Digital Culture and Online Life in a Polarized World

Exploring the wild world wide web of informal vernacular culture being created, transmitted, and adapted by online communities of twenty-first century fan-communities, we think through the powers, potentials, and peculiarities of online culture in relationship to popular culture, communal storytelling, political engagement, social change, community-building, and everyday negotiations of individual and group identity. What are the continuities and disjunctures between hypermodern online culture and ancient storytelling traditions? What new folk groups, storytelling genres, intersubjective possibilities, and political potentials are arising as a result of online interaction? What new forms of belonging, exclusion, connection, and isolation are emerging through online architectures? What kinds of connections are people seeking and what kinds of meaning are they making, through fanfiction, memes, #challenges, Twitter threads, Twitch streams, Snapchats, greentexts, and other forms of digital storytelling? What are the powers and potentials of online communities and internet folklore and how are they being harnessed in projects of future-making? On our journey to the depths and heights of the contemporary online world, students are invited to research, analyze, and participate in digital storytelling and online fan culture in an attempt to better understand themselves and their historical moment through folkloristic engagement. Course work includes all manner of online experiments; the collection, documentation, and analysis of internet folklore; and a final project with a creative option. Students learn about humanistic and ethnographic methods and techniques and how to document, analyze, create, and engage with various types of online culture. Students better understand what internet folklore is, how it affects our everyday lives, and how it is transmitted, changed, created, and re-created; politicized, manipulated, and weaponized. They also learn why it enriches our lives and relationships and provides us with engaging, sustaining, participatory, and powerful means of connecting, communicating, and making worlds.