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Folkloric Expression
Long before either of us were internet scholars, long before either of us even knew what a scholar was, we were students of everyday folk expression. We wouldn't be the people we are today, and certainly not the scholars we are today, if folkloric expression hadn't so fundamentally shaped our humor, our values, and our basic understanding of the world. Similarly, online ambivalence would be a pale shadow of itself without folklore to blur so many normative boundaries.
This chapter will chronicle these blurred boundaries, emphasizing the overlap between then and now, formal and folk, and commercial and populist. It will focus most intently on then and now, connecting dirty limericks, high school hijinks, saucy photocopier art, Facebook antagonisms, laughter at tragedy, and a fun fellow named Uncle Dolan. As we'll see, every shared meme, every dark joke, every photoshopped image sexually corrupting a beloved children's icon, is a bridge between past and present, pre- and post-internet. Understanding the newest of the new necessitates tracing these connections; new dirt from old soil.
In addition to emphasizing continuity, the chapter will also emphasize divergence. This divergence can be attributed, first and foremost, to the affordances of digital mediation: modularity, modifiability, archivability, and accessibility in particular. These affordances accelerate familiar embodied ambivalence, immediately complicating ethical assessment and even basic classification of digitally mediated content. Irony can be especially difficult to parse from earnestness online, and problematic perspectives can be amplified just as easily as pro-social ones. These new contours coexist alongside all that has come before, a point of ambivalence that will underscore each of the subsequent chapters.
The essentials of folklore
Some of Milner's earliest exposure to ambivalent folkloric expression occurred during adolescence. When he came of age around 12, he was permitted to join the men on his mom's side of the family for their annual male bonding fishing trip. Although not much one for fishing (or rigid gender segregation), Milner nonetheless enjoyed his nights around the fire year after year in rural Missouri, trading jokes and stories as the Jack Daniels flowed and the conversations grew more ribald. Milner and his cousins were interrogated by various uncles and fathers about their moral purity; those same uncles and fathers then happily told story after story undercutting their own moral purity. Barbs were traded about love, politics, and “just what kind of bullshit” Milner's brother Eric had added to the night's playlist of background music. On these nights, Milner often found himself laughing along with the family, despite some of the troubling commentary being shared. And by the time Pappaw – mostly drunk and mostly toothless – began to recite from Uncle Dave's hallowed dirty limerick book, Milner was reciting right along: “There once was a fellow named Skinner, who took a young lady to dinner …”
Phillips' introduction to folkloric ambivalence corresponded with her burgeoning and now decades-long friendship with fellow weirdo Katie – or as 12-year-old Phillips called her for reasons neither can remember, “Bob” (Phillips, for similarly nebulous reasons, was “Artie”). The two would spend their all-day Saturday track meets giggling at stories from the Weekly World News, a campy tabloid featuring accounts of Bat Children, toilets haunted by plumbers' ghosts, and socialites impregnated by Bigfoot, among countless other gems of anti-journalism. They would also play pranks like tying a dollar bill to fishing wire, setting the bait, then tugging it away when someone would bend down for a pick-up (Phillips thinks this was something they learned from The Simpsons). And then there were their ongoing adventures with various adult enemies at meets and during practice, which they would chronicle in their self-published (that is to say, hand-drawn and shown to their mothers) newspaper, The Larry Times (don't ask); targets included a heartless fiend they dubbed “Achum,” somebody's cranky mother who passed out jelly beans after practice and would squirrel away all the delicious reds for herself (Achum's name was derived from the sound the two assumed she made when she ate them).
To those who presume, as many people do, that folklore is comprised of “old stuff” like fairy tales, traditional dances, and spoken word performances, Milner's example might seem more obviously folkloric. It takes place around a campfire, involves alcohol and the spontaneous recitation of poetry, features an older generation bestowing dubious wisdom onto the younger generation, is vaguely ritualistic, and is gender-segregated (rude, Phillips snorts). Phillips' example, conversely, might not seem folkloric at all. It's restricted to inside jokes between two friends (and their bemused mothers), engages with mass media, and trades “traditional” locations like a campfire for youth track meets and practices. But both Phillips' and Milner's examples are folkloric, and understanding why is the first step in understanding the folkloric dimensions of ambivalent expression online.
The first point to mention is that there's no inherent rule that folk expression must consist of “old stuff.” Rather than solely investigating the past, the discipline of folklore is concerned more broadly with the relationship between the folk – which prominent folklorist Alan Dundes famously described as “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor” (1980, 6) – and their lore. Lore (also known as “folklore,” like the discipline itself) is a fraught concept, but broadly defined consists of expressive creations (Radner 1993), expressive phenomena (Toelken 1996), and, perhaps most simply, the “stuff that people share” (Howard, quoted in Owens 2013) within a particular cultural circumstance. As Trevor J. Blank (2013) notes, this circumstance needn't necessarily span vast stretches of time, although of course it can. What matters most is that these expressions communicate “consistencies that allow a person or group to perceive expressions as traditional, locally derived, or community generated” (xiv). Both Milner's and Phillips' examples meet these criteria; each story revolves around a stable (if small) group with many factors in common, and each is steeped in consistent, locally derived traditions that in both cases have persisted for decades.
But tradition isn't folklore's only focus. Augmenting (and complicating) this focus, the discipline also foregrounds what Jan Harold Brunvand (2001) calls “multiple variation”: the transformation of familiar expressions as they spread through new moments and audiences. Barre Toelken (1996) describes this process using the twin laws of conservatism and dynamism. As Toelken explains, conservative folkloric elements are stable; they are the aspects of a particular tradition that are passed down from generation to generation. Dynamic elements are those that evolve over time, and allow participants to personalize an event or behavior while still maintaining ties to tradition. Both Milner's and Phillips' experiences are underscored by these twin laws. In the case of Milner's family, fixed elements like excessive consumption of Jack Daniels, limerick readings, and the exchange of stories and life lessons were balanced by variations of the precise limericks, stories, and life lessons (read: unsolicited sex advice) that were shared and subsequently built upon during the next year's trip. For Phillips and Katie, their shared love of campy media and oddity generally, along with an eye for a particular kind of mischief, served as a consistent backdrop for the emergent jokes that evolved and became tangled into new expressions as the decades wore on.
The interplay between conservative precedent and dynamic transformation places folklore squarely within the realm of the vernacular. Folklorist Robert Glenn Howard (2008) foregrounds two common forms of vernacular expression, each consisting of dynamic innovations on conservative communicative standards: common vernacular and subaltern vernacular. As Howard explains, common vernacular is “held separate from the formal discursive products” (494) of existing institutions. It is, to use a very basic example, the difference between slang and words listed in a dictionary (or between “Achum” and whatever that poor woman's real name was). Subaltern vernacular, expression forwarded by individuals on the cultural margins, hinges as much on who is doing the communicating as it does on what, specifically, these individuals are expressing. Subaltern vernacular is doubly noninstitutional, in other words; the messages themselves run counter to formal or otherwise codified discourse, and so do the people transmitting the message. Reclamations of racist, sexist, or homophobic epithets by the groups these terms have been deployed against is an example of subaltern vernacular.
Both dimensions of vernacular expression are essential to the churning wheel of tradition and transformation that is folklore. And as they trace this churn, folklorists are ultimately tracing how different kinds of people make sense of the world and each other. Regardless of era or degree of mediation, regardless of whether the stuff folklorists study is hundreds of years old or something that happened yesterday, folklore is, to borrow Toelken's very broad framing, the study of “the living performance of tradition” (1996, xi) – for better and for worse and for everything in between, as we'll see below.
80 percent obscene and 100 percent ambivalent
The everyday expression of everyday people is not, by and large, house of worship talk. It's not ivory-tower talk. It's back-alley talk, around-the-campfire talk. Furtive talk when the boss isn't listening. Hybrid, unpolished, and unfinished, folklore is where formality goes to rest. Because it falls outside of, complicates, or is in direct conflict with more formal cultural elements, folkloric expression is often, quite literally, not safe for work (or church, or school, or any other seat of institutional power). Toelken (1996) estimates that the vast majority of orally transmitted folkloric material – up to 80 percent, he suggests – would in fact be considered obscene if encountered out of context. Of course, just as one person's weird is another person's Tuesday, one community's obscenity is another community's everyday expression; even the most seemingly dirty, inappropriate, or just plain weird traditions serve a specific social purpose within the communities that embrace them. That these expressions are both soil and dirt, indigenous and matter out of place, is the most foundational layer of folkloric ambivalence.
Another foundational layer of this ambivalence, highlighted by Howard (2008), is the fact that vernacular expressions are fundamentally hybrid, handily blurring the lines between structure and play, formal and folk, commercial and populist. In the context of Milner's annual fishing trip, for example, conservative middle American ideals of male bonding, family time, and intergenerational outdoorsiness are suffused with the integration of far less conservative elements, notably the mass consumption of alcohol, accounts of illegal exploits, and the disclosure of sexual experiences. Family members' adoption, adaptation, and performance of limericks published in a popular press book also blurs the line between folk creativity and mass produced content.2 In the process, written tradition – borrowed from earlier oral sources – is reintegrated into new oral sources (and with the publication of this book, subsequently repurposed into a written academic tradition).
These same binaries are dismantled by Phillips and Katie's track and field troublemaking. The common experience (for youth athletes, anyway) of sitting through an all-day track meet or, more universally, navigating childhood under the looming threat of other people's mothers, was augmented by idiosyncratic pranks, silly stories, and subversive play. Inside jokes and references were intertwined with corporate content, including the insertion of personal adversaries like the truly frightening Achum into Weekly World News-worthy toilet ghost scenarios. And just as it was for Milner and his family, the line between the stories Phillips and Katie would tell each other and the stories they read in books or magazines was often nonexistent; corporate expression was personal expression.
The basic, inescapable hybridity of vernacular expression is also present in the case studies we highlighted in the Introduction; satirical Amazon reviews, antagonistic hashtags, and macabre fan art (along with myriad other examples yet unboxed) each infuse elements from corporate and populist expression. These cases, along with our own personal experiences, illustrate that while vernacularity may indeed provide an alternative to dominant power, such expression foregrounds and in fact is precipitated by the interdependence of the folkloric and the institutional. Playful Amazon reviews, for example, may subvert the intended purpose of Amazon's reviewing platform. But they also draw from precisely that platform. Henry Jenkins' (2006) assessment of “convergence culture,” in which “new” participatory and “old” broadcast platforms feed into each other, further exemplifies this ambivalence. Like the fuzzy line between formal and informal language, these ostensibly distinct categories are, instead, reciprocal; you can't talk about one without talking about the other, or at least taking the other for granted. The hybridity of vernacular expression thus underscores its ambivalence; few expressive forms remain uninfluenced by at least some aspect of formal culture, so few cannot be regarded, on a basic level, as being “both, on both sides.”
This is not, however, the only, or even the most significant, site of folkloric ambivalence. Much more vexing is the fact that folklore is, to quote Dundes, “always a reflection of the age in which it flourishes” (1987, 12) – one that often reveals anxieties about major social issues, for example concerns about the economy (Dundes and Pagter 1975), resistance to perceived threats to the status quo manifesting as racism, xenophobia, or homophobia (Dundes 1987; Oring 2008), and paternalistic handwringing over women's sexual, economic, and emotional autonomy (Brunvand 2001). Broader cultural issues are in this way encoded into everyday folkloric expression; the lore of the folk can never, should never, be separated from its broader communal or cultural context.
As it is charged with collecting, analyzing, and preserving for posterity this ambivalent intertwine, the discipline of folklore must navigate its own set of ambivalent contours. On the one hand, championing the everyday speech of everyday people is democratic, unpretentious, and ultimately humane. Everybody matters; everyone deserves to be heard. On the other hand, the everyday speech of everyday people can often be quite ugly. “Folksy” does not, after all, necessarily mean good, moral, or just. All it means is that people are doing something. And that can absolutely go any way, from the highest peaks of human compassion to the darkest pits of human intolerance to all the muddy places in between.
The fact that folk expression can perpetuate bigotry and intolerance immediately complicates folklorists' archival impulse, best articulated by the omnipresent Dundes' insistence that the study of human culture “must include all aspects of human activity” (1965, 92, original emphasis). Dundes and Uli Linke (1987) address this tension in their analysis of jokes about Auschwitz, the German World War II concentration camp. The authors provide an impassioned defense of engaging with “repugnant and distasteful” (29) folkloric content, a category into which Auschwitz jokes clearly fall. They concede that by publishing collections of Auschwitz jokes, they risk amplifying precisely the anti-Semitic sentiment they profess to abhor. But, they counter, these sick jokes will remain in circulation regardless of whether or not they are reported by folklorists; by collecting and analyzing them in order to hold prejudice “up to the light of reason” (38), there's a chance that folkloric intervention will call attention to, and in the process help stymie, bigoted thinking.
Cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris ([1988] 2007) challenges the underlying assumption that bigoted expression can, and in fact should, be amplified by scholars on the grounds that it's what people are already doing. As she argues, merely affirming popular behavior risks reducing all expression – the good, the bad, and the ugly – to equally forgettable images in a flipbook. Nothing worth a second look; everything warranting clinical detachment. Beyond that, blithely chronicling and ventriloquizing the popular risks further normalizing the structural inequality, bias, and identity-based antagonisms that are embedded within so many mainstream discourses. This is a risk one takes regardless of motivation. “Even when done in the service of critical assessment,” Milner argues, “reproducing these discourses continues their circulation, and therefore may continue to normalize their antagonisms and marginalizations” (2016, 123). From this perspective, Dundes and Linke's (1987) claim that they were, in fact, helping combat racism by archiving racism falls flat; by archiving, they are amplifying. And by amplifying, they're contributing to the overall problem.
We maintain, appropriately enough, an ambivalent perspective on this issue. It should go without saying that researchers in any discipline should carefully situate their own political standpoint alongside any and all research projects, and take every precaution not to amplify, replicate, or further normalize identity-based antagonisms. We also agree that sidestepping offensive content risks signaling complicity, and that airing uncomfortable cultural truths is often the first step toward combatting them. It might be better if there were more straightforward ethical solutions to issues of amplification. It certainly would be easier. But the ambivalence of these issues – the fact that an equally compelling argument could be made either way – highlights the futility of forwarding universalizing claims about human behavior, and, further, of forwarding universalizing claims about the best way to engage with this behavior. What is right, what is wrong, and what can or should be done, simply depends – requiring not rote proclamations, but context-sensitive, case-specific analyses. These are the analyses we hope to undertake, as we delve into the continuities between digital and embodied folkloric expression.
Digital continuities, bawdy and rough hewn
The previous section argued that the fundamental ambivalence of folkloric expression dismantles easy binaries between formal and folk, commercial and populist. This section will illustrate yet another binary complicated by folkloric ambivalence: the seemingly straightforward, but in fact quite convoluted, line between then and now. To do so, it will draw from a pair of contexts we know all too well: internet memes and subcultural trolling, each the subject of our respective 2012 doctoral dissertations, each the starting point for subsequent solo and collaborative research, and each the continuation of a long line of ambivalent precedent.
The meme connection
The faux Amazon reviews, satirical hashtags, and spree shooter fan art described in the Introduction are examples of internet memes, evolving tapestries of self-referential texts collectively created, circulated, and transformed by participants online. Famed biologist Richard Dawkins first introduced the term meme (a play on “gene”) four decades ago to explain how “units of cultural transmission” (1976, 206) – like trends, fashions, and slang – spread from person to person, evolving as they travel. Dawkins' metaphor was one of virality; in his conceptualization, memes leap “from brain to brain” (206) as new participants imitate what they see and hear. In the years following Dawkins' initial argument, the meme metaphor resonated with participants on the fledgling internet, and by the early aughts the term became a favored descriptor for shared in-jokes, catchphrases, idiosyncratic habits, and of course participants' tendency to caption countless pictures of cats.
But memes are bigger than funny pictures on the internet, and are more complex than a leap from brain to brain. As Milner (2016) argues, memetic media instead comprise a thriving constellation of vernacular expression, spanning genres of communication and even degrees of mediation. Regardless of how divergent these media can be, they are unified by a few fundamental logics. They depend on multimodality (expression through diverse modes of communication, including written words and static images, as well as audio and video), reappropriation (the remix and recombination of existing cultural materials), resonance (the manifestation of strong personal affinity), collectivism (social creation and transformation), and spread (circulation through mass networks). Through these logics, participants create, circulate, and transform shared texts, adding unique and ever-evolving contributions to vast cultural tapestries.
Because this process is so situated, playful, and vernacular, the folkloric lens is a natural fit for internet memes – so much so that digital media scholar Limor Shifman describes memes as “(post)modern folklore” (2014, 15). Analyses of memetic participation have, after all, been folklorists' bread and butter for decades, whether or not they were using the term meme. Indeed, a year before Dawkins even coined the word, Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter were already talking about the “multiple existence,” “variation,” and “genetic interrelationships” (1975, xxi) of Xeroxlore, the folkloric art and commentary that spread across and between offices via photocopiers (for you kids out there, that's the Xerox in Xeroxlore, named after a popular photocopier brand). Common forms of Xeroxlore included mock letters, parodies of songs, comical definitions and taxonomies, and farcical office memos, all of which traveled from copier to copier, office to office, as participants – like they always have – created, circulated, and transformed their own everyday expressions.
These expressions would, for the record, have been right at home on Twitter, Tumblr, 4chan, Facebook, or at least an email forward. Not just because of the often not-safe-for-work (or life) nature of Xeroxlore. But also because Xeroxlore texts were subsumed by memetic logics, even if they existed decades before the mass adoption of digital media. Xeroxlore was multimodal, frequently combining written word and static image; one commonly circulated piece of Xeroxlore, for instance, is a drawing of a doughy cartoon man with a screw driven through his torso, captioned with some variation of the expression “work hard and you shall be rewarded.” Xeroxlore was also reappropriational, featuring vernacular reinterpretations of pop cultural fixtures like Peanuts and Looney Tunes characters. It was resonant, connecting with participants' disdain for the bureaucracies underpinning college campuses, military branches, and commercial offices. It was collective, often being shared without signature or citation, and often lauding one social group at the expense of another. And it certainly spread, as variations of the most resonant jokes and stories popped up in different forms across different regions.
The overlaps between folklore and memetic media run even deeper than these fundamental logics. Before he ever even heard of Toelken's (1996) twin laws of conservatism and dynamism, for example, Milner (2016) pulled from discourse analyst Deborah Tannen ([1989] 2007) to argue that memetic media depend on the interplay between fixity and novelty, concepts essentially interchangeable with conservatism and dynamism. Tannen applied fixity and novelty to everyday conversations and the scripts we all live by. Fixed communicative motifs provide templates for, say, greeting acquaintances, sharing small talk in an elevator, or invoking common idioms. But, as standard as they might be to members within a given culture or community, these scripts are adapted in novel ways to make every interaction unique. Depending on the circumstance, we decide whether to greet with a handshake or a hug, whether we want to fill that elevator with talk about the rain or about the local baseball team, and whether “slow and steady wins the race” is a better piece of advice than “the early bird catches the worm.”
Milner (2016) argues that memetic media balance the fixed and the novel in similar ways. Satirical Amazon reviews, for instance, are novel in their creative individual expression; they're fixed, however, in the constellation of odd products they target and the humorous hyperbole they employ. Each critical #AskThicke response was novel in its specific commentary, but the themes that resonated across these responses remained largely consistent, resulting in the repeated lampooning of Thicke's presumed misogyny, sexual desperation, lack of talent, and fashion faux pas. Holmies and Columbine shooter groupies, for their part, were novel in their professed affinity for mass murderers James Holmes, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold, but their expressions of devotion – love letters and floaty hearts – shared fixed dimensions premised on romantic motifs commonly applied to teenage heartthrobs. The balance of fixity and novelty in these and other cases allows participants to infuse collective online spaces with more idiosyncratic expression.
As it was fundamentally memetic and therefore fundamentally folkloric (and vice versa), Xeroxlore also hewed to a basic fixity of form, and also spun out novel iterations within a shared social context. Pop cultural references (to Looney Tunes and Peanuts characters, alongside countless others) and various stock office archetypes (the asshole boss, the bullying co-worker, the know-nothing secretary) were creatively transformed in the name of critique, parody, and play. Participants often edited broader Xeroxlore scripts so that they more specifically applied to their region, their company, or even their own uniquely incompetent middle management. The fixity and novelty of these forms – or if you prefer, their conservatism and dynamism – served to create a lingua franca, a bridge language between and within folk collectives: the same then as now, immediately raising questions about that basic demarcation.
Not only are internet memes and Xeroxlore premised on similar fundamental logics, and a similar blend of fixity and novelty, they're also similarly vernacular. And as such, are often quite “bawdy and rough hewn” (to borrow a wonderful phrase from Greenhill and Matrix 2010, 22). There's no rule that they have to be, of course. But as expressions standing in conflict with or in contrast to more formal cultural elements, their tone frequently veers – and veers spectacularly – into Toelken's (1996) “80% obscene” territory. One preeminent contemporary example is the collectively created (and childhood-ruining) “Dolan Duck” family of comics (Figure 2). Dolan comics were popularized in 2010 on 4chan's “/b/” (“Random”) board, a simple message board founded in 2003, which quickly established itself as the go-to place for so-called “trollish fuckery.” These crudely drawn comics, some of which are animated and voiced by glitchy voice-to-text translation software, memetically chronicle the misadventures of homicidal sex monster “Dolan Duck” (a play on Disney cartoon staple Donald Duck) and his friends “Gooby” (Goofy), “Pruto” (Pluto), and “Fogor” (Foghorn Leghorn, a Looney Tunes addition to the Walt Disney party) – all of whom are luminous poster children for rule 34 (as Fogor and Gooby exist, there is indeed porn of them).
Dolan comics often feature explicitly assaultive and sexually violent imagery, which we will spare you (issues of amplification, after all). Figure 2, as tame as it might be compared to other Dolan comics, nonetheless demonstrates the character's memetic intertextuality and archetypical cruelty. The story told in the 12 words and 4 scant panels of Figure 2 not only pulls from Disney's Donald Duck, but also DC Comics' Batman. Its narrative hinges on Batman's orphan backstory, knowledge required to understand the mean-spirited poignancy of Dolan's characteristic taunting. It also replicates the nonstandard spelling and grammar so prevalent in Dolan comics and esoteric online vernacular more generally.
As uniquely absurd and grotesque as it might seem, Dolan's memetic vernacularity hews closely to the Xeroxlore American office workers created, circulated, and transformed a half-century ago; Dundes and Pagter (1975) note that much of the content they encountered was too sexually explicit, profanity laden, and gratuitously violent to print. Which is really saying something, considering the slew of profane, misanthropic written commentary and crudely sexualized drawings they did print. Popular reappropriations of Looney Tunes characters (like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote) and Peanuts characters (like Charlie Brown and Lucy) exemplify this prurience: each was repeatedly placed into obscene circumstances, illustrating that rule 34 was alive and well long before 4chan. Memetic play resulted, for example, in Road Runner alternatively anally penetrating and being anally penetrated by Wile E. Coyote, and Charlie Brown constantly fighting an erection, or repeatedly impregnating his female friends (“Goddamn you, Charlie Brown” was a recurring punchline).
These examples, like the Dolan comics that exist in their lineage, may seem like shocking misappropriations, but as Dundes and Pagter argue, all it takes for a mass-produced work to pass into the populist tradition is for it to catch “the imagination of the folk” (145). A half-century later, the potential for collective narrative play – from the innocent to the grotesque – persists. There may be more ways to catch the imagination of more people, with more creative tools at their disposal, but the behavioral impulse remains the same.
And these impulses, regardless of era, directly reflect the contexts in which they thrive(d) – not necessarily as part of a conscious argument about the broader cultural reality, but as a backlit framing of its contours. As explained by Dundes and Pagter, Xeroxlore reflected the profound racial, sexual, and class tensions that permeated mid-century American office spaces. Right-wing populist sentiments were pervasive, as workers shared endless ethnic jokes and slurs. Through satirical accounts of “equal-opportunity Christmas memos” and “government poverty applications,” they also skewered what is now derided as “political correctness” (paging Donald J. Trump and his legion of racist Twitter attack dogs). Misogyny reared its head in popular jokes about (allegedly) dumb blondes and (allegedly) promiscuous secretaries. And recurring jabs at redundant paperwork, incompetent middle managers, and corporate inefficiencies all point to a broader sense of alienation in the face of expanding white-collar bureaucracy.
Contemporary internet memes are similarly reflective of broader cultural motifs, illustrated by how often memetic content is steeped in familiar identity antagonisms. Dolan comics, for instance, often portray Dolan and his pals assaulting, dismembering, or murdering “Dasae” (i.e. Daisy Duck, girlfriend of Donald) because she displeased someone, sometimes simply by existing. Such misogynist expression is common on 4chan, which Phillips calls “unquestionably androcentric” (2015, 54). This isn't to assert that Dolan participants or 4chan users more broadly are necessarily violent or misogynist in their embodied lives, but rather that sexually violent motifs are especially resonant, and therefore especially common, on 4chan's forums. Similar discourses – about male dominance, violence, and sexual conquest – also persist on sites like Reddit and BodyBuilding.com, where the sizeism and ableism of Amazon Customer's initial Three Wolf Moon review first spread. These sorts of antagonistic memes weaponize existing cultural logics, and thus reflect the antagonisms pervasive in embodied spaces as well; the memes wouldn't remain so popular with so many participants if they didn't.
But within our contemporary media landscape, this picture isn't wholly discouraging. On the other end of the identity antagonism spectrum, hijacks of #AskThicke and Bill Cosby's ill-conceived request for participants to “meme him,” as well as satirical reviews of BIC “Cristal for Her” pens, point to clashes around the same identity essentialisms that are predominant in many online spaces. Clash that is indicative of a cultural moment in which more people from historically underrepresented perspectives are asserting their right to be heard. Over the last half-century, many cultural realities have changed, and many (sadly) have not; but, for better or worse, folkloric (and therefore memetic) expression has consistently reflected those realities.
Expanding on this continuity, we will now turn to memetic play with death, another image reflected in the folkloric mirror. Although this image may strike many as especially outrageous, especially unpleasant, or even outright immoral, it too persists across eras and degrees of mediation – challenging, once more, any clear breakdown between what happened then and what's happening now.
LOL your dead
In 2010, a new and particularly virulent form of subcultural trolling began to overrun Facebook, the omnipresent social networking platform. Unlike contemporaneous subcultural trolling on 4chan's /b/ – whose anonymous, ephemeral interactions didn't extend beyond a particular coordinated attack against a chosen target – trolling on Facebook allowed for the creation of a relatively stable anti-social network in which trolls were easily able to form close-knit cabals targeting a whole host of on-site causes, public personalities, and affinity groups (Phillips 2015).
The most outrageous of these behaviors occurred on what Facebook called “memorial pages.” These pages – sometimes known as “RIP pages” – allowed friends and family of the recently deceased to convene, collectively mourn, and share memories. In the wake of high-profile deaths, members of the wider public would often join these mourners, and would express their condolences alongside those who knew the victims personally. Facebook memorial trolls took umbrage at these public outpourings of sentimentality, and began taking aim. Most often, their targets consisted of so-called “grief tourists,” those who didn't personally know the deceased. But some trolls focused on bereaved friends and family. Regardless of whom participating trolls chose to target, their behaviors encompassed a wide spectrum. They pretended to know the deceased to confuse posters who also didn't know the deceased; created fake memorial pages as a kind of grief tourist honeypot; posted silly, bizarre, or obscene photoshopped images onto official (created by friends or family) or unofficial (created by strangers or trolls) memorial pages; and, most upsettingly, flooded a page with cruelly photoshopped images of the crime or victim in question, or with crime scene photos taken of similar tragedies.
Unsurprisingly, RIP trolling generated a great deal of journalistic coverage and public debate focused on the singular, pointed question: exactly what was wrong with the people who would engage in these sorts of behaviors? Why would anyone do something like that? In her ethnographic research on the subject, Phillips found that, often, these kinds of questions would be followed by a lamentation that the internet was making everything terrible: people were getting meaner, and nobody had any respect. Reasonable conclusions to draw, given the behaviors in question, but ones that are not borne out by the folkloric record. RIP trolling is, in truth, highly precedented, a fact that doesn't mitigate its harm, but which does complicate any simplistic comparison between our presumably benighted present and presumably gentler past.
For instance, similarly profane behaviors were exhibited – and similarly fretted over – at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Newfoundland funeral wakes. As folklorist Peter Narváez (2003) explains, wake participants played games “with penalty of biting the corpse's toes,” rigged corpses to scare unsuspecting guests, made the corpse “drink” alcoholic beverages, dressed the corpse in silly outfits, and played cruel practical jokes on selected attendees. Echoing memorial page trolling, these outrageous behaviors trounced taboos related to death and to the mourning process generally. Questions about motivations and what might be wrong with participants were just as pressing to horrified nineteenth- and twentieth-century onlookers as they were in response to contemporary Facebook memorial page trolling. In reviewing the existing literature, Narváez encountered two prevailing explanations: that mourners felt compelled to play within these sacred spaces, first, to placate the dead, or second, to challenge the ruling order.
While Narváez concedes that each explanation is plausible, especially when applied to their respective contexts (both arguments were forwarded by Irish scholars in response to Irish funeral behaviors), he asserts that neither adequately explains why Newfoundland wakes would inspire such bawdy and rough hewn fun, and why the tradition would persist – with some dynamic variation, of course – for so many generations. Perhaps there is a better theoretical explanation, Narváez contends; perhaps it would be possible to construct a socio-cultural analysis that elegantly explains why otherwise “normal” people would engage in such abnormal, or perhaps even sociopathic, behaviors. The problem, Narváez suggests, is that almost none of the informants' testimonies would support such a staid, academic reading. In accordance with their own explanations, people flocked to these sorts of wakes because they were fun. Some informants even expressed glee when a member of the community died, because a death meant a party, and a party meant drinking, and drinking meant there'd be pranks to play.
This does not mean that the behaviors couldn't also be reflective of larger cultural forces. As folkloric practices, they most certainly were. But in addition to the crisscross of cultural forces that influence behavior, play was also, well, at play. People like to feel good, Narváez notes, and like to do things that make them feel good. Sometimes “feeling good” is as simple as having a full stomach and nice buzz (what Narváez describes as “evasive” pleasures, like getting drunk on Jack Daniels and reciting vulgar limericks with the family). Sometimes “feeling good” means doing something you know you shouldn't be doing (described as “subversive” pleasures, like watching with glee as the coach who punishes you with never-ending warm-up drills bends over to collect their sidewalk dollar prize and then is thwarted mid-snatch). Frequently, “feeling good” means both.
So, while a well-drawn theory will consider whether and how and why these pleasures reflect larger social forces, a fully embodied folkloric account must also acknowledge that pleasure is often a reason in and of itself. Questions as to why Newfoundlanders would engage in mischievous, rowdy behavior in the face of death could therefore be answered with (deceptive) simplicity: because they wanted to, which – as Phillips (2015) argues – was also a common attitude of the trolls who terrorized Facebook memorial pages. It was fun. It made them laugh. This laughter was often met by confoundment, rage, and disgust, with very good reason: the behaviors were often quite confounding, enraging, and disgusting. But for participating trolls, enjoyment was one very simple and almost always overlooked explanation for why they did what they did.
Narváez' account isn't the only study that provides precedent for memorial page trolling. Folklorist Elliott Oring's (1987) analysis of the “tasteless and cruel” humor surrounding the 1986 Challenger space disaster, in which seven shuttle crew members were killed instantly during an explosion at take-off, uncannily echoes the behavioral impetus and basic tone of RIP humor (“LOL your dead” – with “you're” deliberately misspelled – being a representative example). Many of the resulting jokes focused on middle school teacher Christa McAuliffe, winner of NASA's immediately abandoned “Teacher in Space” program. One of the jokes that Oring recounts asks, “What color were Christa McAuliffe's eyes?”; the answer: “Blue. One blew this way and the other blew that way” (280).
Rather than echoing the common perspective that such jokes were either evidence of sociopathy or provided a therapeutic release, Oring argues that these jokes allowed participants to play with and push back against a media apparatus that packages tragedy as a commodity and attempts to set an emotional agenda predicated on corporate interests. Whether or not the joke tellers self-consciously framed their actions as a pointed critique of sensationalist journalism is another question. Oring's argument is that these jokes weren't necessarily attacking McAuliffe and the other astronauts personally, as an act of targeted or otherwise sociopathic antagonism. Neither were they necessarily serving an explicitly therapeutic function. The truth was almost assuredly more nuanced than either versus or, this versus that.
The trolls Phillips (2015) interviewed for her study of memorial page trolling seemed to support Oring's hypothesis. Augmenting the trolls' insistence that they targeted memorial pages “for the lulz” – trolling parlance for antagonistic laughter derived from the infliction of emotional distress – they also cited news coverage as a behavioral catalyst. One troll, Paulie Socash, framed mainstream media outlets as “tragedy merchants” (161), and frequently discussed his disdain not just for journalistic sensationalism, but for the average Facebook users (“grief tourists”) who bought into a given media narrative and inundated dead strangers' pages with what trolls derided as empty condolences. To the trolls Phillips interviewed, the oft-repeated expression “I didn't know you, but I am very sorry you're dead” bespoke excessive sentimentality and a lack of critical thinking, and therefore justified their trollish tauntings.
However carefully they rationalized their actions, of course, participating trolls were engaging in behaviors that had direct and often devastating real-world consequences for those affected by a tragedy. Trolls' behaviors also directly impacted those who weren't personally affected, but who nevertheless felt strong attachment to a story – despite trolls' myopic assertion that it is impossible to feel genuine compassion for a stranger. And it is at this point that the analogy between Oring's (1987) account of “sick” Challenger humor and RIP trolling breaks down; there is a big difference between recounting an off-color joke in a private setting and posting antagonistic commentary potentially or pointedly accessible to friends and family of the deceased. That said, like Narváez' (2003) account of Newfoundland wakes, Oring's (1987) account illustrates the fact that there is ample precedent for mischievous, antagonistic, and seemingly callous responses to death and tragedy. Memorial page trolls are certainly outrageous and upsetting, but they are far from the first group to make light of terrible things.
Timothy Tangherlini's 1998 study of Bay Area medics provides another embodied example of this impulse. As in the previous examples, the medics Tangherlini profiles laugh at (or, perhaps more accurately, around) dead people. Unlike the previous examples, these medics' dark and often grisly humor is shared by medics with other medics, often friends and co-workers, making it more of a tale-telling exercise than one of directed antagonism. So while not perfectly analogous to RIP trolling per se, the tradition of tale-telling Tangherlini explores can still be likened to the informal “grossest of the gross” contests (i.e. attempts to tell the worst story / show the nastiest image) that permeate the trollspace and other corners of the internet where shocking or scarring one's readers is the desired outcome. The following anecdote from Tangherlini's study illustrates this continuity:
[describing a picture taken with a suicide victim]
Darryl: We have this one picture where this chick had hung herself in a closet and she's like, err. And she'd been there for probably a day, and she was stiff – she was dead, dead, dead! And we took a picture of her hanging there with like me with my arm around my prom date.
(161)
And this isn't even the most visceral story. One medic likens the brain of a woman run over by a train to a pile of chewed-up bubble gum; another compares the collapsed skull of a shotgun suicide to a salad bowl; and countless others recount one blood-splattered call after another, often sending their audience, always other medics, into giggling fits.
Based on the medics' shared experiences and emotional reactions, Tangherlini concludes that the stories medics tell provide an outlet for narrative one-upsmanship; create and maintain social hierarchies (within and outside the medic community); challenge, comment on, or subvert authority; and allow medics – whose jobs are otherwise never finished – to posit discrete endings (and therefore closure) for particularly difficult or otherwise jarring experiences. Perhaps most importantly, these stories, and the humor they contain, establish performative distance between the observer and that which has been observed, thus allowing the medic to do their job with a minimal amount of psychic trauma. Tangherlini's analysis also highlights the importance of taking audience into account when considering ambivalent behaviors. As he found, humor related to severed optic nerves, splattered brains, and otherwise disarticulated corpses – a few common narrative themes – depended entirely on context, namely the person telling the story and the people listening, how many times the story had been told, the current mood of the audience, what happened the previous shift, and so on – variables that are just as important when talking about memorial page trolling, or indeed any other ambivalent online behavior.
Although the subjects, objectives, and methods of their studies are widely divergent, Narváez (2003), Oring (1987), and Tangherlini (1998) reveal a great deal of behavioral and even tonal overlap between the pre-internet then and the contemporary post-internet now, and in the process provide a richer context through which to engage the seemingly unprecedented category of memorial page trolling. Precedent is not, however, the same as permissibility; the mere fact that certain behaviors span eras or degrees of mediation doesn't make the behaviors socially or politically acceptable. What this continuity does do is call attention to the fact that now and then are not so different after all, and must instead be considered on an uneven, ever-evolving continuum.
Digital divergences and folkloric expression
The conservative element of folkloric expression is that the tone, nature, and pleasures of ambivalent vernacularity have persisted over time, and span both historical eras and degrees of mediation. Echoing folklore itself, this conservatism exists in balance with dynamism; the brave new world of digital media adds its own topography to the landscape of folk practices, amplifying the ambivalence of already highly ambivalent expression. In the process, the already blurry lines between then and now, formal and folk, and commercial and populist, are rendered even more unstable. We'll explore these new blurs below, emphasizing the new technological affordances, new behavioral complications, and new ethical questions engendered by the ambivalent internet.
The affordances of digital mediation
Like all technologies, digital technologies are replete with specific affordances, a term meaning – most simply – what an object allows a person to do with it (Gaver 1991). Although these affordances don't dictate behavior, they certainly limit one's options; you can't, for example, very easily use a child's car seat to mail in your taxes or burn down your house. In the context of folkloric expression online, one of the most significant affordances is what new-media scholar Lev Manovich describes as modularity: the ability to manipulate, rearrange, and/or substitute digitized parts of a larger whole without disrupting or destroying the “overall structure of an object” (2001, 31). In his exploration of the open source software movement, Chris Kelty (2008) foregrounds the related concept of modifiability, the ability of open source software producers – really anyone engaging in any form of free and open collaboration – to repurpose and reappropriate aspects of an existing project toward some new end.
In addition to facilitating the modularity and modifiability of content, digitization also simplifies the archivability of content, or as communication scholar Nancy K. Baym (2015) puts it, how content online may be replicated and stored. Augmenting the ability to archive content is the accessibility of that content through categorization and searching. Online photo tagging, in which the people, places, or things in uploaded photographs are indexed within a searchable database, exemplifies this process (Shirky 2008). Taken together, these technological affordances – which have become more available to more people as the infrastructure of the web has shifted to favor social, and especially mobile, applications – allow online participants to create, circulate, and transform vernacular media much more easily than in previous eras. There were, of course, some early tools affording media manipulation (photocopier machines, for example). But these tools were restricted to a select few (in this case white-collar office workers), and furthermore afforded a fairly limited range of participation (copied images could be further copied, but if someone wanted to modify a drawing, they had to start from scratch or trace over the original).
So, while the three memetic images in Figure 3 certainly connect to an existing lineage of ambivalent folkloric expression, they also demonstrate how the affordances of digital media push folkloric ambivalence into hyperdrive, adding new dynamics to long-established practices.
The convincing cover forgery corrupting the Berenstain Bears source text on the left side of Figure 3 illustrates modularity. Adapted from a 1998 book titled The Berenstain Bears Get Their Kicks, which features Sister kicking a ball past a stunned Brother as a delighted Mama and concerned Papa look on, the faux cover replicates fixed components of the original while adding dynamic, satirical elements. Even as “Get Their Kicks” is transformed into “Get Kicked in the Dick,” the font, size, and placement of the title is precisely replicated. Brother is scooted to the left so that he's the one being kicked; to accommodate that change, the net and landscape have been reconstructed (the ball is altogether deleted). The facial expressions of three of the four characters have been altered to fit the new message. Only Papa's concerned grimace hasn't been touched. Mama's eyes are closed and her mouth widened to signal sadistic glee. Sister's eyes are narrowed and her teeth are exposed in a display of carnal ferocity. And instead of worriedly watching a soccer ball zoom through his legs, Brother is given the closed eyes and gritted teeth of a male who has just been, well, kicked in the dick. And to really drive that point home, the outline of a penis has been added under Brother's shorts. All thanks to a few minor photo manipulations.
The related affordance of modifiability allows for the collective repurposing of existing materials, helping facilitate the creation of the top right image in Figure 3. First, the image's original creator was able to screen capture a still from a 2002 SpongeBob SquarePants episode titled “Can You Spare a Dime?” It also allowed someone (perhaps the person who first captured the image, perhaps not) to add layers of text over the screen capture. Here the eponymous SpongeBob is looming over his neighbor/co-worker/rival Squidward, fists cocked, on the verge of breaking, screaming “Who Up?? You, muthafucka! So why the fucc didnt u clik the muthafuckin LIKE” (apparently SpongeBob is upset that Squidward is currently active on some social media platform but isn't “liking” SpongeBob's posts). Finally, modifiability allowed the humor site ifunny.co to watermark the image when it was uploaded there (again, perhaps by the individual who screen captured it, perhaps by the individual who annotated it, and perhaps by some third or fourth or fifth or who-knows-how-many-th party). By the time Milner found the image on Tumblr in 2015, the affordance of modifiability had transformed the source text and its original meaning into a new form of vernacular creativity.
The bottom right image in Figure 3 augments Bert and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street with an anal-retentive proclamation. It was born from a circa-2007 meme about an unconventional form of intoxication: supposedly, one could get high by siphoning granulated sugar into one's rectum. Dating back to at least 2008, Cookie Monster was a chosen memetic vessel for this message; you can thank the affordance of archivability for gracing your life with its presence. Users' ability to encounter the image, connect with the image, download the image, and then repost the image, where it might remain for years undisturbed, in turn enabling others to find it, download it, possibly modify it, and subsequently recirculate it, has allowed the image to persist well beyond its esoteric origins. It's now made its way into an academic monograph, where it shall live on as an analog curio for decades to come. You're welcome.
“There's Sugar in My Ass,” like all three images in Figure 3, is also indebted to the accessibility resulting from practices like tagging, cataloging, and indexing. These practices, coupled with archivability, mean that each one of those images is only a search inquiry away – provided one knows what terms to input. Accessibility also allows one to chart and trace the context surrounding these sorts of folkloric expressions in unprecedented ways. For example, after just a few moments of searching, Milner was able to uncover the unannotated Berenstain Bears cover (search term: “Berenstain Bears soccer”), the source episode for SpongeBob accosting a bed-bound Squidward (search term: “SpongeBob yell Squidward bed”), and the earliest uploads of “There's Sugar in My Ass” (via a reverse image search on TinEye.com). Like nothing that has come before, accessibility puts the everyday expressions of everyday folk collectives right at users' fingertips.
Chaos in order
As they facilitate ease of search, storage, and playful reappropriation, these affordances allow participants to manipulate and continually remix an ever-expanding reservoir of source material, often without attributing what was found where, or made where, by whom. And once this newly remixed content is itself archived and search indexed, it can be found and further remixed by others – also without attributing what was found where, or made where, by whom. As a result, even with the affordances of archivability and accessibility, it is often impossible to track with complete certainty where a piece of content originated, where it subsequently traveled, or what meanings it might have communicated to the audiences who engaged with it.
The fact that digital media lend themselves to chaos as much as organization complicates Blank's assertion that the internet provides a “greater paper trail” (2009, 9) for researchers. Sometimes it does. But often digitization has the opposite effect, particularly given how easily vernacular content jumps between platforms and can be downloaded, remixed, and reposted in multiple locations by multiple participants, perhaps even simultaneously. The images in Figure 3, for example, may each contain traces of countless iterations made by countless participants unknown to each other, all culminating in an image that appears singular, but in fact is the remix of a remix of a remix over the course of an untold number of months or years. It's simply not possible to know just by looking at the “final” product (which may, of course, have continued evolving to meet subsequent folk groups' unique needs).
These broader technological affordances are themselves impacted – sometimes augmented, sometimes stymied – by specific platform affordances, essentially the menu of on-site behaviors from which users are able to choose. The most significant of these platform affordances is users' relative level of anonymity or pseudonymity. The more free-wheeling microblogging platform Twitter, for example, has no policy against the creation of pseudonymous accounts, resulting in a great deal of satirical, and often highly ambivalent, play. But even more controlled social networking platforms like Facebook – which ostensibly disallows “fake” profiles3 – can be creatively misused. Users may be discouraged from creating fake profiles or subjected to punitive measures (like bannings or suspension) if they do, but that doesn't mean that they can't, or that all information included in a person's profile should be taken at face value. Ambivalence can still reign, even when platforms take preventative steps.
These platform affordances don't just impact what individual users can and cannot do on-site. They also impact what onlookers can know about these behaviors. For example, although the original satirical reviewer of the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt ultimately outed himself to the New York Times (Applebome 2009), the vast majority of Three Wolf Moon Amazon reviewers appear to be posting under so-called “sock puppets,” throwaway accounts created for a singular specific purpose, usually shenanigans. Some of the commentators may have been “real” people, as suggested by multiple reviews spanning a period of months or years, but because Amazon accounts don't have to include legal names or other public-facing contact information, it's difficult to know what is really what, and who is really whom. All observers have is the text of the review, and any self-disclosed identifying information – which given the context, should be taken with a boulder of salt. Poster 50 Shades of Bic (2012), for example, proclaimed that “Shirt is awesome! However, Kevin Costner keeps following me around wanting to slow dance.” While such a claim might be highly unlikely, it is not logically impossible – and further is difficult, if not impossible, to verify empirically.
Also difficult, if not impossible, to verify empirically is the exact number of participants contributing to a given thread, hashtag, or page, further precluding precise behavioral assessment. As Milner notes, online participants in anonymous or pseudonymous environments can easily have “multiturn conversations with themselves” (2016, 210) – maybe to seed a particular controversy, maybe to set up a particular joke, or maybe for some other inscrutable reason. In the context of Three Wolf Moon reviews, it may well be that some or all of the reviews were posted by the same person. This isn't to say that the reviews were indeed posted by the same person. Rather – echoing Kevin Costner's alleged love for 50 Shades of Bic – one can't prove it's not true.
Even when an individual does post under their legal name, or what seems to be their (or somebody's) legal name, motivations online remain extremely difficult to trace. So much so that questions about motivations are almost always nonstarters. And not just because people online can so easily misrepresent themselves and engage in various forms of mischief with the greatest of ease, as we'll discuss time and again in the chapters to follow. Rather, motivations are usually moot because, for observers, the truth looks the same as a lie, and there is no reliable way to fact-check what even needs fact-checking.
Milner (2016) foregrounds this ambivalence in his analysis of Poe's Law, an online axiom stipulating the difficulty of distinguishing irony from earnestness in public conversation online.4 By posting something obnoxious to an internet forum, for example, a person might be messing with their audience for a laugh. On the other hand, they might sincerely hold an absurd or outright contemptible opinion. Both options are equally plausible, and, in most cases involving unknown strangers, equally unverifiable. Not that Poe's Law is exclusive to digital spaces, of course; it can be difficult to discern the difference between mischief and sincerity in embodied spaces as well, particularly when wildly divergent power dynamics require subversive rhetorical tactics.5 But it is particularly potent in public conversations online, where observers have far fewer opportunities to consider paralinguistic signals alongside a particular statement, and just as importantly, rarely have access to the full relational context of a given interaction.
The vitriolic debate surrounding a rainbow tie-dye number cake recipe published to the website of a Melbourne radio station in 2014 illustrates the difficulty of parsing genuine outrage from straight-up silliness online, and in the process underscores the ambivalence of digitally mediated folkloric expression.6 As Albert Burneko (2014) chronicles in Deadspin, the radio station's article was straightforward enough; it explained to readers that, to achieve the desired tie-dye number cake effect, one need only freeze said tie-dye numbers beforehand, and drop them in the middle of the cake tin before baking. The resulting comment thread, however – which, remember, was in response to a cake recipe posted by a radio station – quickly devolved into a shouting match between commenters about the relative merits of conservatism versus liberalism, the meaning of freedom in democratic societies, and whether or not certain commenters were, in fact, fascists (“Farts,” commenter stuffnfartsinyomouth added to the fracas). Reading through the comments, many of which are posted in all-caps and are so frothy as to be almost unreadable, it's unclear who is genuinely angry and who is fanning the flames for a laugh. Because, again, it's a cake recipe. Posted by a radio station.
Ethical considerations, to be continued
The broad technological and specific platform affordances constituting digital media allow participants to share vernacular expression freely, easily, and immediately. While these affordances can and often do yield explicitly positive outcomes, the same technologies that facilitate cooperation, connection, and community can also facilitate discord, anxiety, and alienation amongst those not comfortably situated within the ingroup. Sometimes these behaviors are willfully destructive – say when online mobs engage in harassing, professionally damaging, and in some cases explicitly illegal behaviors against chosen targets. In these cases, the ethical stakes are clear.
But in many cases, the ethical stakes are difficult to assess; echoing the above section, many stories are convoluted because participants' demographics are convoluted, because their motivations are convoluted, and because it's not always clear what kinds of messages are being communicated. The Australian Rainbow Tie-Dye Cake Comment Apocalypse illustrates this point. There's just not enough context to determine exactly who is playing, exactly who is serious, and exactly what difference that might make. Even attempts to understand a behavior through careful emic analyses – which consider an event or behavior using concepts and frames indigenous to the group in question – can fall flat; not having access to basic information like “Who is doing this?” and “What are they trying to accomplish?” means there's not even a breadcrumb trail to begin following. Sometimes all you have to work with is the content rolling past you on the screen, and sometimes all you can do is 
as it goes. Because what even is that?
The Columbine shooter fan art described in the Introduction further exemplifies this folk ambivalence. As Ryan Rico (2015) explains, much of this content was created, circulated, and transformed by anonymous or pseudonymous participants. While some of the resulting creative expression appeared to be a genuine expression of solidarity with the killers, it could also have been posted in an effort to anger other users, as an inside joke within an unknown affinity group, or because one individual was messing around online and felt like doing something weird, with no deeper motivation than that. Adding to the mystery, while these posters may have been the original content creators, they also may have been reposting found images for a laugh (“look what fucked up thing I found!!”) or out of outrage (“look at what fucked up thing I found”), which in turn may have been reappropriated by other audience members for who knows what reason. The problem is that, more often than not, observers can't know, because observers can't ask. Even when they can, it's difficult to assess the veracity of what some random stranger (particularly some random stranger who may or may not be in mischief mode) posts to the internet – a phenomenon Phillips (2015) experienced all too frequently in her study of memorial page trolls.
Further, the ease with which digitally mediated content can be unmoored from its original context and memetically spun straight off a cliff raises another, familiar specter: the ethics of amplification. Amplification in digitally mediated spaces carries the potential for harm – immediate harm, persistent and searchable harm – distinct from anything experienced in embodied spaces. That harm can land in the inboxes or social media feeds of those personally impacted by a tragedy within minutes, even if the post was “just a joke,” even if the poster was speaking to a very specific audience and didn't mean any harm. Playful engagement with mass shootings, or really any mass-mediated tragedy, exemplifies the potential impact of amplification; content floated as harmless can be anything but.
But it's not as simple as wagging a finger at callous online joke telling, or any behavior that actively courts controversy. The basic – and, one would think, value-neutral – act of commenting on a story also risks amplifying the story's reach to other members of one's social network. After all, the more engagement a story generates, the more likely it is to live on through the circulation and transformation underscoring online interaction; content spreads memetically whether participants share something to signal support, disgust, or anything on the spectrum in between.
A striking example of problematic spread occurred in the summer of 2016, when American actress Leslie Jones – a woman of color – faced an onslaught of racist abuse stemming from her upcoming appearance in an all-female Ghostbusters remake. This abuse was nasty enough on its own, but it soon merged with, and was significantly worsened by, the concurrently popular “Harambe” meme. Harambe was an adult male gorilla housed at the Cincinnati Zoo. He made news after being killed that May, when a black child fell into the animal's enclosure. Almost immediately, Harambe's likeness was incorporated into a flurry of images, songs, and mashups. Folkloric engagement with the Harambe meme reached such critical mass that the Cincinnati Zoo was forced to delete its Twitter account in August due to the deluge of participatory, and often directly antagonistic, vernacular expression. Some of this content was silly and playful; some took an activist, animal rights stance; and some was simply disturbing – for example, the iterations that likened Harambe to Jones (Rogers 2016).
The story only got worse from there. Two days after the Cincinnati Zoo deleted its account, hackers compromised Jones' personal website and posted to its front page unlawfully acquired personal information, nude photos of the star, and Harambe images. In an interview with Jason Koebler (2016) at Motherboard, Phillips raised the issue of amplification in relation to this story, noting that when journalists, cultural critics, and individual citizens alike shared the story, even in order to condemn the abuse, they were helping to perpetuate that racist imagery, and in an indirect way, helping to perpetuate the harassment itself – an outcome, Phillips suspects, that was likely part of the hackers' plan. Even if it wasn't, that is precisely what happened. The Jones case thus speaks to the underlying ethical question of whether and how to engage with explicitly damaging content online. This is a question we asked ourselves when weighing the ethical costs against the potential political benefits of including this example here; ultimately we decided to discuss the case, because it so clearly illustrates the embodied implications of vernacular participation online, as well as the broader – and often devastating – implications of amplification. But not without consequence, as we readily, and uncomfortably, concede.
In this way, digital mediation adds new shades of ambivalence to longstanding questions about amplification. Shining a light on cultural problems, such as the violent misogyny and virulent racism animating the Jones harassment case, is often the only way to affect awareness; sometimes, not speaking up is worse, since silence risks signaling complicity. But by engaging with vernacular ambivalence online, one is always on the precipice of amplifying ugliness, even inadvertently. On the other hand, by not engaging with vernacular ambivalence online, particularly when the stakes are as high as in the Jones case, one risks extinguishing important critiques, which can only spread if their audiences give them life. This is a line we walk throughout this book – imperfectly, we are sure – as we've had to decide what to amplify and what to ignore in the service of our own critical analysis.
It is here where our world is most new and most brave; and it is also here where folkloric expression online is most ambivalent. What this ambivalence means, and the lesson it ultimately conveys, is that no broad, overarching theory could ever comfortably subsume all instances of vernacular participation and play – not around a campfire, not at a track meet, and certainly not online. The only approach, and it is an unquestionably imperfect approach, is to work with this ambivalence, not against it. Most importantly, to resist the urge to assert that something is a particular thing, and therefore means a certain thing, just because it looks like that thing. Online, what something “really” is, what it “really” means, are often the first certainties to go. What can be gleaned, however, is the impact of folkloric expression: what groups are helped, what groups are harmed, and, most importantly, whose voices are empowered to speak as a result. In exchange for easy certainty, in other words, ambivalence can help illuminate truths that are much more valuable. Truths that are both, on both sides.
Chapter overview and looking forward
This chapter forwarded a number of ideas, tensions, and themes that will permeate the remainder of this book. Most conspicuously, it illustrated how ambivalence in both embodied and digitally mediated spaces complicates a number of seemingly straightforward binaries, including formal and folk, commercial and populist, and conservative and dynamic. It focused specifically on the erroneous demarcation between now and then, which it complicated by affirming the very real and very impactive differences between embodied spaces and tools and digitally mediated spaces and tools. It's a brave new world, the chapter argued, and there is nothing new under the sun.
The following chapter will take this tension for granted, focusing more directly on the erroneous breakdown between “online” and “offline” spaces, and the ways this ambivalence challenges normalized assumptions about identity expression. It will also avoid making any sweeping generalizations about ambivalent identity expression, regardless of media. Instead it will argue that the best response to questions about such ambivalence is a quick eyebrow raise, coupled with the assertion “yes, and …”.