Posthuman Folklore by Tok Thompson

Author:Tok Thompson [Thompson, Tok]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Folklore & Mythology, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Popular Culture, Future Studies
ISBN: 9781496825100
Google: w7utDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2019-09-25T05:14:52+00:00

V. CONCLUSIONS: FOLKLORE 2.0

With the onset of digitization technologies, copying, including creative copying, became once again in the hands of the masses. This has shaped up as an epic battle between “the copyrighters and the copylefters.” Although much excellent scholarly work has been done on this matter,31 I am more concerned in this chpater with the impulse of people to create art, using the materials that form their lives, rather than the legal issues surrounding such actions.32 Increasingly, our lives include sights, sounds, and scenes that the media industry has generated. Also increasingly, people are realizing that the power to (re)produce and distribute art, to manipulate these generated realities into new forms, is once again in their hands. Not only this, but this is occurring on a global, de-territorialized scale. If folk music is closely enmeshed with identity, then what sort of identity does this global, computer-mediated folk music herald?

Of course, not all humankind is linked in together in the cybernetic world wide web, and certainly not evenly so, but the various online communities numbers are impressive: how many YouTube users? Second lifers? World of Warcraft players? Online newspaper readers? Online professional or hobby organizations? The trendsetters of the world are highly interconnected via the computer, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. Cell phones are wildly popular in much of the third world due to their affordability. These are not telephones in the old sense of the term, but instead miniature computers in their own right, connecting even impoverished people to the world wide web, and to the discussions and movements occurring therein.

If it is true that identity is constructed and reconstituted by actors in performance rather than passively expressed through them (as per Bauman 1972), then I believe that identity concerns can be discerned by looking at the aesthetic concerns with the artistic performance. In this case, the aesthetics in both beatboxing and mashups point to an identity concern with computers. In a nutshell, they perform this idea that we are the cyborg. We still have a sense of self, yet this now includes an interconnected cognitive function with the machine, and it is this new identity concern that is being negotiated by new forms of folklore, the realm of “folklore 2.0.”

In a sense, this should not be surprising. Other scholars in diverse fields have also pointed to the cyborg quality of modern life, and the resulting questions for notions of identity.33 Just as the printing press ultimately proved decisive for the development of national identity (as outlined by Anderson 1991, among others), so too will this new media provide for new identities and new subjectivities.

We have given birth to a new kind of cognitive functioning, a new sense of self. One of the best ways to witness the formation of subjectivity in action is through observing new vernacular musics like beatboxing and mashups: the aesthetic choices of people throughout the world point to new subject concerns, new negotiations about who one is. Only this time, it is not just humans in the mix.

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