Internet and Media in American Folklore and Folklife

Author(s):  
David J. Puglia

The media of print, radio, film, television, and especially the Internet are subjects as well as sources of folklore and folklife. Following the rise of the Internet in the late twentieth century, and its proliferation in the early twenty-first century, bringing with it Web 2.0 and the performative folk web, folklorists increasingly turned to the Internet to research folk processes and compare them to the kinds of transmission in face-to-face communities. Digital folklore—with “memes” being most recognizable—flourishes online, and the Internet creates new traditional forms and practices. The Internet challenges long-standing assumptions, definitions, methods, and theories in what has been called the predigital or analog era. Folklore and folklife research of media and digital technology contributes to the broader field of communication and media studies by emphasizing the continued importance of informal culture and group aesthetics in technologically mediated environments.

Author(s):  
Paula Clare Harper

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. A photo of a dress, and videos set to “Harlem Shake.”  The above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. In this paper, I argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to borrow and adapt Christopher Small’s foundational 1998 coinage. In this paper I analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the 2010s, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. The notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often credited to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from Derrida to Baudrillard and Deleuze. In this paper, I seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, situating music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding Internet circulation. Ultimately, I argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Neal Wyatt

As RA service has moved from its second-wave renaissance during the late twentieth century/early twenty-first century (with a steady stream of reference tools, conference programming, and think pieces) into an often underpromoted but bedrock mainstay of the public library, what do advisors continue to discuss among themselves and see as areas of need? If you could gather a handful of advisors together, over a cup of coffee one rainy morning before book group began, what would they talk about? What would they ask each other? What do they know to be foundational about the service? As important, what might they suggest we all re-think? This column invites you to eavesdrop on such a conversation. It was conducted over email between six advisors: two at the start of their careers, two helping to define the field, and two who have lead the way for librarians, for a combined eight decades. These advisors share research, hard-won and lived-in lessons, showcase the luminous nature of RA work as well as its difficulties, propose a change for RA education, and, of course, each suggests a book to read.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-78
Author(s):  
Adam Crymble

By the twenty-first century, billions of historical sources were digitized, with many historians actively involved in this unprecedented archival revisionism. Understanding the history of mass digitization is fundamental to understanding the environment of historians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as one of the key ways that historians applied computers to their cause. Charting the history of the archive through waves of interest in hypertext, multimedia, the Internet, Web 2.0, user experience, and mobile computing, this chapter argues that changes in technology-enabled historians to revise the nature of the archive, first by bringing primary sources into the classroom and then into the streets.


Author(s):  
R. Blake Brown

AbstractThis article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria G. Lebedeva ◽  
Anthony R. Lupo ◽  
Chasity B. Henson ◽  
Alexandr B. Solovyov ◽  
Yury G. Chendev ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
V. Fauzer ◽  
T. Lytkina ◽  
A. Smirnov ◽  
G. Fauzer ◽  
T. Kuzmitskaya

The general dynamics of the Russia population in its northern territories, and the Belarus Republic is presented; the demographic component role in population dynamics and their transformation in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century is shown. Special attention is paid to the effectiveness of migration exchange between the Northern territories and the Russian regions, and the scale of migration losses is shown. It is noted that the Russian North is highly urbanized, surpassing both Russia and the Belarus Republic and most of the countries of the foreign North in this indicator. In terms of the urban locality number, small and medium-sized cities are the leaders, while the majority of the population lives in cities of more than 100 thousand people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
David Chisholm

The word “Knittelvers” has been used since the eighteenth century to describe four-stress rhyming couplets which seem to be rather simply and awkwardly constructed, and whose content is frequently comical, course, vulgar or obscene. Today German Knittelvers is perhaps best known from the works of Goethe and Schiller, as well as other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.Well-known examples occur together with other verse forms in Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager, as well as in ballads and occasional poems by both poets. While literary critics have shown considerable interest in Knittelvers written from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, there has been almost no discussion of the further use and development of this verse form from the nineteenth century to the present, despite the fact that it continues to appear in both humorous and serious works by many contemporary German writers. This article focuses on an example of dramatic Knittelvers in a late twentieth century play, namely Daniel Call’s comedy Schocker, a modern parody of Goethe’s Faust. Among other things, Call’s play, as well as other examples of Knittelvers in works by twentieth and early twenty-first century poets, demonstrates that while this verse form has undergone some changes and variations, it still retains metrical characteristics which have remained constant since the fifteenth century. Today these four-stress couplets continue to function as a means of depicting comic, mock-heroic and tragicomic situations by means of parody, farce and burlesque satire.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291
Author(s):  
Jason Francisco

This article critically investigates the work of the Japanese American photographer Masumi Hayashi (1945–2006), with special attention to her series on World War II era internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry. It has three goals: to describe Hayashi’s unusual working method through close attention to the works themselves; to articulate the aesthetic, philosophical and ethical dimensions of Hayashi’s practice; and to position Hayashi within the field of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century photographers concerned with the problem of giving-image to traumatic histories. The author argues for recognition of Hayashi’s deeply accomplished, ground-breaking work.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (18) ◽  
pp. 6805-6822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei Zhao ◽  
Harry H. Hendon ◽  
Oscar Alves ◽  
Guoqiang Liu ◽  
Guomin Wang

Abstract Predictive skill for El Niño in the equatorial eastern Pacific across a range of forecast models declined sharply in the early twenty-first century relative to what was achieved in the late twentieth century despite ongoing improvements of forecast systems. This decline coincided with a shift in Pacific climate to an enhanced east–west surface temperature gradient across the Pacific and a stronger Walker circulation at the end of the twentieth century. Using seasonal forecast sensitivity experiments with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology coupled model POAMA2.4, the authors show that this shift in background climate acted to weaken key ocean–atmosphere feedbacks that amplify eastern Pacific El Niño, thus resulting in weaker variability that is less predictable. These results indicate that extreme El Niños, such as those that occurred in 1982/83 and 1997/98, were conditioned by the background climate and so were favored to occur in the late twentieth century. However, anticipating future changes in El Niño variability and predictability is an outstanding challenge because causes and prediction of low-frequency variations of Pacific climate have not yet been demonstrated.


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