When historian Henry Adams stepped into the Paris Exhibition of 1900, a twirling, whizzing, bedazzling machine caught his eye.¹ Enamored with this “God-like creature” (in his words), Adams felt overwhelmed by the looming profundity of technology and its implications for the future. Later, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), he recollects this moment and notes that the machine—“the dynamo”—appears to serve as a symbol for man’s replacement of religion with technology. For Adams, the implication of this symbolic displacement was that man now worships machine; thus, people will henceforth stop at nothing to ensure the...

In 1964 students converged on the University of California’s Sproul Hall. Protesting new policies that radically limited political speech on campus, some of these students wore punch cards, used to input data into the era’s computers, around their necks. One protestor had a sign suggesting computers were a mechanism of oppressive institutional power: “I am a UC Berkeley student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me” (Turner 2006, 2). In 1964 the computer could be invoked as a symbol of oppression. Some twenty years later, however, it had been transformed into a symbol of freedom. In January of...

On January 25, 2011, protestors took to the streets of Egypt, demanding democracy and a change in regime. An election held in November 2010 was largely denounced as a sham. The 82-year-old leader and thirty-year autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, quickly moved to shut down the Internet in an effort to counter user-generated social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook (see Ali 2011). Egyptians exploded in anger: who was he to control who they—the people—could speak with? There were appeals to the Internet as a human right, and debates on those appeals.¹ After a week of massive protests, the...

A few years ago, I visited “Sean,” an old college friend, in San Francisco.² As we sat in his apartment catching up, our conversation turned toward a mutual acquaintance, “Jake,” whom neither of us had seen in some time. When I relayed what information I had about recent happenings in Jake’s life, Sean conjectured, “So I guess you keep in pretty good touch with him, huh?” I clarified that I had not talked to Jake in over a year but that I had been informed about his life by following his Facebook status updates. “Then it makes sense that I...

The text message arrives on Monday: “Pillow fight mob, Saturday, 11:45 a.m., Union Square.” The message is forwarded to friends, posted to Facebook, picked up by a popular blog, and forwarded again. By the time Saturday morning rolls around, close to 5,000 people are casually converging on Union Square in New York City, pillows hidden under jackets or in tote bags. At 11:45 exactly, a whistle blows, and thousands of people seemingly spontaneously begin to whack each other with pillows—much to the shock and bewilderment of those present who were not in on the plan. Feathers fly, fabric tears,...

When confronting the issue of humorous folklore on the Internet, certain questions necessarily arise. What part of humor is folklore? What constitutes folklore on the Internet? When does humor on the Internet become the concern of the folklorist? After all, not all humor is considered folklore. Most folklorists would not regard a spontaneous witticism made in the course of a social encounter to be folklore. Innumerable witticisms are generated in conversation each and every day and no folklorist has ever set out to document them. Nor would many folklorists regard television situation comedies as falling within their province. Although some...

As the personal computer began replacing the typewriter on office desktops during the 1980s, folklorist Paul Smith (1991) reported that workers delighted in the new machine’s capacity to enable unofficial, playful activity that he called folkloric. Although he sensed that many colleagues wedded to definitions of folklore around face-to-face oral transmission might be skeptical of his folkloric label, he pointed out the continuity of repeatable, variable material on the Internet with previous folk forms. The material in question was not games that had already been commercialized and packaged for computers. What he noticed beneath the surface of work life was...

Twenty-first century Americans live in a complex, fast-moving society. With free-flowing information from the Internet, television, and radio, it can be difficult for people to distinguish fact from fiction. At times of crisis, rumors and legends articulate borderlines between safety and danger, health and illness, and boredom and excitement. Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani defines rumors as pieces of information that help groups solve problems (1966, 227). According to folklorists Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis, some rumors about immigration, terrorism, trade, and tourism are “too good to be false” (2010, 5; italics in original). These rumors express anxieties about globalization, emphasizing...

The concept of folk groups has been central to academic folkloristics for many years. Originally, such groups were assumed to be illiterate, preliterate, or simply not as literate as the academic elite who studied them.¹ Alan Dundes boldly challenged this stereotype in 1965, declaring that “folk groups” could be “any group of people whatsoever,” so long as they shared some common factor and developed traditions that gave their communities individual identity (1980, 6–7). “The folk” could include professionals, college professors, and even the most elite of scientists and engineers. Since then, folklorists have tried to banish the stereotype of...

What sets us apart as folklorists from other researchers is that we stand shoulder to shoulder with the people we study (see Ben-Amos 1973b; Dorson 1972, 5–7). Through firsthand fieldwork, with courageous and patient participant observation and naturalistic observation, folklore scholars have stood out in the academic world by respecting and prioritizing the voices and meanings of the insiders who trust them with their memories and their traditions.¹ In the new millennium, the virtual landscape has blurred boundaries between “real” and online identities, relationships, and research methods. This chapter addresses the implications of Internet technologies, communities, and norms for...