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Paper short abstract:

Digital sharing of humour has become an integral part of everyday family life, allowing family members to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to new circumstances. The paper explores the forms, topics, ways and challenges of sharing humorous folklore digitally.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the specific features and dynamics of sharing humorous content digitally within a family in the context of daily communication. The data, collected from Belarusian families via oral interviews and an online survey, suggest that sharing humour digitally within a family can take various forms, some of which parallel oral face-to-face interactions, while others complement them. The digital forms of sharing humour thus cannot be juxtaposed to the oral ones; the process of family humorous communication is viewed as a continuum of various hybrid forms that combine features of oral and digital interaction.

The most preferable ways of sharing are those that ensure the privacy of conversation, thus providing family members with an opportunity to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to new spatiotemporal circumstances. Even though the process of selection of humorous content shared within the family is often implicit, some tendencies clearly transpire: visual and generic forms of humour are more popular than the textual and personal. Sharing such humour presupposes certain considerations about its recipients, thus making family audience an important factor in the practice of digital sharing.

While the practices of sharing humour digitally found their way into family communication rather quickly, the implications of digital sharing in the traditionally face-to-face realm of family interactions are still somewhat unclear and ambiguous, especially among the older generations of some families. The paper sheds light on these ambiguities and outlines opportunities and challenges pertaining to various forms of humorous communication within a family.