“This text is an essential contribution to the field. Scholars need it right now, and its publication lays groundwork for future scholars.”
　　—Claire Schmidt, Missouri Valley College

　　“The fruition of mature scholarship on folklore and digital technology. With this volume, readers will be able to clearly see that this area of scholarship is more than a novelty: it is an essential, perhaps the essential, terrain of study for folklorists in the coming years.”
　　—Anthony Bak Buccitelli, Penn State Harrisburg

★An essential update of scholarship to the study of digital folklore
★written by Andrew Peck, assistant professor of strategic communication at Miami University and Trevor J. Blank, associate professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam
★an invaluable addition to the literature on digital folklore scholarship that will be of interest to students and scholars alike

　　Ten years after the publication of the foundational edited collection Folklore and the Internet, Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank bring an essential update of scholarship to the study of digital folklore, Folklore and Social Media. A unique virtual, hybridized platform for human communication, social media is more dynamic, ubiquitous, and nuanced than the internet ever was by itself, and the majority of Americans use it to access and interact with digital source materials in more advanced and robust ways.
　　This book features twelve chapters ranging in topics from legend transmission and fake news to case studies of memes, joke cycles, and Twitter hashtag campaigns and offers fresh insights on digital heritage and web archiving. The editors and contributors take both the “digital” and “folklore” elements seriously because social media fundamentally changes folk practices in new, though often invisible, ways. Social media platforms encourage hybrid performances that appear informal and ordinary while also offering significant space to obfuscate backstage behaviors through editing and retakes. The result is that expression online becomes increasingly reminiscent of traditional forms of face-to-face interaction, while also hiding its fundamental differences.
　　Folklore and Social Media demonstrates various ways to refine methods and analyses in order to develop a better understanding of the informal and traditional dynamics that define an era of folklore and social media. It is an invaluable addition to the literature on digital folklore scholarship that will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Andrew Peck
　　Andrew Peck is assistant professor of strategic communication at Miami University. He is a media scholar and ethnographer whose research focuses on how digital media offer new possibilities for persuasion and everyday communication. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of American Folklore, and the edited collections Hashtag Publics and Slender Man Is Coming.

Trevor J. Blank
　　Trevor J. Blank is associate professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the editor of Folklore and the Internet and Folk Culture in the Digital Age, coeditor of Tradition in the Twenty-First Century, and author of The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age and Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Old Practices, New Media
　　Andrew Peck 3
1 #LatinxGradCaps, Cultural Citizenship, and the “American Dream”
　　Sheila Bock 24
2 Bridges, Sex Slaves, Tweets, and Guns: A Multi-Domain Model of Conspiracy Theory
　　Timothy R. Tangherlini, Vwani Roychowdhury, and Peter M. Broadwell 39
3 The Vernacular Vortex: Analyzing the Endless Churn of Donald Trump’s Twitter Orbit
　　Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner 67
4 The Death of Doge: Institutional Appropriations of Internet Memes
　　Andrew Peck 83
5 “Zero Is Our Quota”: Folkloric Narratives of the Other in Online Forum Comments
　　Liisi Laineste 108
6 Trickster Remakes This White House: Booby Traps and Bawdy/Body Humor in Post-Election Prankster Biden Memes
　　Jeana Jorgensen and Linda J. Lee 129
7 Dear David: Affect and Belief in Twitter Horror
　　Kristiana Willsey 145
8 The Beauty, the Beast, and the Fanon: The Vernacularization of the Literary Canon and an Epilogue to Modernity
　　Tok Thompson 161
9 Classifying #BlackLivesMatter: Genre and Form in Digital Folklore
　　Lynne S. McNeill 179
10 The Clown Legend Cascade of 2016
　　John Laudun 188
11 The Blue Whale Suicide Challenge: Hypermodern Ostension on a Global Scale
　　Elizabeth Tucker 209
12 Overt and Covert Aspects of Virtual Play
　　Bill Ellis 226

About the Contributors 251
Index 255