The Internet Is Real Life
Description
We often speak of a divide between online and offline cultures, despite growing recognition that the two are intertwined. Here, folklorist Anthony Bak Buccitelli challenges the idea of any divide at all in contemporary American culture. He argues that digital communications and behaviors are already deeply embedded in everyday expressive life and therefore are also already implicated in a variety of ways in the embodied performance and transmission of folklore. In other words, in contemporary American society, folklore seamlessly integrates online and offline.
By treating the digital interface as a site at which embodied performance can take shape rather than just a point of contact with the online, Buccitelli argues for a critical renewal of core folkloristic concepts to meet the challenges of understanding modern networked life.
More details
Person
Anthony Bak Buccitelli, interim assistant dean for graduate studies and associate professor of American studies and communications at the Pennsylvania State University, currently serves as director of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore. His books include City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston.
Content
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Pandemic Event: Rethinking Events, Audiences, and Context After Lockdown
Chapter 2: Accessing the Archive: From Tradition Memory to Potential Memory
Chapter 3: Check This Out: Mobile Devices and the Poetics of Sharing
Chapter 4: Tap Here: Folk Art, Illusions, and Haptic Affordances
Chapter 5: Fairy Tale as Fuck: Anti-Modern Media and the Cultivation of Affect
Chapter 6: Get Outside and Move Around: Technological Structures and Cultural Heritage
Chapter 7: Agentive Folk: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Tradition
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index