DIGITAL FOLKLORE
CELEBRATING FOLK CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE
ABSTRACT
Our society lives in the historical period of the Digital Age characterized by a rapid epochal shift of the ways in which we interact with others and share information provoked by increased accessibility to the internet. From forms of textual play and online jargon to the folk art of new media in internet memes and viral videos, these semiotic resources and user practices help to expand our traditional comprehension of folklore. On this site, we will explore the significance of digital folklore through visual and textual ethnographic domains to help highlight the contribution, need, and value of the internet to social evolution.
digital folkore:
a breakdown
Folklore is an expressive body of culture encompassing traditions, beliefs, customs, and stories shared by a community. Digital Folklore is just that but through the digital media (and everything digital does not mean its online). In this case, let's look into internet culture and cyberethnography in the post-dial up age. Digital folklore includes but is not limited to online communication (methods, jargon and emojis), videos, memes, and communities- all of which have a siginificant role in cataloging our era's history like never before.
ONLINE JARGON
DIGITAL FOLK ART
COMMUNITIES
CATALOGING
ONLINE JARGON
Vernacular creativity in the digital age has created ways for people to communicate from different parts of the world. Online jargon extends beyond the use of "LOL" and "TTYL" and has developed into rich and complex methods of exchanging textual information to each other.
Think Reddit form (>be me), doge speak (much wow), internet slang (brb), abbreviations (totes), hashtags (#tbt), and viral phrases (don't @ me)
DIGITAL FOLK ART
Digital content created and shared on the internet is tied to developing the knowledge of how the web works and not just an outcome of using the Internet. As often as social media gets a bad rep, it is a method that connects many through the shared experience of witnessing history. Content creation through memes, art, vlogging, photography, video, song, and more paves a new way to track events, places, and people.
COMMUNITIES
Online users are a folk group in itself but within the world wide web lies a vast selection of subcultures to join, discover, create, and identify with. From BTS international fan clubs to finding another farmer to date, crowdsourcing to help pay for a surgery, mommy blogs dedicated to quick crock pot dinners, online gaming forums, facebook pages just for sharing pictures of disapproving corgis- online communities help to bring people together.
CATALOGING
Unlike traditional folklore, finding the roots of online traditions, myths, and expressions are generally easier to recover. With algorithms like Facebook's Memories or the IPhone's On This Day feature, we are able to reference historical data at our fingertips. Digital folklore is a catalogue of our generation's history thoroughly entangled with the uptake of new forms of mediated communication that continues to grow each day!