Creative Crowdsourcing and Mythology

There is an intrinsic connection between a story that is creatively crowdsourced and mythology. By mythology, I don't just mean books like "the Odyssey," or other ancient stories that we had to read in some high school western civilization class. A standard definition for myth is something to effect of: "a traditional story, esp. one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events." This actually seems to fit more with those texts that bind cultures together in a belief system: like the Bible, or the Bhagavad Gita or the Quran. But what's missing from all these texts is a reference to the author. We never see, "The Bible . . . by Jimmie McAlester," for example. There might be several authors, they might be unknown, but there's never that one person who wrote the whole thing.

In a sense, you could say these texts, which are mythologies in the sense that they all typically involve "supernatural beings or events," and they unite communities together under a set of common values are crowdsourced. By the way, we tend to associate myth, in our modern culture, with falsehoods, so I'm not making any value judgements on these sacred texts. I'm using myth strictly within the context supplied by the definition, above.

So, if the story is truly creatively crowdsourced, there are several authors and they are all contributing different angles. There's not really an auteurship about the whole thing but there is usually a directed vision and everyone works within that vision. It makes perfect sense, with this in mind, that a crowdsourced narrative might take on more of a mythological form than relating a story in the traditional narrative form, where this a singular point of view - even if that point of view is a detached observer.

The Transcendent Web?

Imagine you're on a soccer team, in the midst of a very close game with an opposing team. The stadium lights glare onto the field and though the cheers of the crowd, fill the air, they seem to somehow wash out into the night. You are aware of their presence, and yet, you are not. Something feels different about this game. Everyone on the team is in sync ~ operating as parts of a larger organism. Even the audience plays into the whole energy of the moment - again, there, but not there.
In the final moments, your team scores and

YOU WIN!

And your team is,
well,
needless to say,
ecstatic.

Obviously, you won the game, right?
But you've won games before and somehow, this one is different.

Why?

Because perhaps it wasn't just about winning, not that you even knew it before, but because your team was in sync, in "the zone," and the moment almost had a supernatural air to it.
Maybe we've all had moments like this some time in our lives. Maybe they don't necessarily involve a group of people. Maybe, you're just walking outside at dusk and something about the moment hits you; the way the air smells, the quality of light, the movement of the grass reflecting the remaining glints of sunlight. And it's a moment that sets itself apart from other moments.

Or, you have that amazing dream where everything is in technicolor and you're flying ~ literally flying ~ over this fantastic scenery

Then you wake up and you're left with this feeling of how fantastic it all was and waking life, by comparison, seems much more muted (even thought your life may be perfectly cool, by all accounts). Excepting the last example, the other instances take place in the physical universe

And yet, today, we are hearing buzz about how the web can link us together like a single organism or take us toward the next step in our evolution. But can the web possibly provide the same type of transcendental experiences noted in the above example? I can't think of any, right off hand. I have yet to hear about someone looking at their news feed on Facebook and suddenly, the pixels on their screen glow in perfect harmony, the angels sing in digital harmony, yaddah yaddah yah.

But maybe we just haven't figured out how to use online technologies to have the soccer game moment. Or could we recreate a moment like that fantastic dream, where we don't just view the whole thing like a passive observer, but we actually manage to live it? How could we do this with creative crowdsourcing, where the aim is not to get a bunch of people to make your idea but agree to take part in a mysterious experiment?