Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how grandmothers are negotiating and capitalising on the recent proliferation of digital communication. I outline four resources that are being deployed to navigate the new technologies. These I posit are the foundation of current distant family folkloristic interactions.

Paper long abstract:

A good sense of personal identity contributes to mental resilience in young adults (Fivush and Duke: 2008). If the grandmother, as is often the case, the ‘most trusted kin keeper’ of family lore, stories, and connections, her reaching out to family has profound implications. For grandmothers in geographically distant families, the experience of passing on family folklore has changed from embodied learning – visual and bodily behaviours enabled by sharing the same space – to short physical visits supplemented with, and even overtaken by, digital communications.

Through auto-ethnographic observation and interviews, this paper demonstrates how active grandmothers are negotiating and capitalising on the recent proliferation of digital modes of communicating. These grandmothers, with their experience of a past analogue world, have a unique perspective as ‘digital immigrants’, compared to their ‘digital native’ grandchildren (Tasha et al: 2020). I outline four key resources that are being deployed to navigate new technologies successfully: (1) a sense of responsibility to past family culture, (2) a reluctance to give up familiar cultural attitudes, (3) an ability to be reflexive within unfamiliar digital interactions, and (4) powerful feelings of love and desire that provide the sustaining energy to keep trying.

References to Artificial Intelligence (Turing: 1950), grandmother chatbots (Vlahos: 2019) and current science fiction (Black Mirror: 2013) are touched upon as indicators of the radically changing modes of documenting family folklore.

In the end, the underlying predispositions that grandmothers have for ‘trusted kin keeping’ are, I suggest, the foundation of current family interactions.