Folklore and the Internet

Utah State University Press

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

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...