A more contemporary definition of folk is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. “Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family”. This expanded social definition of folk supports a wider view of the material considered to be folklore artefacts. These now include “things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)”. The folklorist is a discipline which studies the traditional artefacts of a group.
Folklore was the original term used in this discipline. Its synonym, folklife, came into circulation in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when some researchers felt that the term folklore was too closely tied exclusively to oral lore. The new term folklife is meant to categorically include all aspects of a folk culture, not just the oral traditions. All professionals within this field, regardless of the other words they use, consider themselves to be folklorists.
Many Walt Disney films and products belong in this category of folklorism; the fairy tales, originally told around a winter fire, have become animated film characters, stuffed animals and bed linens.
With the invention of the internet, the transmission of individual folklore artefacts to a worldwide audience is done in a flash. We are no longer dependent upon individual performers to find us with their song and dance; now they just broadcast across the net. An example of this is electronic joking, which has become as common than oral joking and can reach a much larger audience with just a button click. The folk group is no longer exclusively defined by physical presence and locality, it also exists in the connectivity of cyberspace. With this, diffusion of folklore is skewed away from a live performance toward a multiplicity of new venues and social groupings. These new transmission modes apply not only to oral folklore. Traditional skills and handicrafts can be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube, enabling any interested individual anywhere in the world access to this record of specific traditional skills. No longer anchored in time and space, both the social group and the channels of folklore transmission have expanded across the globe.
The study of folklore was professionalized and solidified by Alan Dundes (1934-2005). Dundes taught folklore at University of California, Berkeley and wrote numerous books on the subject, including The Study of Folklore (1965), which established popular definitions of folklore, the folk, and the theoretical and methodological practices of folklorists.
While many folklorists throughout the 20th century lamented the introduction of modern technology as a death sentence for folklore, Dundes instead argued, “technology isn’t stamping out folklore; rather it is becoming a vital factor in the transmission of folklore and it is providing an exciting source of inspiration for the generation of new folklore. The rise of the computer symbolizes the impact of technology upon the modern world. My point is that there is folklore of and about the computer”
In forms as diverse as jokes, contemporary legends, local rumors, folk belief, music, and storytelling, this ‘e-lore- is well documented and easy to assimilate into already-established genres”. Digital folklorists have studied phenomena like the meme, chain-emails, and online memorial pages for deceased individuals, otherwise known as digital graveyards. In the book Folklore and the Internet, Simon Bronner coined the term “the folk universe of cyberspace,” noting, “The folk realm is not located in a socioeconomic sector or particular nationality but instead represents a participatory process that some posters refer to as the democratic or open web”
One of the most interesting elements of digital folklore is the creation of Internet urban legends. Urban legends are “‘stories of unusual, humorous or horrible events that contain themes related to the modern world, are told as something that did or may have happened, variations of which are found in numerous places and times, and contain moral implications’”.Although these stories can be exchanged and replicated through oral interaction, print media sources like tabloids have increasingly reproduced urban legends, ostensibly lending a sense of legitimacy to the stories. Urban legends are also migratory, in that they can be transmitted across folk groups and geographic barriers, adjusted to fit the particular cultural milieu in which they are told (Brunvand 2001). Although the Internet has increased the transmission and dispersal of urban legends, the web has also begun to generate its own urban legends or cyberlore. Websites like Creepypasta host competitions for the creation of new urban legends, while others document the legends embedded in computer and video games.