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Upgrading Folklore for the Digital Age

The Internet has become our primary mode of communication. On the Internet, people participate in multiple communities by remixing and sharing information. Because of the remixing and sharing functions of the Internet, traditional folk tales, beliefs, legends, and material culture have been given new life. The Internet not only preserves and enhances traditional forms of folklore, but also gives rise to emergent genres particularly suited to the medium. This repository of lore lays virtually untouched by the majority of folklore scholars. The remixing and sharing of traditional folklore and the new genres emerging on the Internet deserve more scholarly attention.  

Traditions require creativity in adapting to current situations. Eleanor Long’s research on personality types of performers of folklore highlights the need for creativity. When passing on a joke, preservators too often forget the punchline. Integrators use validating formulas to make the joke funnier to their audience and recreators create a whole new joke, following the original’s pattern. This creative alteration of tradition keeps it alive, as opposed to killing it by losing essential elements.

Creativity is not just characteristic of face-to-face interactions. When folklore is adapted into literature, it often undergoes great change, such as the contemporary spin Shakespeare put on folktales about moneylending in his play, The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare differentiates his version from earlier tellings by casting a Jew as the moneylender and making his story an oikotype of the Elizabethan Era when Jews had been expelled from England and folk superstitions surrounded them (Rogers).

In like manner, when people share texts or materials online, they often change or add details that make them relevant to their community: a phenomenon they refer to as “remixing’. Items of traditional folklore are remixed by many hands as they are shared online. The remix culture of the internet is the perfect venue for the creative preservation of tradition.

There are also emergent genres of folklore particular to the Internet. Examples of these genres are memes, photoshops, hashtag jokes, and items folklorists have yet to label like viral videos and their remixes. These genres are what Howard calls “amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression” (192). As early as 1990, John Dorst asserted a collapse between consumer culture and the vernacular (188-89). His assertion challenges traditional conceptions of the definition of folklore, but this “penetration” of the vernacular is inherent to the nature of participatory media on the Internet and does not diminish its creativity (Dorst, 188).

In Folklore and the Internet, Trevor Blank writes, “Creativity is at the center of folkloristic inquiry, and the manifestations of online identity formation, artistic expression, folk religion, and the social dynamics of community construction are all important venues for analysis" (12). “Folkloric expression [on the internet] is reflective and serves as a 'mirror' of [contemporary] societal and cultural values” (Blank,4). It is this mirror that folklorists ought to be studying and teaching about if they want to keep the field relevant into the digital age.

Sources:

Dorst, John. "Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age." Journal of Folklore Research. 27.3 (1990): 179-190. Web.

Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Ed. Trevor Blank. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009.

Howard, Robert Glenn. "Electronic Hybridity:  The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web." Journal of American Folklore. 121 (2008): 192-218. Web.

Rogers, Jami. “Shylock and History.” Masterpiece Theater: Merchant of Venice Essays and Interviews. PBS. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.