Sööme, joome, lükkame, sõidame... Sotsiaalmeediakasutajate mäng Facebooki sündmuse formaadis

Abstract

The Internet and its social media platforms offer opportunities to make visible grassroots creative products and activities, which would not otherwise receive wider attention. In November 2018, as Facebook enables to create online meeting spaces for various events, a series of fake events was initiated on this social media platform by Estonian-speaking users. The “actions” were announced exactly like any other Facebook event, yet were not actually intended to be performed. It is reasonable to consider the event-organising game as a special vernacular practice that deserves to be observed from a folkloristic perspective. The analysis focuses on various aspects of fake events – the genre of these actions, the seriality of events, the dialogue between the participants and those interested in the comments sections, but also the peculiarities of the co-created content. The article attempts to frame the groups of internet users that temporarily gathered around the events within the concept of event community, and traces which stages of the formation and operation of an event community occur in the fake events. In a broader context, the author discusses the similarities between the parodies that lie at the forefront of the fake events initiated by social media users’ communities and the Renaissance carnivals in a public city square.

Keywords

• digital folklore
• event studies
• facebook event
• meme
• online-performativity
• event community