Folklore and the Internet

Vernacular Expression in a Digital World

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2009 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-750-6

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet Trevor J. Blank.........................................1Chapter 1 Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore Simon J. Bronner...............................................................................21Chapter 2 Guardians of the Living: Characterization of Missing Women on the Internet Elizabeth Tucker.........................................67Chapter 3 The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the Provision of Infinite Choice Lynne S. McNeill.......................................80Chapter 4 The Forward as Folklore: Studying E-Mailed Humor Russell Frank......................................................................98Chapter 5 Epistemology, the Sociology of Knowledge, and the Wikipedia Userbox Controversy William Westerman...................................123Chapter 6 Crusading on the Vernacular Web: The Folk Beliefs and Practices of Online Spiritual Warfare Robert Glenn Howard.....................159Chapter 7 Ghosts in the Machine: Mourning the MySpace Dead Robert Dobler......................................................................175Chapter 8 Public Folklore in Cyberspace Gregory Hansen........................................................................................194Appendix Webography of Public Folklore Resources compiled by Gregory Hansen...................................................................213References.....................................................................................................................................231About the Contributors.........................................................................................................................254Index..........................................................................................................................................257

Chapter One

Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore

Simon J. Bronner

One popular sense of tradition signals a human, even naturalistic connection. In this view, tradition is down home, out in the fields, back in the woods, where socializing, ritualizing, and storytelling occur unencumbered by machines or corporations. Hearing tradition uttered often raises images of family huddled around the dinner table at holidays or the neighborhood gang getting together for play, and it might be imaginatively set in opposition to the socially alienating quality of modernity dominated by technology. The rhetoric of tradition cited in folkloristic annals is not that far off from these characterizations, although it may broaden to a variety of settings-urban as well as rural, industrial as well as agricultural-and include folk transmission via a host of technologies, from printing press to photocopier (Bendix 1997; Bronner 1998). Still, analytical uses of tradition typically evoke a community's naturally authentic customs or face-to-face expressive encounters, in contrast to the artificiality of technology. The folklorist's tradition signifies cultural production of earthy artistic expressions, from homey proverbs to hand-wrought pots, which are said to be folk because they attach culturally to groups and repeat and vary. To be sure, the joke of the day or the latest rumor on the Internet may be pegged as lore or urban legend, but it is hard to shake the image of folk connections made around the campfire rather than through FireWire.

With the explosion of the Internet as the way that people communicate with one another, is tradition still relevant? After all, texting a joke to an unseen recipient is a far cry from gesturing and making eye contact with huddled buddies in the usual familiar place. In this chapter, I examine, ethnographically and psychologically, the modernistic tendency to construct various cultural divisions, or binaries, to separate reality from fantasy or imagination. Such binaries include natural and artificial, public and private, analog and digital, group and network, relational and analytical, and especially folk and official. Although folklorists have previously noted that various communication technologies that emerged in the twentieth century, such as the telephone and photocopier, have altered the way that lore, as well as information, is spread, I find that the Internet, more so than other media, has unsettled many of the prior cultural binaries, which is evident especially in the rise of what I call the transgressive folk web. The Internet has become an essential tool of everyday life; it is also distinguished by being envisioned as a separate location or space in which traditions arise and are constituted.

A description often applied to cyberspace and natural space is that each is free and open, in the sense of unrestricted; each invites involvement on common ground, where participants can formulate social guidelines to organize themselves. From the perspective of the user, the Internet is a free medium that opens access to information. A formidable Internet social movement advocates for "open-source culture," in which collectivity, rather than acquisitive individualism, dominates and the communal spirit is manifested by making creative works, including software, that are entitled to copyright protection generally available to the masses (Truscello 2003). Unstructured in this ideal cyber-collective, the Internet could appear as one big open mess were it not for organizational tools that are left to users to put into place, thereby showing their orderliness in creating an information system. Practices that specially tag the organization of information and so become metaphors for vitality on the Internet are searching, surfing, and marking. The thrill of the dynamo-proportion search engine driving the conspicuous consumption of information is downright intoxicating, until the sobering realization hits that one has some serious sorting and sifting to do with the results to enable an effective virtual office. Structuring one's knowledge allows, like a grammar of language, the individual to communicate and think together with others.

In the gathering on the digital commons, though, Internet users can only approximate meeting, so when users talk of virtual reality much of its meaning is wrapped up in making a connection that is social as well as electronic, and that is where tradition comes in (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; Rheingold 2001; Swiss 2004; Zizek 2001). Perhaps most exciting, and troublesome at the same time, is that seated at screens, people negotiate the isolation of one-person/one-hard-drive material culture with a Wi-Fi social breakthrough that allows, as never before, conversations between anywhere and the deep recesses of homes and offices. Examining the web landscape with touch screens on the go or mouse pads in cubicles, users recognize a fundamental difference between sites identified as official or corporate, which control content and broadcast information to a passive viewing audience, and those that allow posting, "live" chat, and free exchange. For many users, the latter constitutes the folk universe of cyberspace, in contrast to its elite realm. The folk realm is not located in a socioeconomic sector or particular nationality but instead represents a participatory process that some posters refer to as the democratic or open web.

Does where you are from matter anymore then? For folklorists, who are perennial commentators on the formation of cultural identity through the production of tradition in place, this context for transmission means rethinking business, or analysis, as usual (see Jackson 2001; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; Oring 1994). Although folklorists have an advantage among the scholarly pack who look critically at the Internet in having created a niche for themselves as specialists on vernacular expression through various forms of transmission, the engineered or mediated inter- and hyper-textual, visual assemblage that characterizes much of Internet communication provides challenges of identification and interpretation based on the discreteness of extracted artifacts of tradition (see Bronner 2006; Ketner 1976).

Now hold the phone. The traditional, or folk, web is not just a place for simulating storytelling around the kitchen table or bull sessions in the dorm room. Noting that much of folklore research was premised on the social intimacy or familiarity of people engaging in face-to-face oral communication, folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that rather than transposing pre-modern orality into the new media, folklorists need to start fresh, with the premise that "computer mediated communication, at least in its present form is between speech and writing. Listers on X-CULT-X dub this kind of talk putation, and speak of puting or putating. The words on the screen neither precede nor follow speech, though they often feel more like talking than writing. Electronic messages are neither a playscript nor a transcript, particularly in the interactive chat programs. They are the event" (1995, 74). She describes the kind of Internet vein mined by folklorists for textual humor, but many websites complicate the matter with visual imagery, often in motion, that is layered, embedded, and juxtaposed with other messages into a multimedia assemblage. A folkloric term that could describe tralatitious Internet praxis, between reading and writing, assembling and visualizing, is the process of relating (and the interactive mode of responding). Carrying a sense of doing more than scribing or sending information, it connotes reaching someone by relating narrative and belief, signifies the connection and assemblage in relating different sources to one another, and considers precedents in relation to the present.

Although it is tempting to see Internet communicative frames as more conversations from which one can extract tradition as rhetorical strategies, if not artifacts, surely something different is occurring when one is using a keyboard for "telling" a joke, yet it is a far cry from pecking out reports on the keys of a mechanical typewriter in a previous epoch. The computer monitor also has transformed from its previous incarnation as a television set in a couch-potato-filled living room of the past. What happens when keyboard and screen conjugate, and out of the union is born a vernacular communication form that by tapping on keys imitates the ease of conversation? What happens when producer and consumer merge in a single interactive medium as prosumers, who can readily create as well as consume the message, or product (Toffler 1980)? Is it not a symbolic breakthrough when instead of bowing to sacred icons, people can freely move them around on the screen, create their own avatar (drawing on Hindu mythology of the descent of a deity to earth), and in ordinary, secular life use a cursor like a cleric handling a pointer on sacred parchment scrolls or evoke with a hand symbol that locates a hyperlink the revered yad, or hand, in Jewish Torah readings? Maybe the big question, or byte, is whether beyond offering unprecedented access to materials of folklore amassed outside it, in the field, the Internet facilitates, mediates, or produces tradition on a computer screen. Do some or all of the productions tailor-made for the website phenomena YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz qualify as folk practices, and if so, well, so what? What are the various cultural texts, and contexts, of e-mails, text messages, listservs, blogs, vlogs, and homepages and how do they diverge from the face-to-face, in situ experience of field-recorded material? Is disembodied storytelling on the Internet really folkloric, after all? Is it real, even if it is in real-time? Or in computer lingo, what happens when in addition to digitizing folklore, for example, sending or posting jokes they heard orally, people virtualize it? How do new media technologies featuring the Internet-such as netbooks, video game units, media players, iPods, smartphones, and iPhones-relate to cyberculture?

These are key questions because folklore-a fundamental, timeless form of communication-is inextricably tangled up in the Web. Folklore as an expression of tradition has to be present on the Internet because increasingly e-mail and listservs, often incorporated into the Web, have become the primary way that people message, connect, and link, if not talk, to one another, and hence incorporate the symbolic and projective functions that folklore distinctively provides. When people e-mail or post to a board, they often invoke, and evoke, folklore as a cultural frame of reference for creatively relating experience, particularly in narration and imagery that respond to ambiguity and anxiety. If saying that folklore is on the Web or is produced about it are relatively safe cultural calls, the signal claim that the Internet acts folkloricly may give pause (see Dundes 1980, 17-19; Dundes 2005, 406; Ellis 2006). Yet upon reflection, the Internet as an expanding folkloric thoroughfare may help explain aspects that have confounded those technopundits who were sure that the vampire in the machine sucked users dry of their culture and creativity. As an icon of mass media, the Internet was certain, they said, to alienate us all and obliterate the last semblances of community and art we have (Ronnell 2001; Ross 2001; see also Benjamin [1936] 2007). How, then, has it been a tool of social connection, and consequently, of new expressive lore engendering digital, or virtual, culture?

To begin answering these questions, I move from the manifest appeal of the Internet as a social networking tool to the less discussed, but critical area, of its folk logic, which is steeped in the psychologically created frame of an open medium. In addition to suggesting concepts to guide the interpretation of folk web practice and sources for the social construction of the folk web, I provide a case study involving cultural responses to tragedy in 1987 and 2007 that allows me to compare folklore as oral and Internet traditions.

Social Factors and Folklorization

The basis of the claim for the Internet taking on folkloric qualities is the medium's interactive, instrumental quality; that differentiates it from television and radio, which divides people between broadcasters and listeners or viewers. Internet users are captivated by its capability to simultaneously send and receive, produce and consume, write and read (Tabbi 1997; Zukin 2004, 227-52). Precedent can be found in vernacular uses of photography, photocopying, and faxing. They invited manipulation of images and text to create a play frame in which humor, pathos, and memory were shared among members of a social network. The playful manipulation often came from an anonymous source that signified commentaries we might call metafolklore on values and attitudes about the very technology and institutional contexts that made the images and text possible (Dundes [1966] 2007b; Dundes and Pagter 1975; Fineman 2004; Mechling 2004, 2005; Preston 1994; Roemer 1994). Many of these broadside-type sheets, surreptitiously produced in and circulated from photocopy rooms, found their way to bulletin boards and office walls, creating a foundation for the humorous postings one sees on the Internet today.

In my experience, folklore was present at the beginnings of computing, even before Internet and e-mail burst on the scene. When in its Neolithic stage of the 1960s I began computing, as one of the select high school math-team members who formed a geek clique, the gargantuan machine we thought was wondrous in its power was barely capable of a few mathematical calculations. But it still seemed light years ahead of the slide rules we were carrying around, and the idea of wiring into a machine what we did in our heads made us giddy. The machine was the brain, and we marvelled at its symbolization of things automatic, how it seemed self-acting, with apparently a life of its own. It suggested autonomy; unlike the automobile, it could run itself, evident in the digital installation of autorun. It could speak, through programmed message responses to user actions. I recall philosophical discussion of automorphism, the reproduction of forms, as a representative system. I wrote a program to generate automorphic numbers, maybe as a precursor to folkloristic fascination with repetition and variation of forms. These numbers are those that when multiplied result in the number appearing in the total (e.g., 5 5=25; see Kobayashi, Schmid, and Yang 2008). Binary language, the programming fundament of 1s and 0s that spawned a new science, also gave rise to inside jokes written into notebooks, such as "There are only 10 types of people in the world-those who understand binary, and those who don't."

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