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Newslore: The COVID-19 Pandemic in TikTok’s Representations
 
Код статьиS086954150017609-9-1
DOI10.31857/S086954150017609-9
Тип публикации Статья
Статус публикации Опубликовано
Авторы
Тукина Дарья Игоревна 
Аффилиация: European University at St. Petersburg
Адрес: Russian Federation, Saint Petersburg
Название журналаЭтнографическое обозрение
Выпуск№6
Страницы269-279
Аннотация

The article dwells on the videos on the Internet platform TikTok during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the structural and pragmatic features of these video clips can be described via the analytical concepts of “disaster lore” and “newslore”. The coronavirus infection in its representations on TikTok is endowed with agency, the problems of implementing quarantine measures are unfolded upon through jokes and sharing of the new experience of living in self-isolation becomes the main folklore pattern. The content analysis conducted in this article demonstrates that TikTok can be considered a new specific space where newslore exists, and therefore, folklore acts as a type of cultural communication. TikTok itself is a cultural resource that symbolically builds a distinct community.

Ключевые словаcoronavirus pandemic, disaster lore, Internet folklore, Internet video, disaster jokes, newslore
Источник финансированияThis article is a translation of: Д.И. Тукина. Ньюслор: пандемия COVID-19 в репрезентациях в TikTok // Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. 2021. No 6. P. 8–21. DOI: 10.31857/S086954150017929-1
Получено20.12.2021
Дата публикации23.12.2021
Кол-во символов38071
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Оглавление

Disasters and folklore
Online field assessment
Coronavirus, pandemic and self-isolation
Between folklore and communication
1 The pandemic that started in December 2019 after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China became a key topic in the world public discourse of winter/spring 2020. Estimates of COVID-19 expected spread, discussions of its socio-economical, political and other consequences, reaction to state measures designed to contain the contagion – all this was all over news feeds, social networks and everyday conversations. The COVID-19 pandemic went (and still goes) hand in hand with another pandemic – that of COVID-19 talks. The forms of reflection upon COVID-19 are particularly diverse online, since the Internet nowadays is the key media platform. It is not difficult to track various rumors and information about the coronavirus and its consequences since almost everyone becomes a participant observer here, and a researcher finding themselves in such circumstances might notice what a “boom” of folklore the pandemic has caused. The virus prompted an explosion in coronavirus-related folklore: numerous rumors, gossip, anecdotes, jokes, memes, chain letters in messengers, songs etc. have emerged, and most of them exist online. Therefore, a researcher might ask themselves: how does one describe this folklore online content? And is it folklore at all?
2 In this paper I would like to present the research I conducted upon TikTok, a media platform popular with teenagers and young adults, that allows to argue that videos created by TikTok users on the onset of the pandemic can be described via the concepts of newslore and disaster lore. Besides, the paper dwells (as exemplified by TikTok) on the problems of what folklore is in modern world and what it is not, and how one distinguishes between folklore and non-folklore.1 1. This mini-research was conducted in Spring 2020. Since then I have reviewed some of my theoretical convictions concerning folklorism on the Internet, so I view my work critically and am open to dialogue. I also welcome any scholarly discussion upon the contents of this worl. I would like to express my special gratitude to my reviewers and my colleagues from the European University at Saint Petersburg, particularly to Mikhail L. Lurie who guided me all along the way while I was writing this article.
3

Disasters and folklore
4 What is folklore of disaster/disaster lore? This term, like many more in contemporary folklore studies, is hard to interpret unambiguously. Nevertheless, there are criteria that allow us to classify some of the studied objects as examples of disaster lore. Alan Dundes, who studied cycles of sick jokes about AIDS, connects those to the category of “disaster”. He notes that these irreverent jokes were constituted as an instrument of collective mental defense that helped people cope with the most terrifying of disasters – both naturally-occuring and man-made (Dundes 1987: 73). Willie Smyth, who studied Challenger jokes, emphasized that most of those were about death, sickness, deformation and disaster in general. Both Smyth and Dundes drew parallels between the series they studied and other cycles of disaster jokes: it was noted that all of those borrow traditional forms2 and motifs. The emergence of such cycles was ascribed to “the extraordinarily large number of tragedies that are brought to our attention by the media” in the 20th century (Smyth 1986: 250). Therefore, it is safe to assume that the analytical construction of disaster lore could be described as follows in the 1980s: 1) a disaster acted as a topic for a specific themed cycle; 2) the emergence of the cycles was interpreted as the society’s psychological reaction to the disaster; 3) a wide circle of users participated in the creation of the cycles due to novelty characteristics of information space (growing importance of mass media, more detailed coverage of the events: details of the events, visual representation, etc.); 4) the key research objects were mostly the cycles of jokes. This last characteristic is probably debatable, since jokes are not the only genre activating at the time of the disaster and during the period of surviving it. 2. By “traditional forms” I mean those that existed prior to cycles of jokes about particular disasters – despite varying themes and spaces of existence they demonstrated similar structure (a question-and-answer joke; an abbreviation expansion, etc.).
5 Alexander Edward Jania explored construction of disaster folklore diachronically as exemplified by Japanese post-earthquake legends (Jania 2015). He examined beliefs about nature in pre-modern Japanese literature and attempted to construct a scheme of parallel development of these beliefs and folklore texts. According to Jania, the latter reflect the desire of the Japanese people to create a more understandable and predictable environment that would allow for feeling safe, even in the case of a natural disaster (Jania 2015: 19).
6 Larisa Fialkova, a researcher in “Chernobyl folklore”, notes that the field materials that she has collected include various examples of children’s folklore: games, fantastic stories, bywords, “sadistic” rhymes, etc. (Fialkova 2001). Nevertheless, Fialkova writes, jokes are prevalent here, which is obvious even from the quantitative characteristics of the sampling. It is interesting that the researcher labels Chernobyl folklore in her paper as gallows folklore/gallows humor, which, in its own turn, is a sub-genre of black humor (Ibid.: 182). The term gallows humor, introduced by Antonin Obrdlik in 1942, just as humor in general, has both social origin and social agency: it enables a certain group of people to exert social control over a dangerous or unstable situation through mockery, irony or sarcastic accusations (Obrdlik 1942: 709, 716). Fialkova implements this concept to demonstrate that Chernobyl jokes are, in fact, intended to 1) keep the morals and resistance spirit of the people struggling for individual or national survivial high; 2) destroy those whom this humor is aimed at (Fialkova 2001: 190)3. She suggests to interpret Chernobyl folklore, in many respects, as an attempt of positioning the nuclear disaster mostly based on gallows humor, where the disaster is both the cause and the evidence of the new apocalyptic reality (Ibid.: 197). 3. The social agency of humor is rather more fittingly unfolded upon in Dundes’s psychoanalytic folkloristic tradition.

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