The Internet transformed rather than destroyed folklore transmission.

Evidence

Brunvand, writing in 1981, conceded that “today’s legends are also disseminated by the mass media.” During the succeeding two decades, the Internet emerged as a major new medium. Wojcik notes: “Folklore is not only transmitted through printed sources and electronic media but now through the Internet and e-mail, as members of global subcultures who never interact face-to-face exchange and create folklore in cyberspace. Despite predictions to the contrary, technology and industrialization have not necessarily destroyed traditions but have altered the ways that traditions are expressed and communicated, and have helped to generate and perpetuate new types of folklore.” Such technological innovations are particularly important for the subcultures in which conspiracy theories have taken root. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Innis’s communication-bias thesis and to earlier reading on how communication technology shapes cultural forms and communities.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the internet argued to kill tradition now sustains it — how online conspiracy cultures are contemporary folklore communities of time and ritual.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reverse of the usual claim that technology destroys tradition; the countercurrent — technology alters and perpetuates folklore — is a sturdy lens for how beliefs like conspiracies now travel.