From Oral Tradition to Viral Trend: How Folklore is Reconstructed in Meme and Short-Video Culture

The proliferation of digital media has changed the modes of folklore production, circulation, and reconstruction. Folklore is grounded in oral history, communal ritual, and cultural activities; today, it is increasingly being transmitted in digitally networked environments. In today’s digital era, memes and short videos shared on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have become significant media for culture. This research will explore the Reconstruction of folklore in meme and short video culture and discuss the impact of this reconstruction on cultural continuity, participatory communication, and digital pedagogies. The study uses a qualitative research design and digital ethnography and reflexive thematic content analysis. Thirty short-video artifacts and memes were gathered from the major social media platforms during 2024–2025 and analysed using a purposive sampling framework. Coding was done inductively to discover common patterns of adaptation and circulation of folkloric stories. The results show four main themes: re-contextualization of tradition, archetypal inversion, algorithmic adaptation, and cultural-pedagogical expression. The findings reveal that folklore is not gone in digital environments, but rather it is constantly reworked, parodied, and reinterpreted by the process of remixing. In addition, algorithmic infrastructures can have a profound impact on the visibility and dissemination of digital folklore, as they can affect how audiences interact with the material and how it circulates. Digital reconstruction can increase access, support the preservation of cultures, and foster informal learning experiences, but can also lead to the oversimplification, commercialization, and reinterpretation of traditional stories. The study argues that digital folklore can be considered as a process of going, a process of continuous construction that occurs in the intersection of participatory creativity, platform governance, and algorithmic mediation. This research serves as a contribution to broader folklore scholarship by introducing memes and short video practices and placing them into a larger context of cultural continuity, digital media, and contemporary knowledge production for interdisciplinary conversations.