The Things We Already Know and the Things We're Set Up Not to See: Folkloristics, COVID-19, and the Traps of Amplification

Abstract:COVID-19 folklore can be deadly. It also poses a particular set of challenges to researchers endeavoring to study it, and indeed, to researchers who are not actively studying it yet still find themselves confronted by it on their social media feeds. These challenges emerge from digital constraints and affordances that obscure—and are designed to obscure—digital folklore's full context, resulting in vexing problems of amplification, rampant artifactualization, and potential weaponization by bad actors. Folklorists can minimize these outcomes by drawing from methodological insights of the past, while at the same time zeroing in on the unique contours of the present. Erving Goffman's analysis of everyday performance, for instance, provides a critical methodological entry point to digital ethnographies, with one internet-era update. Online, seemingly backstage elements—from digital tools to platform affordances to algorithms—are a critical part of the frontstage. The ethnographic vistas that open up when the online backstage is reframed as the online frontstage help foster stronger, more nuanced digital folkloristics. This also encourages researchers to reflect on the reciprocal influences of technologies, and how we all impact our networks through everyday actions like sharing, commenting, and liking.