The Internet Is All Vernaculary

Last Friday I attended a couple of lectures given as part of the Future of Folk festival. The first was entitled "FoklNets: The Emergence of the Vernacular Internet" and was given by Robert G. Howard, an Assistant Professor of Folklore & Communication Arts here at the UW. (I'm doing this from memory although I recorded his lecture.) The room was pretty empty when I got there but some people filed in towards the starting time. I was a bit perplexed as the topic interested me greatly so I wondered how it could interest virtually no one else. Presumably the nice weather kept people away. At any rate, Howard began his lecture by briefly defining what folk culture is.





Basically he said that folk culture is a body of expressions of a community that are innovated upon and then returned to the community. He then described 'photoshopping" and used the infamous fake, "Tourist Guy", as his primary example. Here he is:



He went on to show how the idea was picked up by others, modified, and put back into the Internet community:



He gave other examples and showed how newsgroups and websites sprang up as places for people to share their photoshopped pictures. Not surprisingly, he continued with blogging. Howard used a couple blogs by people who have fish tanks as examples and contrasted them with an about.com page pertaining to the same topic. He noted how the two types of sites looked different and had dissimilar content.



Personally, I found the lecture to be very interesting and I can see what he means by the "vernacular Internet". And I buy his argument of blogging, photoshopping, etc. as being new forms of folk culture. One of things I would have liked to heard him address was about the community to which these expressions belong. The World Wide Web is only about 10 years old and the culture he described even younger. What I wonder is who makes up the community that photoshops, blogs, and the like. How many people actually photoshop? How many people actually maintain a blog and post to it on a regular basis? All of these forms of Internet culture are fun, neat, and whatnot but there's a fairly steep entrance fee. Older forms of folk culture don't require computers, access to the Internet, and special pieces of software. Folk music, for example, at its most basic level, only required that a community memeber go somewhere local to listen. If you wanted to play, well, you could buy an instrument or you could make one yourself. Internet culture, by contrast, has a fairly steep initial outlay. I'll grant Howard that it's another incarnation of folk culture but I'd bet that the community here isn't as diverse as the all-inclusive utopian rhetoric about the Net would have you believe. Every culture on this planet has folk music but I'll bet ya that Internet culture is practiced predominantly by a community that is white and male. And a very large percentage of those members are also American. Just as Latin was the lingua franca for science and religion in the Middle Ages, English, in large part, is the language of the Internet. By no means is it complete and total, but I think it's the most common. So there's another prerequisite for entering many of the nascent online communities. However, non-whites, womyn, and non-English speakers have plenty of room to form their own communities.

Despite the brevity of the lecture, I found it quite interesting. It gave me a lot to cogitate upon and some good references for further inquiry.

The next lecture was by Siva Vaidhyanathan and entitled, "Who Owns Folk? How Should We 'Protect' the Public Domain?" Unfortunately, I was only able to record about 15 minutes of his lecture and I'll attend to it here later...