Folklore and the Internet: the Life of Urban Legends in the Digital World

The present paper is part of a more elaborate thesis which focuses on Romanian urban legends, a study comprising a number of more than one hundred texts and their analysis. In a comparative approach, we have analysed variants of the same legend and put them in relation to similar legends in an attempt to identify stable elements and variable details. Furthermore, the sociological approach to urban legends relies on Gary Alan Fine's assumption that, if one wants to understand a text, one has to also examine the contexts in which both narrator and audience operate. He stated that legends are a distorted mirror reflecting social and economic conditions of modern industrialised society [1: xxvii-xxviii]. Therefore, we have explored themes and motifs, variations and circulation of urban legends, contexts of narration, with emphasis on the various functions of these narratives. The following paper deals with the influence of the Internet on the folkloric phenomenon called urban legend. Today, oral circulation is no longer a prerequisite for the existence of urban legends. They reach us through print and audiovisual media and mostly through the Internet. Not only does the Internet make the transmission of such texts instantaneous, and thus they become accessible to a large number of people from every corner of the world, but it also shapes legend form and style. Consequently, unlike traditional folklore, there are fewer versions, as computer users merely pass them on in the form they receive them, hardly making any changes; hence, text stability. The Internet has turned into a large archive, a folklore keeper, which opens new paths to the study of this genre. There are websites dedicated to urban legends, real databases to which both experts and non-specialists have access. We shall conclude, therefore, that modern technology is not an enemy of folklore, but a key factor in its diffusion.