Children’s “invocation of spirits” on the Internet.Features of the tradition

The work aims to present a current (on 2020th) picture of the existence in the Russian-language segment of the Internet of phenomena that are based on Russian oral tradition for the children’s “invocation of spirits” and that together are forming its modern network equivalent; to identify the continuity and original features in their poetics and specifics in their existence, and to establish general patterns and trends in the development of the network tradition as a whole.

The author’s research source base includes a public page of the folklore archive in the Lobachevsky University (UNN) with texts of “invocation of spirits”, widely distributed in the Russian-language segment of the Internet; 13 sections of forums that captured the memories of adults about their participation in children’s “invocation of spirits”; 14 groups in the social networks “Vkontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”, publishing methods of “invocation of spirits”; 15 collections of instructions for “invocation of spirits” posted in the online community Wattpad; 19 channels and 13 separate YouTube videos dedicated to performing rituals, as well as presentations of existing methods for invocation of spirits; materials in the “invocation of spirits” category at the site of scary stories 4STOR.ru

The author collected and reviewed the publications of texts and videos related to the children’s tradition of “invocation of spirits” that cover the periods from 2005–2020 and from 2014–2020, respectively.

Also respectively in 2013 and 2016 she began selecting the material itself and fixing observations on the development of children’s tradition “invocation of spirits” in the Russian-language segment of the Internet.

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