Cyberculture and Weblore
No Boundaries
Before realizing what weblore is, it is necessary first to understand the history of folklore and culture as such. Folklore is known to be an oral folk art characteristic of a traditional society. Thus, folklore belongs to folk culture, usually classified along with high and mass culture.
Urbanization has brought what the Russian folklore researcher Sergei Neklyudov calls post-folklore. Virtually, it is "folklore" born in an urban environment: songs, urban legends, gossip, graffiti, tattoos, etc. The emergence of post-folklore is also historically associated with the emergence of advanced data media and especially sound recordings, so that folklore now resides not only in oral form. Since post-folklore is peculiar to an urbanized society, this is the point where folk and mass culture converge: post-folklore includes both market mass culture and "low", grassroots, everyday, internal culture, including subcultures and counterculture.
The expansive character of globalization, postmodernist mutations, and other accumulative processes of the late capitalism has led to that three cultural paradigms have merged together. "Nobrow" emerged as a single consumer and cultural subject. In other words, mass culture has grown to such an extent that it has absorbed all the remaining cultures, blurring the boundaries, destroying borders and bringing down all the walls. All the content of the cultural space we are in now has become a single mass culture accessible to the majority of the population, despite the remaining acute social obstacles. All other types of culture have become more like "subcultures", including high classical and folk cultures and folklore, which has now taken the form of a post-folklore. Sure, there are still closed, traditional, and even archaic societies on the planet which continue to exist outside of the context and system of global culture, but everyone who reads this article is inside it, and regardless of their wish, they are not be able to escape from it.
However, with the advent of the internet, we can already talk about the emergence of post-post-folklore or weblore, an absolutely new form of folk culture, not just urban one, but existing within the framework of a global, now digital, and often international Cyberculture.
Cyberculture and Weblore
Folklore does not emerge outside a community, nor does post‑folklore, and even less so weblore. Every unit of web culture has a homeland, not so much geographical as digital. Websites, forums, imageboards, and portals are all platforms for self‑expression, points of creative concentration, and places where cultural artifacts are produced — now in digital form. But what, in essence, is weblore?
In its broadest sense, weblore is the common heritage of the entire internet and a unified digital nation. However, weblore does not encompass web culture as such, just as not every web culture is weblore. The digital space and the global web are merely a medium, a vessel in which modern mass culture takes shape. That is why, in my view, cyberculture is a broader concept. So what does it consist of? The units of cyberculture, and consequently of weblore, are, of course, memes, or rather post‑memes. Despite the fact that I have always maintained that memes should not be reduced to funny pictures, I have often analyzed comedy memes as a specific type of digital humor that plays a key role in cyberculture. The comical on the web is its unshakable foundation.
Weblore, like the culture of post‑folklore, has a non‑commercial foundation (as opposed to the market segment of web culture), meaning it operates on the principle of "from oneself for oneselves" and is as democratic as possible, hence the famous motto "Everything, by Everyone". The issue of the commercialization of the weblore and individual internet memes is particularly interesting, but this article will not address it.
Alongside folklore, weblore is of course anonymous. But this anonymity has a peculiar character. For example, everyone knows Slenderman, but does anyone actually remember the author of the original pictures, or at least the fact that this character was born on Something Awful boards for a paranormal images contest? One can find the info in a second, but does it matter to those who spread the idea and image of Slenderman? That is the paradox of digital folklore. In other words, the content and subsequent development of a weblore unit does simply not require any knowledge about the author. The author is forgotten by the global online community once a particular unit "goes viral" and becomes a part of the public domain, even though authors may still be remembered in their local communities. But it's a fact that, unlike traditional folklore, we can even trace the original author (even if they were anonymous and the meme appeared, for example, on an imageboard; in any case, the very fact that a source exists is documented), as well as the place and time when the work had originated. And since weblore is not only documented but also, despite a certain degree of its unity, highly fragmented (which implies an endlessly diverse range of modifications to its units), we can even thoroughly trace the development of a weblore unit and identify the various stages of its evolution: from the initial concept and first images to a fully developed character and its full integration into culture as an urban and online legend. This is a huge advantage for researchers of digital folklore, but at the same time, it becomes its own disadvantage, since the volume of research is often simply enormous. Unfortunately, even the internet sometimes doesn't remember the origins of some memes, especially in the realm of creepy content, where the lack of information about the origin and authorship adds to its mystery.
Local, or "home communities", that are, in essence, subcultures, have been mentioned for a reason. It is obvious that web culture is heterogeneous and consists of many small cultures, down to microcultures. And, by analogy with post‑folklore, each digital subculture is also a weblore, or, more precisely, has its own weblore, combining individual (authorial) and collective elements in various proportions. This depends on a multitude of variables, including the balance between the thematic and informal nature of communication, the structure and size of the community, its age, the age of the participants, the features of its development and history, its openness or closedness, the level of self‑awareness of the group, and, finally, the nature of the creative activity itself. The aforementioned Newgrounds example demonstrates how, in an environment focused on individual authorial expression, community‑recycled artifacts (images, characters, motifs, etc.) can flourish — the artifacts that have lost the imprint of the author's monopoly and yet have been elevated to the pantheon of "cultural heroes" along with their authors. The exact line between weblore and digital subculture becomes even more blurred if we take into account the existence of such a phenomenon as the quasi‑mythology of a collective: internal jokes, memes, ideas, and systems of images that reflect the common value systems or preferences of the community. Moreover, this is not a unique feature of internet communities; a similar phenomenon exists in communities of any kind: informal, professional, and so on.
Anyhow, if the broader and more ubiquitous weblore is anonymous, then the local one, having overcome the author, varies the degree of anonymity and still remembers them in the form that the nature of this community allows, up to the point where the author is anonymous from the very beginning. Thus, a genetic link is revealed between the two types of weblore: the general folklore of the internet is enriched, among other things, because of subcultures — the author's little cell in the small weblore becomes a part of the larger digital organism, and when this happens, the author not only loses significance but is forgotten. Furthermore, a feedback loop occurs, since weblore, as a legacy of the web as a whole, permeates all or most internet subcultures, like a thin layer of film; it is present even in slang, because language is a universal distributor of memes and one of the main shells for memes, despite the existence of subcultural language codes. The universal weblore can be compared to the heart of web culture, thanks to which the circulation of values and memes takes place on the WWW; these influence communities and even the rest of mass culture that is not weblore per se. Unlike folklore which is closed, the weblore is open and exposed; its boundaries are arbitrary, and that creates the basis for the mutual infiltration of memes and web trends at all levels, their journey through channels to other communities, even closed ones, such as micro-communities or private chats. This is the cycle of memes in virtual society.
Though, as in folklore, there is no censorship on the "grassroots" web, but there is still an internal censorship of the collective, only now we can see it in action. After all, some memes and media works are not viable, while some are embedded in the "fabric" of the Internet for many years and even decades. Different collectives have different values: such of 4chan differ from the values of Reddit, although all coherent and active communities on the internet have a common value base. If folklore spread through time and carried values that were passed down from generation to generation, then weblore spreads itself more through space. However, it would be wrong to say that weblore is fleeting and transient, but time is not its most reliable ally, since elements of global culture have a fairly rapid "turnover" and such a quality as "relevance". The memes can "expire." On the other hand, some memes endure for decades because they have firmly established themselves as fulfilling a specific function: for example, rickrolling as a prank and a deception of expectations. It's not certain that other units won't eventually replace it, changing its form while keeping its content and function the same, but I can't recall any specific examples that would confirm the replacement of such fundamental units of weblore. In any case, the internet and cyberculture are still too young to draw any conclusions about the transience of its units, but the predominance of spatial relationships over temporal ones is obvious. And if folklore carried values that expressed the identity of a people, weblore, being a concentration of the living of a globalized digital nation, reflects the identity and values of the modern person.
Creativity and The Absolute Freedom
The internet, thanks to its freedom of self‑expression, as well as the durability of information, has given rise to countless creative groups and initiatives. Cyberculture exists in endless forms of pure creativity, unclouded by the canons of the past or any conventions at all. Of course, this is also linked to the overall increase in the rate of information production, since values in digital form are generally much easier to produce (and especially to distribute) than material ones. The fact of documentation also allows all these forms to be endlessly layered, intersected, and mutated, giving rise to new aesthetic phenomena. After all, how much art was created before the internet over the course of human hustory? An insane amount for sure, but what percentage of these artifacts have come down to us at least partially intact, outliving the element of time itself?
The flourishing of amateur activity and access to vast amounts of cultural information allowed any creativity to flourish, including the most marginal one. The digital art brut is of particular interest, and its re-emergence hasn't been accidental: one can remember the infamous fetish arts from DeviantArt; cursed foods (or karatelnaya kulinariya), the art brut of the culinary world; especially peculiar forms of other digital art such as early 3D compositions, drawings in MS Paint, etc. The internet has given a voice to everyone, and everyone uses this opportunity to the best of their abilities and desires. Moreover, with the prosperity of the digital age, not only the rise of naive art had begun, but we ourselves entered the era of a new naivety and a new kitsch. Any thoughts, emotions, opinions, and experiences of people of all ages can be transmitted at speeds close to light to any corner of the world in the blink of an eye.
Returning to the author's problem, it is worth noting that often, the author's own creative work becomes the direct material and foundation for other authors' creative work, turning into the common heritage of the community, into its weblore. Otherwise, if the work does not pass the internal censorship of the community, its value-based filter, it remains a simple, more or less individual, isolated artifact whose content has not been further developed. The first path leads to the genesis of niche fandoms such as Madness Combat or Eddsworld fan communities that are rooted in Newgrounds subculture. Such communities are also interesting because the relationship between the fandom object and its fan continuation is carried out horizontally, unlike in traditional fandoms, where it is a fan‑driven, non‑commercial development of products from the commercial "snowy peak" of mass culture. Horizontality and democracy are the fundamental principles of most productive online communities.
It is not surprising that the internet has also brought self-activity as a phenomenon to a qualitatively and quantitatively new level, giving rise to new forms of the grassroots initiative. There are a lot of examples of this: fanfiction, wiki projects that systematize information about media, as well as many other manifestations of fan activity, internet activism, communities for the preservation and archiving of content, at last, internet piracy. Perhaps one of the most socially useful and important of these initiatives is also the open source community and the whole FOSS culture.
So?
All in all, we are now witnessing a picture of a radically new and unique cultural landscape, even more extensive than the one caused by the postmodern explosion that took place in the middle of the previous century. Moreover, all this is emphasized not only by new forms and content, but also by the fact that, unlike the pre- and early digital era, all information, all cultural objects are preserved, often forever — or, to be more prosaic, until the servers break down.
It would seem that this case should give us a greater overview and tools for cultural analysis, because it is now easier than ever. However, paradoxically, we got the opposite effect; in an environment where everything is preserved, it is not so easy to conduct this. And one should keep in mind that the amount of information is growing every day, with weblore, unlike earlier and monolithic forms of folklore, undergoing its changes literally before our eyes. Who knows, maybe someday we will meet with some kind of post-weblore, a source of even more cultural diversity than ever. Nevertheless, the volume of what we have now is so huge that our entire lives will not be enough for us to fully study and classify them, especially in conditions of a frenetic increase in the amount of information. On the other hand, it is worth it, especially in the long run, and that has been a part of the purpose of this blog.
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