly unique quality in which you could edit somebody’s original post in the re-blog, which is wild. And that’s not a thing anymore. But what is a thing still is that if I make a post and it gets re-blogged a bunch and then I edit the original post, those edits don’t show up in the re-blog. Right?

And so that’s a thing, too, where people will make jokes with posting a particular text or a particular image. They’ll let it get re-blogged a bunch. And then they will change the original post and eventually someone will say, “Click through to the original,” and there will be a fun little Rick Roll or surprise or punch line. That’s not something that any other platform has. Because I mean most platforms like Twitter, I know, has introduced an edit button for some people, but I think that then the re-tweets – I mean, who knows what’s going on, on Twitter. I’m not going to pretend to understand how the infrastructure of that place works anymore. But ... it is a unique facet of Tumblr, for sure.

Perry: Well, Twitter has been dealing with tons of iterations of like how do we deal with the fact that people do play with truth on a massive scale? For much darker purposes I think on a platform like Twitter or Facebook than on Tumblr. Because Twitter/Facebook, it’s not really about creativity. It’s about making a point or trying to deceive somebody for a very dark purpose.

I remember when Musk said, “Hey, everybody can be Twitter blue now if you just pay $8,” or whatever. Not really believing that people would do bad things with that. And then of course right when he made that a thing, everybody started creating these fake accounts that looked like verified accounts and causing stocks to tumble, people’s reputations to be damaged, and so on. It’s like, oh, okay, I guess that’s maybe a bad idea. People aren’t just fun-loving on the internet. (laughs)

Lauren: Yeah, and I think the disinformation aspect, I hadn’t really thought about that in relation to Goncharov, because I think in my mind it’s a meme, it’s a mass joke, but you’re right in that it sort of fits into the same modes as a lot of disinformation. And this is a little bit of a tangent, I won’t linger in it for too long because disinformation gets depressing very quickly. But I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and follow a lot of journalists who have been working in disinformation for the last couple of years. It’s sort of like a special interest of mine.

And it’s been really interesting to see over the last, I would say, six to nine months – a lot of those journalists who have been absolutely mired in this particular topic for years and years and years – are not using the terms “disinformation” and “misinformation” anymore. Because some of them have kind of come to the conclusion of ... there’s one newsletter that I read called Control Alt Right Delete, which I think is a great newsletter title. (laughs)

Perry: That’s a phenomenal title.

Cherokee: Yeah!

Lauren: That writer talked about this back in I think December, about how when we’re dealing with these darker aspects of disinformation, especially as it pertains to extremists in this country, it’s not about misinformation or what’s true anymore, it’s about a completely separate constructed reality that people have chosen to live in.

And that’s where disinformation as a term kind of meets its limit, because it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true, because it fits into their constructed reality. And I think that Goncharov is sort of like a very lighthearted version of that, right? It’s just a version of reality that we are collectively creating in which this movie exists and it doesn’t matter what’s true about it, because the purpose of the meme is that it’s an alternate version of reality.

Mason: What I think is so fascinating about that particularly, though, is that nobody who is engaging in this is thinking of it like that. You know? No one in there is thinking, “Ah, yes, I am creating an alternate version of reality, engaging in these folkloric practices.” It’s just like, oh, this is fun and creative. And how naturally we do that, as humans, of just like, “Oh, this is fun. Let me just pile in and join in.” It’s super cool to me.

And I’m really curious about what it is about Tumblr. Because you were telling me about the fan casting and everything else. It really is a very particular ground for this kind of thing.

Cherokee: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think a big aspect of it is that Tumblr is not the home TO but a home OF fan fic, fan art, head canons, creating your own world within the parameters of the media that you consume and that you love. So, Goncharov was just a new exciting challenge or journey or opportunity here, because fan fic could become fan fact in the context of Goncharov. Which I think was very exciting for our user base who this was kind of prime for them to dig their teeth into or to dig their claws into. Whatever the term is that I’m looking for, Mandela effect, let’s call it that. (laughs)

Lauren: I do think there is something unique about Tumblr’s infrastructure and the way that actually Tumblr functions practically as a platform and Mason, earlier when you were talking about sort of the decentralized memes, I’m really curious to hear what you think about how the actual user interface of a platform can effect something and keep it there or take it elsewhere. Because I think another thing with Tumblr ... Tumblr now is very much, yes, the home of fandom on the internet. Sure, there’s fandom on Tik Tok and on Twitter, but like Tumblr has just always sort of been that. But I think it became that because of the way in which re-blogs work, the way that the dashboard works, the way that you can have a Tumblr account and have a bunch of sub blogs that you can post to.

So, you can have your Marvel sub blog, you can have your DC Comics so they don’t overlap. Because some people really like to keep their fandom blogs very specific. Whereas if you want to do that on Twitter you would have to create separate accounts for each new Twitter profile. And when it comes to something like Slender Man, why does that thrive outside of a particular platform?

Mason: That is a good question. It brushes up against something I was thinking. Tumblr supports very well natively all sorts of media that you can include in a post. Even audio post, which is not something you really see anywhere else. But you can do photos and videos and quotes and re-blogs and things like that – all in ways that are presented very well, whereas video on Twitter is like a compromise from a user element standpoint, because it was added in later and it doesn’t super fit with the design.

A lot of platforms are-

Perry: Or text on Instagram or text on Tik Tok. There’s no good mixed mode experience in a lot of these things. I mean, Facebook is pretty close, but Facebook has its own demographic issues, and legacy baggage. But I think when you look at platforms, you do have to think about how do I want to interact on Platform X? And it has to be tailored to that. And I think Tumblr is very much ... it caters toward somebody that needs to express themselves, period. And it’s going to let them do that. Versus like Tik Tok where you do have to be fairly comfortable with doing something on video. But Tik Tok itself is also a folklore factory in a lot of ways, because it allows you to create something and then it can let somebody else become part of the conversation by stitching or duoing or something like that.

So you can get this cat making a weird noise and then somebody else can go in and put guitar behind that and then somebody else could go, “Oh, I hear a drum part in my head, let me put that.” And then before you know it, you have this nice really rocking symphony of a cat doing its thing. And it’s just gone around, it’s gone through several different iterations. And I think Tumblr does that, but in a much more multi-mode type of way so you can get all these different creative vibes. Somebody is a great writer, somebody is a great manipulator of imagery, somebody else is going to create music, and so on. And it just comes together in a very full way.

Cherokee: Yeah, and I like how on Tumblr, as you said, you can kind of build posts exactly how you want to see them. And then you can also add onto people’s posts in kind of whatever media you want as well. You can re-blog and add a poll or a photo or a gif or whatever it is. And so I think you kind of see like the rings of a tree – you know? When you look at a post you kind of see the journey that it’s taken across all these people’s blogs, especially when it’s one of those posts that becomes like a re-blog tree, where people are just adding ... or re-blog chain where people are just adding on their own kind of take.

Was it the Mr. Sandman, man me a sand? That collaborative kind of ...

(laughter)

Lauren: Yes, yeah.

Cherokee: So, making up an entire song. Yeah. (laughs)

Mason: Oh my gosh.

Perry: Nice.

Mason: Thank you for re-unlocking that in my brain. We interviewed Dr. Vivian Asimos for our episode on Slender Man. And one of the things we talked to her about was how the internet has changed folklore and one of the things she mentioned that stuck with me is how basically the platforms it’s created on end up shaping it and seeing how it takes form.

And so it kind of makes sense to think of this one, this is largely text and it comes from Tumblr, which is the home of text posts and fan fics, but also has the graphic design element and things like that. But ...

Perry: I think you mentioned fan fiction. I think that is the heart of this.

Mason: Yeah.

Perry: You have a lot of people that are ... their heart is in story and their heart is in creating big things and they had this chance to come together collectively and do that. The other thing, going back to folks that we interviewed on the Slender Man side, we had that introduction of the concept of the woozle effect. Which is ... it comes from a Winnie the Pooh story where Pooh and Piglet were following their own footsteps in circles, thinking that would lead them out of the woods. And it’s become this term that’s been used to describe where somebody’s evidence of a thing is actually the fact that they did the thing – somebody else did the same thing.

And so you end up with circle footnotes and things, or references that the reason that this thing is true is because there’s this other thing is true that actually points back to the first thing. And so it becomes really hard to deconstruct. And I think there are elements of that in Goncharov as well. There’s been so much ancillary creation around that, that somebody could point to the reality of it by finding one of these third, fourth, fifth generation pieces of content that somebody created. The fact that there’s a musical score for it, that is a very interesting piece of evidence for a thing.

Cherokee: Yeah, the only thing about this film that doesn’t exist is the film itself. Every other aspect of it has been completely fleshed out. (laughs)

Perry: Well, and you even have Martin Scorsese in a text chain saying, “Yeah, I did that movie several years ago.”

Lauren: Yeah, which is incredible. And I’ve seen some people on Tumblr sort of joking about what would happen if somebody ever actually made Goncharov? Would that ruin the joke?

Perry: They would get skewered.

Lauren: Or would it be the ultimate culmination?

Perry: Yeah.

Lauren: And I think the woozle effect is something that I was thinking about just in terms of how hard it can be to, yeah, find the starting point of all of these things, but also to know where to start when looking into these things. And I think Tumblr especially can be intimidating to people sometimes, in terms of jumping into it as a platform. I’m really curious for you, too, when you are picking a topic, whether it’s Slender Man or you want to learn about Goncharov, where do you start? What’s the first thing that you do? What are the places you go to, the modes you take, to try and untangle this web?

Mason: At the moment, at least for season one, have kind of gone with broader themes to explore. So, like the Slender Man one was exploring a folkloric concept of austension, which is when someone in real life acts out parts of a story or parts of a story come to fruition. And Slender Man was a good example. And so was the Momo phenomenon. And so then in the other one we’re exploring alternate reality games and folk groups. So, it’s kind of ... as to where that started? I think it just sort of comes from aggregating a couple of different neat things we’re heard about and then following that trail a little bit deeper and seeing what that intersects with and trying to find a point in-between to take things on.

I feel like that’s true. Because if I have to give the perfect complete honest answer – I have no idea.

(laughter)

You know whenever you set to start something you have this idea and then no matter what the act of doing it makes it something totally different? That definitely happens a lot.

Lauren: Mm hmm.

Perry: Yeah. I think we do start with these broad ideas of something like the memetic nature of something might be a theme, and then we want to find five examples of that. And so Goncharov could be memetic in some ways. It’s more than just a meme. But it is very memetic in the way that it spread. Then we would get into topics like virility. And you might look at Goncharov versus Bernie Sanders and mittens. What was the reason potentially that one of these ... actually both of those, exploded?

But what were the factors involved in that? Well, with Goncharov, you’ve got kind of the implosion of Twitter, you’ve got just the natural group of people that like to hang out on Tumblr, there’s probably three or four other factors that we can find that may have contributed to that. With Bernie Sanders, as you look at several aspects of virility, you have ordinary people, you have heightened emotion, you have people that are just looking for fun, you also have the end of a very rough political season. And everybody needing to collectively exhale and laugh a little bit.

And so you saw people regardless of where they were on the political spectrum, agreeing – this is a great image. And sharing that in so many different ways. And there’s probably two reasons for this. One is because I found it in a book called Memes and Digital Culture. And it is from the Mandela effect of the Mandela version of Lauren. This is from somebody named Lamour Shiffen.

Lauren: (laughs) Weird.

Perry: And the name sounds so close to yours in a weird alternate universe type of way.

Lauren: Oh my god!

Cherokee: From the multiverse where Goncharov exists.

Perry: And in her book on memes, and this is a little bit ... this is like ten years old at this point that this book came out. But she wrote about a study from Jonah Berger and Katie Miltman. And they talked about the give P’s of what makes something go viral. Or actually the six P’s. And so one is Positivity. So, it’s something people can enjoy, can have fun in, they can celebrate. Another one is provoking high arousal emotions. And that’s usually things like anger, joy, celebration. Another one is Packaging. Just the way that it looks, the way that it feels. Prestige – maybe being associated with somebody great, like Martin Scorsese. Something this year, with John Wyck 4 coming out, you might do something with Keanu Reeves. Positioning. And then the last one is Participation. Can everybody pile on to this thing?

And I think when you look at something like Goncharov or Bernie’s mittens or a lot of these other things that have just gone crazy, it is because you see several of these things lining up in just the perfect way. And it was fun to kind of look through that lens of the way that certain academics have tried to measure the memetic nature of something, or the viral nature of something, and try to look at that and see whether these things match up or not.

Lauren: Yeah, that’s really interesting because it sort of relates to a book that I’m reading right now called, Because Internet, which is about the history of sort of internet language. And one of the things that she talks about in the chapter I just read was specifically around early memes as we think of memes. Right? So, LOL Cats and Doge and these various things and sort of the Impact Font memes. And how in the beginning, they were existing in a very specific community because of the amount of effort it took to make them. And then when sort of meme maker websites came to fruition, all of a sudden they exploded and I think that the ability to participate and the ease of participation is so important and something that definitely lends itself to the Goncharov phenomenon, because, yes, you can be a beautiful visual artist or an incredible writer and write script pieces or write music or whatever it is.

But you can also just be a person with a Tumblr account who makes a post about a moment in Goncharov like you would talk about a moment in a movie and because there’s no sort of one true source, everybody’s participation is equal. And I think that’s really unique. I love the internet. (laughs)

Cherokee: Yeah, so much.

Perry: Absolutely.

[gentle music]

Lauren: And it would not be Dashboard Diaries if we didn’t end the show with our Feels Corner. Cherokee, what is giving you feels this week?

Cherokee: The feels I’m getting this week are terrified, but it’s still an emotion. It’s still a feeling. I am watching Yellow Jacket season two.

Lauren: Oh boy.

Cherokee: I don’t know if you watch this show, Lauren.

Lauren: I do.

Cherokee: But oh my. Did you see the newest episode?

Lauren: I haven’t seen the newest one, yet. I’ve only seen the first one of the season.

Cherokee: Oh my, Lauren. Oh my. So, yeah, I love Yellow Jackets. I have watched the first season two or three times, I think. And I just love the mystery of it. It’s so much fun. So, yeah. Really stoked about this season of Yellow Jackets and Succession.

Lauren: Of course.

Cherokee: Succession just came back. And as a Tom/Greg truther I am very excited to have my favorite duo back.

Lauren: Oh, the disgusting brothers.

(laughter)

Cherokee: What about you, Lauren? What has you in your feels?

Lauren: You know, it’s going to be Star Trek: Next Gen again. I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but my partner and I have been watching through the whole series. We’re in season five now. And we just watched an episode last night called The Outcast that was made in 1992 and it’s this beautiful trans allegory about the strictures of gender being a prison and people being able to choose how they want to express their gender. It was made in 1992 and it’s amazing.

So, I just really love seeing stuff from 30 years ago that is so heartfelt and so progressive. It makes me very, very hopeful. So, that’s been a highlight. And then earlier this same season was the very famous episode Darmok, which made me cry. So, get emotional over old TV shows, that’s my recommendation for this week. (laughs)

Cherokee: Love to get emotional over old TV shows. So, go back and watch Goncharov – old film, not a TV show.

Lauren: Exactly.

Cherokee: But still ... (laughs) it absolutely will put you in your feels.

Lauren: It really will. And with that ... I’m Lauren Shippen, and you can find me at TheLaurenShippen.Tumblr.com.

Cherokee: And I’m Cherokee McAnelly and you can find me at Overchers (pun very much intended) dot Tumblr.com. (The pun very much intended is not a part of the URL) This has been Dashboard Diaries. And ...

[outro music]

Lauren: May your anons always be loving.

Cherokee: Your dash always refreshed.

Lauren: Your gifs always be loading.

Cherokee: And your ships always canon.

Lauren: May the fics you’re reading always be finished.

Cherokee: And the answers you seek always in the re-blogs.Lauren: Thanks for scrolling with us!

Can you believe it's been 50 years since the very real film Goncharov came out in very real movie theaters? We're celebrating the anniversary by bringing on the brilliant Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus from the podcast, Digital Folklore. We talk about how Tumblr created its own folk legend in inventing a movie whole cloth from a knock off shoe. Yes, you heard that right. A shoe.

Credits and transcript in our reblog. You can find transcripts for this, and every other episode, here.

Find the posts discussed in this episode in this tag!

#DD 18 #transcript

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