Residential - Internet Folklore and Digital Storytelling

Exploring the wild world wide web of informal vernacular culture being created, transmitted, and adapted by online communities, this course examines the powers, potentials, and peculiarities of internet folklore in relationship to community-building, political engagement, social change, and everyday negotiations of individual and group identity. On our digital journey, we encounter viral videos, meme warriors, urban legends, occult folk beliefs, disinformation campaigns, and viral challenges, while examining connections between contemporary online culture and ancient storytelling traditions. What new folk groups, storytelling genres, and political potentialities are arising as a result of online engagement? What are the creative, destructive, and ambivalent capacities of online participatory culture, and how are they being harnessed in projects of future-making? Course assignments invite students to research, analyze, and participate in digital storytelling in an attempt to better understand ourselves and our historical moment through folkloristic engagement.