The Internet and
Folktales
The digital
revolution in the last quarter of the twentieth century gave way to new means
of communication, new ways of telling tales and new dimensions in researching narrative
culture, especially since personal computers and local networks became
connected to each other in a world wide web called the Internet. In the 1980s,
when a growing number of people were able to afford a personal computer and a
modem, digital communication started by using e-mail, joining mailing lists,
and visiting newsgroups via - for instance - Usenet. The 1990s showed many
improvements concerning pc's, modems, communication software and providers. Not
only could plain messages be sent by e-mail, but larger files with text,
pictures, animated gifs (photos with moving details) or animation as well.
Internet browsers were being developed, like Mosaic, Netscape and Explorer,
webpages gained more and more visual features and symbols, and hyperlinks lead
to unprecedented intertextuality. Sites with discussion fora appeared on the
web as well, and in this era, the first folktale collections and databases were
being published on the Internet. In the twenty-first century, hardware and
software became cheaper and faster. Chatting on the Internet has become very
popular, especially amongst kids and adolescents. At first, conversations in
chatrooms consisted of typing and sending text to each other, but software like
PalTalk and MSN made live chat sessions possible, using a microphone and a
webcam. Meanwhile, mobile phones were able to function as small computers
themselves: the e-mail is called SMS, mailing pictures and small movies is done
by MMS. These mobile phone messages are fit for sending jokes, riddles and
funny pictures to eachother. A new MSN and SMS language evolved, using
abbreviations (lol = laughing out loud, CU l8er = see you later) and emoticons
(smileys).
Within a
quarter of a century, the possibilities to digitally store and exchange folk
narrative has expanded dramatically - developments turned the world into a
'global village' in which English is the foremost lingua franca. The democratic
medium of the Internet made it possible for many to share their stories with
others. Due to the Internet, tales travel faster than ever: a story can go
around the world in just a few seconds now. The exchange of jokes and
contemporary or urban legends is a popular pastime among youngsters and inside
office culture. Due to the enormous expansion of folkloristic and folk
narrative material on the Internet, it is getting harder to retrieve the
information one is looking for, and therefore the importance of search engines
like Yahoo and Google is increasing. Today, it looks as if all information can
be found on the world wide web: more data are added every day, and we sometimes
tend to forget that data are changing, moving to other addresses or even
completely disappearing too. A joke, a piece of Photoshop-lore (a funny,
manipulated digital picture) or a discussion on the subject of urban legendry,
can be here today and gone tomorrow. Google's cache is in many cases a last
resort before folkloristic bits and bytes disappear permanently.
As far as
legend goes, the partron saint of the Internet is the H. Isidore of Seville (c.
560-636).
Folktale collections
One of the
earliest (1994) and still one of the finest folktale collections is the German
Gutenberg Project, in 2006 containing some 1600 fairy tales, 1200 fables and
2500 legends (see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/index.htm).
On the Gutenberg website we - for instance - find the fables of Aesop, the
fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, a fairy tale collection of Ludwig
Bechstein, the Decameron of Giovanni
Boccaccio, the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the Deutsche
Sagen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Volksmärchen
der Deutschen of Johann Musäus, fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and the Deutsche Hausmärchen of Johann Wilhelm
Wolf. The English version of the Gutenberg Project contains several of the
above-mentioned works in English, as
well as the Arabian Nights (or Thousand
Nights and a Night), the French Contes
of Madame d'Aulnoy, stories from Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, Thomas Malory's Le
Mort d'Arthur, an edition of jests
of Nasreddin Hoca, the Edda by Snorri
Sturluson and a collection of Slave
Narratives from Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky,
Maryland, Mississippi and Ohio (see: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page).
A fine collection of folktales can be found on D.L. Ashliman's site on Folklore and Mythology (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html)
as well as on David K. Brown's site on Folklore,
Myth and Legend (http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/storfolk.html).
Of course, there are a lot of webpages to be found, dedicated to a single oeuvre,
like the one containing the works of Hans Christian Andersen (http://hca.gilead.org.il) and the one with
a translation of the Latin Facetiae
of Poggio (http://www.elfinspell.com/PoggioTitle.html),
or to the traditional folktales of a specific country, like the Icelandic Sagnagrunnur (http://www.hi.is/~terry/database/sagnagrunnur.htm,
still under construction). The epic of The
Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Bećirbey, as performed by the Bosnian
singer Halil Bajgorić can be experienced in original transcript, with an
English translation, introduction and comments and with the authentical audio
file (http://www.oraltradition.org/zbm).
Many
websites all over the world present the local legends of a region or town;
these sites are built by private persons as a hobby and by local organizations
to attract tourists.
Modern
genres like urban legends and jokes are collected on the Internet as well. The
most famous site on urban legends is Snopes
(http://www.snopes.com), which contains
thousands of versions and for every story tries to determine whether it is true
or false (or somewhere in between). Apart from this site, there are Urbanlegends.com (http://urbanlegends.com), David Emery's
pages on Urban Legends and Folklore (http://urbanlegends.about.com), the
site of Scambusters (http://www.scambusters.org/legends.html)
and the Urban Legends & Modern Myths
site (http://www.warphead.com/urbanlegends).
Particularly dealing with digital chain letters containing virus hoaxes is the
site of Vmyths (http://www.vmyths.com). There are so many (private)
sites with collections of jokes and funny pictures that it is impossible to sum
them all up; just as an example the sites of Jokes Galore (http://www.jokesgalore.com)
and JokeCenter (http://www.jokecenter.com) are mentioned
here.
All
of the sites above provide researchers with a lot of textual material that can
be read, downloaded and, with the appropriate software, be put into databases,
indexed or researched on word frequencies, for example. In order to perform
comparative research folklorists still have to do a lot of work themselves.
Furthermore, a lot of traditional material is literature, not transcripts of
oral transmission; and if sites present oral material, often quite some
contextual information is lacking, like: when and where was the story told and
by whom? To what tale type does the story belong, according to international
catalogues like Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther's The Types of International Folktales
(Helsinki 2004). It seems that only small countries like The Netherlands and
Flanders (the northern half of Belgium) are building folktale databases that
meet the more specific needs of folk narrative researchers. Both the Nederlandse Volksverhalenbank (Dutch
Folktale Database, http://www.verhalenbank.nl)
and the Vlaamse Volksverhalenbank
(Flemish Folktale Database, http://www.volksverhalenbank.be)
allow scholars to search on keywords, names, genres, provinces, places and
dates. A lot of the folktales stem from oral tradition, are catalogued
according to the internationally acknowledged typology, and there is information
available about the narrator. These databases take digital archiving and
retrievability a step further: they are advanced research instruments,
consultable from all over the world. The only unfortunate thing is that the
databases are just available in Dutch, not in English.
At
the moment, folktales from western cultures are most easily obtained from the
Internet. For comparative research there is still much need for English
translations of - for instance - traditional Asian folktale collections, like
the Indian Jataka and the Japanese Konjaku Monogatari. On the other hand,
there is no decent edition of Johannes Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst to be found on the web either.
So far we looked at primary sources: folktales to be
found on the Internet. Still, there is an abundance of websites with secondary
information as well, dealing with subjects like folklore and narrativity,
mythology, fairy tales and legends. Just to mention a few of them: the Encyclopedia Mythica (http://www.pantheon.org), Myths & Legends (http://www.myths.com/pub/myths/myth.html),
D.L. Ashliman's Folklinks (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folklinks.html),
Folklore and Fairy Tale Resources on the
Web (http://www.rochester.lib.ny.us/folklorefairytales),
and the site on Irish Literature,
Mythology, Folklore and Drama (http://www.luminarium.org/mythology/ireland).
Narrating on the Net
In the
above cases, the Internet more of less functions as a worldwide digital
library. The Internet can be used as a virtual place to tell stories too. For
instance, personal narratives or memorates can be found on all kinds of
weblogs. Riddles, jokes, (urban) legends and rumors are told on mailing lists,
in newsgroups, discussion fora and chatrooms. When legends are told by someone
as being true stories, not seldom follows a discussion with other members of
the group on the reliability of the story. There are certain newsgroups
specialized in narrative subjects, like alt.jokes, alt.humor,
alt.folklore.ghost-stories and many more. Some specialized websites have their
own fora, where narratives can be found on subjects like ethnicity, fantasy,
the paranormal, hauntings, UFOs, crop circles and the End of Days. Particularly
in newsgroups, mailing lists and discussion fora, folk narrative researchers can
operate as invisible fieldworkers just by 'lurking' (reading, not participating
in the discussion). One of the disadvantages of communication on the Internet,
though, is that one can never be sure of the identity of the narrator: most
participants nowadays present themselves with a 'handle' or nickname and create
their own virtual identity through 'avatars' (little pictures that suggest to
represent some part of their personality) and mottos - one cannot even be sure
whether a participant is male or female, young or old. For this, one needs to
follow live chat sessions in which webcams are used. Another way to study human
interaction and storytelling was facilitated by the (originally Dutch)
television program Big Brother, in
which a selection of people was locked into a house out of their own free will,
surrounded by cameras and microphones. All their actions, pranks, jokes and
memorates could be followed online, 24 hours a day, thanks to the live streams
on the Internet.
Probably
the most popular form of virtual storytelling, especially among yougsters and
office workers, is sending each other textual and visual jokes by e-mail. The
oldest visual jokes consisted of ASCII-drawings (http://www.asciiartfarts.com/20060423.html).
One of the advantages of virtual joking is that one does not need to be a
gifted narrator anymore: all that is needed is the ability to cut and paste or
just to forward a funny text. The computer will keep every binary byte in its
place, while the sender can still gain prestige as a funny person. One of the
disadvantages is that this way, a lot of jokes show no variation anymore,
whereas in oral transmission, the narrator would improvise (after all, only a
punchline needs to be memorized) and adapt the joke to his likings and that of
his audience. Still, there are digital jokes sent around, which are altered,
reworked and enhanced, for instance a funny list of differences between men and
women.
The digital
revolution made another form of visual joking possible: it is what I call
Photoshop-lore. PhotoShop is the name of one of the most popular computer
programs with which pictures are being manipulated. Actually, PhotoShop-lore is
in many ways the successor of the well-known XeroxCopy-lore: in the past,
people copied funny pictures and cartoons and distributed them on paper. The
digital distribution of PhotoShop-lore and the oral transmission of traditional
jokes have some features in common: 1) the original maker of the joke remains
anonymous most of the time. 2) The joke is transmitted from person to
person(s), 3) The joke comments on subjects that - at least according to the
narrator and his audience - really matter in present day society. 4) The
PhotoShop joke deals with the same taboos, frustrations, prejudices and
fantasies as the traditional oral joke. 5) Like in traditional joking,
PhotoShop jokes are being recycled every once in a while: lying politicians,
for instance, have repeatedly been depicted as Pinocchio with a long nose. The
phenomenon of PhotoShop-lore has existed since the late 1990s, as soon as
enough people were able to receive e-mails with attachments. Still, it became a
real hype after September 11th, 2001: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon. Mailboxes in the Western world immediately became
infested with PhotoShop humor about the Twin Towers, Bush, Bin Laden,
Afghanistan, Al-Qaida and Muslim terrorism in general. Since then,
Photoshop-lore is being made on every subject worth joking about - nowadays
there even exist Internet contests. The visualization of jokes has not stopped
at pictures: they are sent around as PowerPoint presentations, Macromedia
animations and Quicktime movies as well.
As far as
narrating on the Net is concerned, it looks like the telling of jokes, riddles,
rumors and (urban) legends is more popular than telling a traditional fairy
tale. Every now and again, fairy tale parodies pop up, both as texts and as
pictures. Especially the sexual relationships between fairy tale Disney figures
seem to be favoured, for instance between Beauty and the Beast or Snow-White
and the seven dwarfs.
Another old
form of folklore has infested the Internet: the chain letter. The mail must be
forwarded to multiple persons in order to avoid (personal) harm and bring about
happiness and good fortune. Sometimes it is necessary to forward the mail to
raise money for a sick child that needs an operation, in some other cases Bill
Gates will reward people with a large sum of money for testing his new e-mail
tracking software. Of course, these are all hoaxes, as are the many alerts for
computer viruses that never come. The first e-mail of this kind started
circulating in 1994 as a warning against the (non-existing) Good Times virus.
Many of these virus alerts followed (Irina, Deeyenda,
Join the crew, Penpal greetings, It Takes Guts to Say 'Jesus’, Your friend
D@fit, etc.). Most of the time, it is said that opening the e-mail will cause a
virus to forward itself to everyone in the address book and to erase all
harddisks. Authorities like IBM, AOL, Microsoft and McAfee are mentioned to
make the message more believable. In some cases, the e-mail advises to delete a
certain file when present - after which the user will soon find out he did not
erase a virus, but a part of the standard Windows software. As a reaction to
the virus hoaxes, obvious parodies or anti-legends circulated, in which the
virus was said to wipe all your credit cards, date your girlfriend and drink
all your beer. There is another story one better not fall for: the so-called
Nigerian Scam. The reader is requested by a very polite, well-educated and
mostly Christian official to help transferring millions of dollars out of the
country by opening a trustworthy bank account. The reward will be tremendous,
but first the reader must pay a certain amount of money for the costs that need
to be made. It goes without saying that the victim will never see a penny in
return.
A
last example of narrating on the Net deals with the neglected genre of the 'situation puzzle', a.k.a. the 'albatross story' or 'kwispel'.
A kwispel is a narrative riddle game, in which the narrator or riddler
in a few words unveils the mysterious conclusion of a story and asks what
happened, whereupon it is up to the audience to unravel the
entire plot of the story by asking questions that can only be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Here
is a classic clue the riddler might give: "A man lies dead in his room. On the floor are sawdust and small pieces of wood. What
happened?" The game is often played by adolescents, on vacation, around
the campfire. Recently, the game has been played on the Internet by members of
a Yahoo mailing list: the contestants were allowed to ask five questions in one
e-mail. The solution of the above riddle was: The dead man on the floor was a blind midget and worked in a circus. He was famous for being the
shortest man on earth. A jealous
competitor secretly sawed small pieces of wood from the blind midget's cane, as well as from
the legs of his chairs, his table, etc. This made the midget believe that he had started to grow and that,
soon, he would no longer be the smallest midget on earth. Finally, in his despair, he committed suicide (and now the competitor is the smallest
midget on earth). It is a fine example of interactive storytelling in
cyberspace.
Playing tales
Finally,
one cannot only tell or listen to a tale: thanks to computer technology, one
can play and experience a tale as well - at least in virtual reality. Soon
after consumers started buying personal computers, the first computer games
were developed. Today, the game industry is making more money than the film
industry. Many games - especially the adventure games - take their themes,
motifs and structure from fairy tales, myths and legends, and this goes for
early games like the Kings Quest-series
as well as for later productions such as the Final Fantasy-series. Interactivity has been added since computers
and game consoles can be plugged into the Internet. Now players can
simultaneously play their own roles in folktale-like adventures thanks to the
MMORPGs: the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, bearing names
like Ultima Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft.
For many
people in the early days, the personal computer started out as just another
electronic typewriter. The machine with its monochrome screen was mainly used
for storing data and texts. Soon it changed from an electronic book into some
sort of television due to the addition of all kinds of audio-visual features:
color, icons, illustrations, animations, speech, sound, et cetera.
Intertextuality was enhanced through hyperlinks, the computer turned into a
multi-media device with unprecedented possibilities, while the Internet greatly
expanded the means of storing, retrieving and exchanging data, folktales
included. The Internet did not destroy oral communication or social contact, as
pessimists would have it; the Internet just added more and new ways in
contacting and communicating with people we would probably never meet otherwise.
Considering the fact that computer technology and the Internet will become even
more audio-visual, we will probably soon use the Internet to tell real time
oral stories to each other once more. In the future, game-like storytelling may
even turn into a 'holodeck' experience, in which the tale is lived in 3D
virtual reality. Meanwhile, the folktale databases will not only be filled with
textual transcripts and photographs, but with movie samples showing
storyteller's performances as well.
List of further readings
Alsheimer, Rainer: 'Apocalyps now? Eschatologisches im Internet und
anderswo?', in: Schweizerisches Archiv
für Volkskunde 95 (1999) 1, p. 47-59.
Brednich, Rolf W.: www.worldwidewitz.com.
Humor im Cyberspace. Freiburg [etc.] 2005.
Brunvand, Erik: 'The heroic hacker: Legends of the computer age', in:
Jan Harold Brunvand: The Truth Never Stands in the Way
of a Good Story.
Urbana 2000, p. 170-198.
Burger, Peter: 'De onzichtbare veldwerker. Usenet als corpus voor onderzoek
naar moderne sagen', in: http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/events/stdh2001/burger.pdf
(2001).
Burger, Peter & Theo Meder: '“A rope breaks. A
bell chimes. A man dies.” The kwispel: a neglected international narrative riddle genre', in: Toplore.
Stories and Songs. Trier, WVT, 2006. (to be published)
Dégh, Linda: 'Collecting
legends today - welcome to the bewildering maze of the Internet', in: Ingo
Schneider (ed.): Europäische Ethnologie
und Folklore im internationalen Kontext. Festschrift für Leander Petzoldt zum
65. Geburtstag. Frankfurt [etc.] 1999, p. 55-66.
Ellis, Bill: 'Legend / AntiLegend. Humor as an
Integral Part of the Contemporary Legend Process', in: G.A. Fine, V. Campion-Vincent
& C. Heath: Rumor Mills. The Social
Impact of Rumor and Legend. New Brunswick & London, 2003, p. 123-140.
Ellis, Bill: 'Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in
Constructing a Global Response to Disaster', in: Peter
Narváez (ed.): Of corpse. Death and humor
in folklore and popular culture. Logan, Utah State University Press, 2003,
p. 35-79.
Fialkove, Larissa & Maria N. Yelenevskaya: 'Ghosts in the cyber
world. An analysis of folklore sites on the Internet', in: Fabula 42 (2001) 1/2, p. 64-89.
Foley, John Miles: 'Oral tradition and the Internet: Navigating
Pathways', in: FF Network 30 (June
2006), p. 12-19.
Kuipers, Giselinde: 'Media culture and internet disaster jokes: Bin
Laden and the attack on the world trade center', in: European Journal of
Cultural Studies 5 (2002) 4, p. 451-471.
Kuipers, Giselinde, Jeroen de
Kloet & Suzanne Kuik: Digitaal contact: het net van de begrensde
mogelijkheden. Amsterdam 2003. Special issue Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift.
Meder, Theo: '"Veel geluk, meneer
Gorsky!" Volksverhalen op de electronische snelweg', in: Oost-Vlaamse Zanten 74 (1999) 1, p.
47-58.
Meder, Theo: ‘Viruspaniek. E-mail-lore van
Good Times tot Polleke den Hacker’, in: http://www.meertens.nl/medewerkers/theo.meder/viruspaniek.html
(2001).
Murray,
Janet H.: Hamlet on the holodeck. The
future of narrative in cyberspace. Fourth impression. Cambridge MA, MIT
Press, 1998.
Pearce, C.: 'Story as play space: narrative in games',
in: L. King (ed.): Game on: The
history and culture of video games. London, Laurence King Publishing
Ltd., 2002, p. 112-119.
Schneider, Ingo: 'Erzählen im Internet: Aspekte kommunikativer
Kultur im Zeitalter des Computers', in: Fabula
37 (1996), p. 8-27.
Wiebe,
Karl: This is not a hoax: urban legends
on the internet. Baltimore, PublishAmerica, 2003.
Theo Meder
Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam