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Folk Culture in the Digital Age
Edited by Trevor J. Blank
6x9, 276 pages

Published: 2012

ISBN 978-0-87421-889-3
paper $29.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-890-9
e-book $24.00

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TREVOR J. BLANK
is an assistant professor in the department of English and communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, and an M.A. at Indiana University's Folklore Institute. He is the editor of Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (USU 2009), co-editor (with Robert Glenn Howard) of Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present (USU 2013) and author of The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age (Wisconsin 2013). In 2010, he was awarded the American Folklore Society's William Wells Newell Prize in Children's Folklore for his research on "fartlore." Currently, Blank serves as editor to the open access journal, New Directions in Folklore. Follow him on Twitter@trevorjblank. (Photo credit: Philip Sanfilippo)

Folk Culture in the Digital Age

The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction

Edited by Trevor J. Blank

Also by Blank - Tradition in the 21st Century and Folklore and the Internet

Smart phones, tablets, Facebook, Twitter, and wireless Internet connections are the latest technologies to have quickly 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. Folk Culture in the Digital Age documents the emergent cultural scenes and expressive folkloric communications that are being 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.

Folk Culture 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.

Book Review Journal of Folklore Research April 10, 2013 / Emily Burke, Indiana University