Digital folklore scholars Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank have brought together the new go-to volume for scholarship on internet-based folkloric expression. As Peck eloquently outlines in his incisive introduction to the anthology (a piece of writing worth the price of admission all by itself), this volume reveals how “social media fundamentally changes folk practices in new, often invisible ways” (6). By bringing these invisible effects to light, this volume pushes folklore scholarship’s ongoing examination of digital communication forward with analytical rigor, fantastic examples, and a little bit of humor. For seasoned scholars, students in graduate courses, and undergraduate students alike, this volume offers an excellent opportunity to consider the nature of contemporary folklore as it intersects with our everyday deployments of the most ubiquitous of digital communication technologies: social media.
Peck’s and Blank’s volume shows how the features built into our smartphones and communication platforms like TikTok create new possibilities for everyday expression. With these new possibilities, new expectations follow. As with folklore throughout the ages, the interplay of expectations and possibilities fuels everyday creativity. While there is certainly plenty of continuity between today’s folklore and the folklore of the past, Peck and Blank argue that social media blurs the lines the authors see between the vernacular and the institutional. Through advertising, branding, and other communication practices, institutions are increasingly adopting a vernacular mode. As a result, “social media complicates our understanding not only of how folklore is expressed and transmitted but also how folk practices can be deployed as a resource to reinscribe or resist dominant power structures” (12). To explore a nice variety of these opportunities for re-inscription and resistance, Folklore and Social Media offers twelve chapter-length case studies ranging from the institutional but vernacular-like Twitter-based communication of Donald Trump to the remediating of the “Beauty and the Beast” through everyday creators’ fan fiction posts.
The first case study in the book is offered by Shelia Bock. Bock examines social media posts that express a specific form of Latinx identity. In Bock’s analysis, social media expressions offer individuals tools for reorienting dominant discourses that enact their own sense of belonging. Next, Tangherlini’s, Roychowdhury’s, and Broadwell’s chapter on conspiracy theory uses sophisticated computational methods to show how the affordances of social media are uniquely suited to the structure and transmission characteristics of conspiracy theory that long predate digital media. After that, Philips and Milner focus on Donald Trump’s Twitter communication. In their analysis, Trump’s Twitter posts while president blur the line between vernacular expression and institutional agency. Phillips and Milner decompose Trump’s Twitter style to show how it fuses governmental, business, and folk expression in a powerful deployment of the complex affordances offered by Twitter.
In the next chapter, Andrew Peck’s own case study examines institutional agents using well-known internet memes in their social media communication to attempt to enact a vernacular voice. Peck argues that these sorts of hybrid communications can fail because of the way they interact with their audiences’ expectations by offering conflicting accounts of themselves as both vernacular and institutional agents. After Peck, Laineste’s contribution to the volume expands its coverage by adding a specifically European case with her analysis of digital humor in the Estonian context. This case offers a complex example of how humor reveals subtle and not always flattering insights into everyday expressions of xenophobia. After that, Jorgensen’s and Lee’s case examines humorous memes that feature Joe Biden as a trickster. In their analysis, these memes draw on shared expectations to deal with the disappointment associated with Donald Trump taking the office of US President. Complicating their analysis, these shared expectations rely on hegemonic ideas of gender and power even as they simultaneously offer a resistive discursive space.
The next chapter is a fascinating example of a Twitter-based ghost story that eventually evolved into a commercial project. Willsey’s contribution directly examines the relationship between everyday online vernacular communication and the potential commercial outgrowths of those folkloric behaviors. Willsey deftly demonstrates how it is precisely the collaborative creation of at least this narrative genre that makes it popular. However, those very same collaborative qualities are incompatible with current methods for marketing and distributing commercial narrative texts. After Willsey, Thompson’s contribution looks at a similar relationship between more everyday and more commercial texts by tracing how a commercial text variant of an old story, “Beauty and Beast,” is assimilated and transformed into a host of vernacular expressions by the sustained appropriation of the text by fans. In the process, the fans become their own authorities on the text—once again.
Next, McNeil’s chapter discusses the nature of hashtags in relation to her work with the Digital Folklore Project to shed light on the challenges of documenting and categorizing digital folklore. Then, Laudun’s contribution uses the spread of spooky clown sightings as a way to consider the intertwined nature of mass and social media. Using both computational and close textual analysis, Laudun’s work demonstrates how social and mass media communications interact with each other in a communication ecosystem that leaves its marks on the folkloric texts as they move between more institutional and more vernacular forms of communication.
Next, Tucker’s chapter examines the communication of young adults and children as they explore moral issues and impending adulting through pranks on social media by documenting the spread of a rumor through ostentation, the real-life enacting of elements of a legend or rumor matrix. In the anthology’s final chapter, Ellis takes Folklore and Social Media on a direct foray into the nature of online play. Imposing a stiff structural framework to his understanding of the typically dynamic and often unpredictable nature of online play, Ellis’s chapter seeks to cement the claim that online folklore is important to study. This same claim is, of course, one that Trevor Blank, Lynne McNeil, and Andrew Peck (and even myself) have made across many years and many publications before this one: online folklore is not “a ‘trivial’ pursuit,” as Ellis puts it, and as such it must be documented and analyzed (247).
If Folklore and Social Media is the state of the art of digital folklore research, it presents the reader with an excellent overview of the different topics and methods that researchers are using in this field today. Highly readable and often funny, it is a collection of essays that is suitable for classes in digital folklore or communication technologies, as well as for the general reader. As a book, Folklore and Social Media is using a communication technology that has hardly changed for 200 years. In the last twenty years, Facebook has become Instagram has become TikTok and beyond. Given the rapidly changing nature of digital technologies, this book offers a welcome update from “internet folklore” to “folklore as it emerges in social media.” Looking ahead in time, still newer technologies and platforms will force us to (once again) update our research topics, methods, and to publish new things—or at least to tell our chatbots what to write for us.
Thinking back through the last twenty-five years of my own publishing and teaching in digital folklore, I wonder if we will (in the next book) be able to look out over our field and declare a victorious peace. Whole careers have now been built on studying digital folklore, and some of the platforms and technologies those folklorists studied have come and gone—and sometimes come back. Aren’t these careers and technologies testament to the “untrivial” nature of digital communication? Have we not now won the field? Is the battle over? Maybe not for folklore itself. We folklorists have argued long and hard for the untrivial nature of everyday and informal communication and behavior. Here, at the end of Folklore and Social Media, it is clear to me that online folklore is no longer viewed as any more or any less trivial than folklore itself. Maybe in service of folklore, then, books still need to be written and courses still taught. Making the argument for the value of folklore studies generally, Peck and Blank must be commended for still committing words to (printed) pages in the pursuit of documenting, understanding, and celebrating the power and beauty of our daily moments of expression “online” or off.
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[Review length: 1367 words • Review posted on May 13, 2023]