Folklore is incredibly ancient, linked to the development of human culture and civilization long before the written word was developed, as the tribes and communities we lived in used language and storytelling to explain a world full of mysteries. The era we inhabit today is totally different, and it’s reasonable to think that with the internet making every piece of human knowledge accessible to anyone, the tradition of folklore might have suffered significantly.

What’s actually happened is the opposite, and unfettered online interactions have enabled a new generation of people to create their own mythologies. It’s one of the brilliant things about storytelling in the 21st century, and deserves celebrating just as much as the folklore that emerged from earlier epochs.

Viral Narratives & Memes

Memes are the modern equivalent of the oral tradition that helped tales of folklore spread and survive the generations. Most importantly, they’re built around user input and remixing, meaning that there’s no canon version, but instead millions of iterations and adjustments to the same core concept. Each retelling of an ancient tale would be a little different, and that’s the same as memes being reshared and recontextualized online.

Making Monsters Online

Folklore is ingrained with horror, in part because people in the past might come up with scary stories to teach valuable lessons about the dangers of the world. A similar motivation drives online storytellers in many cases, and we’ve seen monsters dreamt up by an army of posters and proliferated throughout the wider culture in days or weeks, rather than decades.

Slenderman is perhaps the single biggest example of this, although there are also collaborative projects like The SCP Foundation and The Backrooms that represent their own collection of monsters and modern myths.

We’re even seeing a new version of ritualistic superstition emerging, but applied to online services. For instance, players at web-based casinos for Canadians often share stories of their success on forums, attributing a lucky outcome to some ritual of interaction that they performed before spinning the reels. This might be classic superstition with no basis in fact, but it’s tied into the stories we’ve told ourselves for millennia, about what might bring luck to ensure a good harvest or protect the village from marauders.

Blurring Fact and Fiction

Folklore in the internet era shares just as much with traditional tales in terms of how it presents the truth of what’s being told. Communities like the r/NoSleep subreddit might be fundamentally built on the understanding that the stories people share are fictional, but the method of the telling makes them appear as realistic and tangible as posts on reality-based equivalent forums.

The upshot of all this is that folklore arguably sits in the strongest position it has ever occupied, drawing in the entire planet with the storytelling prowess of online posters. And because this is a truly democratic place to share stories and remix them, there’s the opportunity for anyone to break through and become the next difference-maker in the shared ecosystem of narrative.