From event to public opinion: Monitoring contemporary urban folklore

Abstract

Public reaction to ongoing events is frequently wrapped up in folklore models and texts belonging both to traditional and modern/urban genres. These texts are not just a manifestation of public reaction: they carry out important social functions like adaptation to the changing context, compensation of frustration, building group identity in crisis situations. More than that, they even become a news media themselves, informing the public about events and setting the frames of socially approved reaction to a current situation. This topical folklore can refect the dynamics of attitudes and norms of contemporary society in a much more in-depth and sophisticated way than average sociological research. One of the challenges of studying media-dependent folklore is the vast corpus of very different texts (jokes, rumors, photoshops, videolore, etc) which are generated, changed and transmitted at an incredible speed. This means that researchers of newslore need to shift from case studies to a consistent monitoring. In the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) an interdisciplinary research group has been set up in 2014 in order to investigate these processes.