Internet Folklore and Digital Storytelling

In “The Fanfiction Reader” Folk Tales for the Digital Age, “Francesca Coppa writes that in the contemporary world, “the stories that we share on a national or even global level—the mass- media stories that Henry Jenkins refers to as “contemporary myths”—aren’t even owned by individual auteurs, but by huge corporate conglomerates: that is, movie studios, television networks, production companies, and, increasingly, online behemoths like Apple, Netflix, Ama- zon, and Google. The average person is—in the Marxist sense—alienated from the process of storytelling…Fanfiction is what happened to folk culture: to the appropriation of fables and the retellings of local legends, to the elaborations of tall tales and drinking songs and ghost stories told round the campfire. Fanfiction is the bastard child; the disavowed heir; outlawed.” For this netset, we invite you to wrest back narrative power from copyright holders and intellectual property protections, and write your own fanfic, putting popular culture back through the folkloric wringer of “tradition in dynamic variation.”

Cossa offers several potential frameworks‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‍‍‍‌‌‌‌‍ through which to understand fanfiction: 1.) fanfic as amateur, non-commercial creative writing shared within a community; 2.) fanfic as intertextual engagement with preexisting texts and characters, 3.) fanfic as transformation / appropriation of copyrighted material, 4.) fanfic as a gift made within and for a community based on communal genres/conventions of storytelling, 5.) fanfic as a form of  multimodal ‘transmedia’ storytelling that thrives on shifting genres, and 5.) as a form of speculative fiction focused less on “world-building” and more on “character-building, allowing people to deepen, elaborate on, and/or reimagine preexisting shared characters.

For this NETSET, we invite you to engage in “fanfiction” not as a folklorist, but as a storyteller in your own right, a creative ‘bricoleur’, taking inspiration from the pop cultural narratives and characters that inspire you, and using them in your own creative, dynamic retellings, revisions, and re-imaginings. The final product for this NETSET should be a work of fanfiction delivered in the style and medium of your choice, and a 250 word reflection on your aims and expereinces writing the fa‌‍‍‌‌‍‌‌‌‌‌‍‍‍‌‌‌‌‍nfic, engaging with at least two course concepts.

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• Background Cultural history
• Foundations of Addiction and Substance use disorders
• Changes in Immigration Policies Over Time In Britain
• Reflexivity and culturally responsive practice
• video games & behavioral problems in teens
• CMN 101: Relational Analysis – Response Paper One
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• Narrative and Discussion