Trevor J. Blank

Andrew Peck

Folklore and Social Media

A pioneering examination of the folkloric qualities of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and related digital media. These stuidies show that folk culture, sustained by a new and evolving vernacular, has been a key, since the Internet's beginnings, to language, practice, and interaction online. Users of many sorts continue to develop the Internet as a significant medium for generating, transmitting, documenting, and preserving folklore. In a set of new, insightful essays, contributors Trevor J. Blank, Simon J. Bronner, Robert Dobler, Russell Frank, Gregory Hansen, Robert Glenn Howard, Lynne S. McNeill, Elizabeth Tucker, and William Westerman showcase ways the Internet both shapes and is shaped by folklore

Vernacular Expression in a Digital World

Folklore and the Internet

Ten years after the publication of the foundational edited collection Folklore and the Internet, Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank bring an essential update of scholarship to the study of digital folklore, Folklore and Social Media. A unique virtual, hybridized platform for human communication, social media is more dynamic, ubiquitous, and nuanced than the internet ever was by itself, and the majority of Americans use it to access and interact with digital source materials in more advanced and robust ways. This book features twelve chapters ranging in topics from legend transmission and fake news to case studies of memes, joke cycles, and Twitter hashtag campaigns and offers fresh insights on digital heritage and web archiving. The editors and contributors take both the “digital” and “folklore” elements seriously because social media fundamentally changes folk practices in new, though often invisible, ways. Social media platforms encourage hybrid performances that appear informal and ordinary while also offering significant space to obfuscate backstage behaviors through editing and retakes. The result is that expression online becomes increasingly reminiscent of traditional forms of face-to-face interaction, while also hiding its fundamental differences. Folklore and Social Media demonstrates various ways to refine methods and analyses in order to develop a better understanding of the informal and traditional dynamics that define an era of folklore and social media. It is an invaluable addition to the literature on digital folklore scholarship that will be of interest to students and scholars alike. Contributors: Sheila Bock, Peter M. Broadwell, Bill Ellis, Jeana Jorgensen, Liisi Laineste, John Laudun, Linda J. Lee, Lynne S. McNeill, Ryan M. Milner, Whitney Phillips, Vwani Roychowdhury, Timothy R. Tangherlini, Tok Thompson, Elizabeth Tucker, Kristiana Willsey

David Puglia

The demon car of Seven Hills Road, the ominous Hell House above the Patapsco River, the mythical Snallygaster of western Maryland--these are the extraordinary tales and bizarre creatures that color Maryland's folklore. The Blue Dog of Port Tobacco faithfully guards his master's gold even in death, and in Cambridge, the headless ghost of Big Liz watches over the treasure of Greenbriar Swamp. The woods of Prince George's County are home to stories of the menacing Goatman, while on stormy nights at the nearby University of Maryland, the strains of a ghostly piano float from Marie Mount Hall. From the storied heroics of the First Maryland Regiment in the Revolutionary War to the mystery of the Poe Toaster, folklorists Trevor J. Blank and David J. Puglia unravel the legends of Maryland.

Folklore from the Old Line State

Maryland Legends

David J. Puglia

Widely publicized in mass media worldwide, high-profile tragedies and celebrity scandals—the untimely deaths of Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, the embarrassing affairs of Tiger Woods and President Clinton, the 9/11 attacks or the Challenger space shuttle explosion—often provoke nervous laughter and black humor. If in the past this snarky folklore may have been shared among friends and uttered behind closed doors, today the Internet's ubiquity and instant interactivity propels such humor across a much more extensive and digitally mediated discursive space. New media not only let more people "in on the joke," but they have also become the "go-to" formats for engaging in symbolic interaction, especially in times of anxiety or emotional suppression, by providing users an expansive forum for humorous, combative, or intellectual communication, including jokes that cross the line of propriety and good taste. Moving through engaging case studies of Internet-derived humor about momentous disasters in recent American popular culture and history, The Last Laugh chronicles how and why new media have become a predominant means of vernacular expression. Trevor J. Blank argues that computer-mediated communication has helped to compensate for users' sense of physical detachment in the "real" world, while generating newly meaningful and dynamic opportunities for the creation and dissemination of folklore. Drawing together recent developments in new media studies with the analytical tools of folklore studies, he makes a strong case for the significance to contemporary folklore of technologically driven trends in folk and mass culture.

Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age

The Last Laugh

Smart phones, tablets, Facebook, Twitter, and wireless Internet connections are the latest technologies to have become entrenched in our culture. Although traditionalists have argued that computer-mediated communication and cyberspace are incongruent with the study of folklore, Trevor J. Blank sees the digital world as fully capable of generating, transmitting, performing, and archiving vernacular culture. Folklore in the Digital Age documents the emergent cultural scenes and expressive folkloric communications made possible by digital “new media” technologies. New media is changing the ways in which people learn, share, participate, and engage with others as they adopt technologies to complement and supplement traditional means of vernacular expression. But behavioral and structural overlap in many folkloric forms exists between on- and offline, and emerging patterns in digital rhetoric mimic the dynamics of previously documented folkloric forms, invoking familiar social or behavior customs, linguistic inflections, and symbolic gestures. Folklore in the Digital Age provides insights and perspectives on the myriad ways in which folk culture manifests in the digital age and contributes to our greater understanding of vernacular expression in our ever-changing technological world.

The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction

Folk Culture in the Digital Age

The stories, folklore, and history surrounding Maryland's most haunted places. A must-read for fans of the supernatural and Maryland history. The demon car of Seven Hills Road, the ominous Hell House above the Patapsco River, the mythical Snallygaster of western Maryland--these are the extraordinary tales and bizarre creatures that color Maryland's folklore. The Blue Dog of Port Tobacco faithfully guards his master's gold even in death, and in Cambridge, the headless ghost of Big Liz watches over the treasure of Greenbriar Swamp. The woods of Prince George's County are home to stories of the menacing Goatman, while on stormy nights at the nearby University of Maryland, the strains of a ghostly piano float from Marie Mount Hall. From the storied heroics of the First Maryland Regiment in the Revolutionary War to the mystery of the Poe Toaster, folklorists Trevor J. Blank and David J. Puglia unravel the legends of Maryland.

Lynne S. McNeill

The essays in this volume explore the menacing figure of Slender Man—the blank-faced, long-limbed bogeyman born of a 2009 Photoshop contest who has appeared in countless horror stories circulated on- and offline among children and young people. Slender Man is arguably the best-known example in circulation of “creepypasta,” a genre derived from “copypasta,” which in turn derived from the phrase “copy/paste.” As narrative texts are copied across online forums, they undergo modification, annotation, and reinterpretation by new posters in a folkloric process of repetition and variation. Though by definition legends deal largely with belief and possibility, the crowdsourced mythos behind creepypasta and Slender Man suggests a distinct awareness of fabrication. Slender Man is therefore a new kind of creation: one intentionally created as a fiction but with the look and feel of legend. Slender Man Is Coming offers an unprecedented folkloristic take on Slender Man, analyzing him within the framework of contemporary legend studies, “creepypastas,” folk belief, and children’s culture. This first folkloric examination of the phenomenon of Slender Man is a must-read for anyone interested in folklore, horror, urban legends, new media, or digital cultures. Contributors: Timothy H. Evans, Andrea Kitta, Mikel J. Koven, Paul Manning, Andrew Peck, Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Elizabeth Tucker

Trevor J. Blank

About

Books

Join the club