Paper short abstract:

The specially designated forums on topics related to weddings may represent a place where a rather fruitful ethological research may be conducted. Such forums can be the place where the old traditions are recalled and the new ones are put in shape.

Paper long abstract:

Today, conducting research on various contemporary aspects of ritual behaviour appears to be incomplete without investigating the multiple facets of tradition appropriations people upload on the web, on different sites ranging from the discussion forums to social media pages. At the same time, since there is a tendency of getting information about how things should be done by asking other users how they did may double as picturing such internet pages as a tradition maker or as a trendsetter in matters of contemporary ways of ritualising the lifetime events.

My paper proposes to investigate a few layers of meaning when it comes to searching the web for the facts and acts to be followed during a wedding: the way people connect to the old traditions, the openness to the newly set rules of organising a wedding and how people try sometimes to join together to some end the most contrasting steps to be taken in a wedding. Furthermore, this papers aims at answering a rather difficult question in places where national ethnology research is still carried out, namely to what extend an ethnology on the internet is of essence on a theme that traditionally belongs to the national ethnologies fields of study, or in other words is there a netnological approach useful when trying to see how people shape their offline ritual lives?