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.