When I first opened Theresa Heyd’s 2008 book Email Hoaxes: Form, Function, Genre Ecology I thought I had discovered a lost classic of digital folklore studies. Unfortunately, that is not quite how it turned out. Although its central claim is about the nature of “digital folklore,” the book proceeds by applying linguistic genre theory to create a robust and detailed taxonomy of a very tightly bounded media object: the email hoax. Rigorously analytic in its handling of texts, the work demonstrates a powerfully systematic approach to communication research. For specialists working on digital folklore, it offers an excellent model for doing taxonomic research. However, its tight focus on the formal features of emailed texts inhibits it from documenting the dynamically lived performances that give life to everyday expressive behavior online. That lack renders it less attractive for a broader readership.
The author defines the “email hoax” or “EH” as “a message containing false or at least problematic information that is passed along via the forward function of email programs” (1). Offering examples from across the early years of the Internet, the author documents everything from a hoax about a “2400 Baud Modem” virus in 1988 to the 2005 rumor of a cursed girl whom Allah turned into a rat (5). She focuses on what she considers the most prominent period of EHs from 1997 to 1999, showing that the appearance of new EHs significantly declined after 2002 (4).
Her central claim is that EHs are not a self-contained genre, but a “linguistically distinct subform of Digital Folklore” (7, italics in original). For her, digital folklore is a “supergenre” that has spawned many “subgenres” (email hoaxing, prayer chains, and so on). This taxonomy makes sense within the baroque system the work has taken from linguistics because supergeneric distinctions are made based on the etic-defined “function” of a genre within a communicative community and subgeneric distinctions are made based on the formal qualities of a communicative action. Because larger linguistic purposes change more slowly, the supergenre is more stable than its supporting subgenres. Hence, the author argues, the digital folklore supergenre is not new because it fulfills pre-digital linguistic functions. However, the many subgenres that define digital folklore are new in the sense that their formal features are rapidly emerging, hybridizing, and changing with digital communication technologies (see pages 199-202). Heyd summarizes this argument in chapter 1. In chapter 2, she develops a taxonomy of digital forms in order to distinguish the features of the EH. In chapter 3, she expands on the specific formal features of email hoaxes. In chapter 4, she describes the transmission of email hoaxes, including their origination and duration. In chapter 5, she expands on “non-cooperativeness” as a definitive textual feature of hoaxes by using linguistic theory to imagine the purposes these texts might serve. In chapter 6, she explores email hoaxes’ tendency to include formal narrative elements. Finally, in chapter 7, she locates her analysis in terms of broader theories of genre ecology.
While powerfully systematic, the work lacks ethnographic components and, as a result, comes across as a coldly technical analysis of seemingly lifeless media objects. At the same time, the book is a fantastic example of a rigorous and systematically executed taxonomy of a very specific form of digital communication.
For folklorists specializing in digital folklore, this book is a must-read for its rigor and methods alone. For folklorists looking for a general or introductory text about digital folklore, it is not useful both because it is highly technical and because it does not engage the field of folklore studies in an easily recognizable way. The work barely peeks into the huge storehouse of tools and theories developed by folklorists over the decades. To be fair, the book could not take any cues from the recent work in this area by folklorists like Trevor J. Blank in Folklore and the Internet (2009) or Russell Frank in Newslore (2011). Still, it can be faulted for not exploring the early theoretical and case studies of digital folklore that place digital communication into the framework of pre-digital folklore, in studies done by John Dorst (1990), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1996), or my own work on digital genres (1997, 2005a, and 2005b).
A fascinating linguistic project, it seems to miss folklore’s potential to shed light on everyday online communication by treating the EH as a collection of dead media artifacts. So doing, the book offers a powerful challenge to the rapidly growing cadre of folklorists doing research on network communication. It demands that we take on the task of documentation and analysis with similar rigor, attention to detail, and sophistication—but that we do it without losing sight of the real humans that render such communication meaningful.
WORKS CITED
Blank. Trevor J. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
Dorst, John. 1990. “Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age.” Journal of Folklore Research 27(3): 179-191.
Frank, Russell. 2011. Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press.
Howard, Robert Glenn. 1997. “Apocalypse in your In-Box: End-Times Communication on the Internet.” Western Folklore 56: 295-315.
--. 2005a. “A Theory of Vernacular Rhetoric: The Case of the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ Online.” Folklore 116 (3): 175-191.
--. 2005b. “Toward a Theory of the Worldwide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore Research42(3): 323-360.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1996. “The Electronic Vernacular.” Connected: Engagements with Media. Edited by George E. Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21-64.
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[Review length: 920 words • Review posted on October 26, 2011]