Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the problems of construction of cultural memory in Russian segment of the Internet with means of folklore, as Internet communication produces specific folklore forms and methods of interpreting history of a community.

Paper long abstract:

Due to a number of factors, the life-cycle of netlore forms is quite short. The process of computer-mediated communication (CMC) produces a variety of texts, still only few of those remain in demand after the peak of their popularity. Moreover, the practice of re-publishing old texts is condemned in most online communities. Nevertheless, despite high speed of text circulation, the Internet communities do not turn down its own past but carefully preserves it. The interest to the history of the Internet as a whole, of various communities, even to the history of individual texts is very common. This interest leads to production of specific "historical" texts, a kind of self-portrait of the first Russian Internet generation; the texts combine documental evidences with mythological assumptions and are often based on archaic folklore models which suit best the purpose of understanding and collating the mosaic reality of the Internet, making some sort of order out of traumatizing chaos. These texts also prove to be a means of building the identity of community and as such, they become messages in the communication with alien groups - including the next generations, since these "historical" texts are to a wide extent a way of constructing memory and the corpus of heritage.