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June , , began as a normal day. I was in Bloomington, Indiana, teaching an introductory folklore class (cleverly disguised as a sociology course) for the local community college. About an hour into our discussion, one of my students’ phones began to vibrate loudly. I leveled him with a stern “teacher’s glare” as he silenced his phone, but not even a minute later his phone vibrated again—and this time he checked it right in front of me. Before I had the chance to dropkick him for disrupting class, he raised his hand and sheepishly stammered , “I don’t mean to interrupt . . . but I just got a text that Michael Jackson died.” Audible gasps could be heard throughout the class, followed almost immediately by personal commentaries on the nature of the situation being disheartening, untimely, unfortunate, or—in some cases—quite humorous. Within seconds of the news first breaking, my classroom devolved into a latenight comedy forum: “They’re gonna need a jackhammer to do the autopsy on his plastic ass,” exclaimed one student. “I wonder if anyone will moonwalk past the casket for good luck,” offered another. Before even two minutes had passed from the initial interruption, something fascinating took place in my classroom: as if witnessing a virus spread, another student’s phone vibrated. Then another. And then another. Within five minutes, all but one of my fifteen students’ phones had vibrated and all of them reported receiving text messages that relayed that Michael Jackson had died. At that moment I realized that I was witnessing a unique moment of folkloric dissemination made possible by the digital age. I suspended our class lesson and took to the Internet with my students to see if we could be the first to report of Michael Jackson’s passing on the folkmoderated digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. However, by the time the page loaded we were surprised to find that a full, detailed article had already been  Introduction cyberspace, technology, and mass media in the twenty-first century posted with a userbox caveat noting that the article “refers to a person who has recently died. Some information, such as that pertaining to the circumstances of the person’s death and surrounding events, may change as more facts become known.”1 A quick trip to Google thereafter with the search criteria “Michael Jackson” nearly froze the computer—it was later confirmed by researchers that the news of Jackson’s passing had spread so quickly that the immense swell of participants seeking information on the Web had caused the infrastructure to slow to a crawl, nearly “breaking” the Internet and disrupting numerous websites and electronic media sites and services such as Twitter and Google News (Rawlinson and Hunt ).2 As it turned out, June , , was a memorable day after all. My experience and my students’ experiences in the moments following the death of Michael Jackson exemplify contemporary American culture’s hightech , fast-paced behavioral response to salacious or tragic stories that hit the newsfeed. Today people are perpetually connected to the digital format. Information constantly flows to users, and there is never a break in coverage. From twenty-four-hour news stations and Internet news sites to information collected from friends’ Twitter updates and personal text messages, a major news story never stays unnoticed or uncommented upon for long. Sociologist David Riesman posits in his classic work, The Lonely Crowd (), that American character has shifted from being tradition directed (guided by the predominant values and practices of previous generations) to inner directed (guided by an “internal gyroscope” that leads the individual to define their own set of values). Following the Industrial Revolution, an economically stable “middle class” emerged in America that caused individuals to migrate toward an “other-directed” mentality guided by the need to meaningfully relate to (or distinguish oneself from) peers. While earlier generations were said to have been motivated by the need to produce and conserve scarce materials, the other-directed society was motivated by the need to consume as act of social participation. Material acquisitions and outward expressions of creativity symbolized the individuals’ connection with mass society. Even though some traditions may no longer guide specific modes of social interaction, they nevertheless inform the ways that vernacular expression manifests itself in modern society. As older patterns of socialization fade, they inevitably reemerge in modified ways. Computer-mediated communication technologies provide users guided by tradition-, inner-, or other-directed personalities with a forum that can adapt to their...

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