Folklore, Media-Lore & Modernity: An Introduction.

Abstract

This special themed issue of Coolabah features a series of papers exploring the connections between various forms of folklore and modernity and the development of contemporary media-lore. The concept of media-lore is a relatively recent one, elucidated by the Russian Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics at their 2014 conference ‘Mechanisms of Cultural Memory: From Folk-lore to Media-lore’. Comparing it to the classic oral culture of folklore, they position media-lore as a ‘third’, screen-based mechanism for the transmission of cultural knowledge (the second was writing). Medialore, they posit, in its immediacy and interactivity, has more in common with oral folklore than in does with the intermediate stage of written text. Where written text often intends to replace oral memory, media-lore shares with oral folk-lore the creation of cultural knowledge through dialogue. ‘This is a paradoxical similarity since the technology for information transmission and storing in the ‘screen age’ is radically different from those of the oral era.’ (Russian Laboratory of Theoretical Folkloristics 2014: online)