Non-Fiction Books:

The Last Laugh

Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age
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Paperback / softback
$73.99
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Description

Widely publicised in mass media worldwide, high-profile tragedies and celebrity scandals - the untimely deaths of Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, the embarrassing affairs of Tiger Woods and President Clinton, the 9/11 attacks or the Challenger space shuttle explosion - often provoke nervous laughter and black humour. If in the past this snarky folklore may have been shared among friends and uttered behind closed doors, today the Internet's ubiquity and instant interactivity propels such humour across a much more extensive and digitally mediated discursive space. New media not only let more people ""in on the joke,"" but they have also become the ""go-to"" formats for engaging in symbolic interaction, especially in times of anxiety or emotional suppression, by providing users an expansive forum for humorous, combative, or intellectual communication, including jokes that cross the line of propriety and good taste. Moving through engaging case studies of Internet-derived humour about momentous disasters in recent American popular culture and history, The Last Laugh chronicles how and why new media have become a predominant means of vernacular expression. Trevor J. Blank argues that computer-mediated communication has helped to compensate for users' sense of physical detachment in the ""real"" world, while generating newly meaningful and dynamic opportunities for the creation and dissemination of folklore. Drawing together recent developments in new media studies with the analytical tools of folklore studies, he makes a strong case for the significance to contemporary folklore of technologically driven trends in folk and mass culture.

Author Biography:

Trevor J. Blank is visiting assistant professor in the Department of English and Communication at SUNY Potsdam. He is editor of the e-journal New Directions in Folklore and of the booksFolklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World and Folk Culture in the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of Human Interaction.
Release date Australia
August 30th, 2013
Audiences
  • Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
  • Professional & Vocational
Illustrations
12 black & white illustrations
Pages
176
Dimensions
154x228x12
ISBN-13
9780299292041
Product ID
21033750

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