In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars have observed that social networks are supposedly weakest after age forty (see Brandes ). At this time in one’s life, meaningful friendships are often diminished or dwindling, and interpersonal discord is often reported. In fact, this is such a common tale that our society has created and identified a rite of passage to facilitate the transition into “older adulthood”: the midlife crisis. The ritual of the midlife crisis is often lampooned in popular culture by mocking expected behaviors— the purchasing of a “vanity item” like a fancy car, or getting hair transplants to compensate for baldness, or perhaps getting a divorce in an effort to find intimacy with younger partners. However, the ritual is most often invoked to solidify the individual’s concept of friends and family in a time of internal anxiety marked by a perception of social disconnectedness. If this rite of passage is a tradition of “analog” culture, what then can we expect from the digital age in altering this cultural phenomenon? With the immense connectivity of new media technology, will future generations have any use for such a rite of passage ? Or will they be so interpersonally connected through social networking and computer-mediated communication that the midlife crisis will fade away from our culture’s psychological processing of the life course? Although the Internet is rather youth oriented (see Bronner ), the fact remains that today’s youths will be tomorrow’s middle-aged Internet users who will test the potential agelessness of social networking. Through the hybridization of behavioral forms and knowledge dissemination across analog and digital vernacular expressive venues, a new communicatory construct is created that embodies the amalgamation of behaviors across culture, regardless of analog or digital context. In this sense, “hybridization” exemplifies the intersection of repetition and variation with the shifting meanings of space, place, and context that  Afterword predictions on future trajectories of vernacular expression and new media  afterword occurs when people engage in symbolic interaction online. Throughout this process, individuals use their conceptualization of tradition to guide their actions. This notion of tradition provides an interpretative grounding, or contextual fulcrum, for how they will perceive and in turn reciprocate symbolic interactions. Essentially, tradition is used in the symbolic construction of the self (Jones ). Technology serves in the individual’s symbolic construction of modernity, and visual cues from the digital medium capture the expressive patterns that represent dominant aesthetic ideals of the hybridized culture. Although I contend in this book that American society has fundamentally shifted toward a preference for simulated connectivity over exclusively face-toface interaction (through the hybridization of expressive behavior), I would like to think that the ultimate choice for how people live out their lives online is still firmly in their own control. Nevertheless, I predict that future generations will be increasingly immersed into a mass-mediated society and that as a result, the differences between analog and digital cultures will eventually be “virtually” indistinguishable. Every future generation henceforth will inherently be composed of “digital natives.” Grim and dismissive though it may seem, the fact remains that it is only a matter of time before “digital immigrants” will no longer exist, and there will be no need for a semantic distinction between the two groups. Everyone will be born into a culture where digital connectivity and pervasive social networking is the norm. We are pretty much there already, and so it will be ever increasingly important for students of folklore and cultural studies to remain engaged with the medium in order to ascertain the continued evolution of hybridized behaviors. This prognosis may appear scary to some—especially to those who have a special reverence for “folksy” or “old-timey” stuff. I do not mean to suggest that the bucolic landscapes of America will be converted into something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report (see, there I go using my own cultural inventory to imagine a future aesthetic!). It is very likely that many of the more oldfashioned conceptualizations of folk culture will remain intact or adjust to the pressures of modernity in order to survive, much as they already have throughout history. Just as we now look to the “real world” for cues on how to interpret the digital one, so too will we again look to the past as our culture evolves. We will continue to use our notions of tradition as a guide for making sense of the world. Like language acquisition, future generations will...

Share