The Internet Is Real Life: Performing Folklore Online and Off by Anthony Bak Buccitelli

We often speak of a divide between online and offline cultures, despite growing recognition that the two are intertwined. Here in The Internet Is Real Life (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026), folklorist Anthony Bak Buccitelli challenges the idea of any divide at all in contemporary American culture. He argues that digital communications and behaviors are already deeply embedded in everyday expressive life and therefore are also already implicated in a variety of ways in the embodied performance and transmission of folklore. In other words, in contemporary American society, the internet truly is “real life.”

By treating the digital interface as a site at which embodied performance can take shape rather than just a point of contact with the online, Buccitelli argues for a critical renewal of core folkloristic concepts to meet the challenges of understanding modern networked life. The result is a folklore book for the current age.

Anthony Bak Buccitelli, interim assistant dean for graduate studies and associate professor of American studies and communications at the Pennsylvania State University, currently serves as director of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore. His books include City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston.