Faux Your Entertainment: Amazon.com Product Reviews as a Locus of Digital Performance

Abstract

Over the last couple of years, numerous product pages on Amazon.com have been intentionally and collaboratively overrun with humorous fake customer reviews aimed at mocking the items for sale or what they symbolize. In doing so, participants have managed to carve out a vernacular niche within the institutional confines of Amazon, establishing a vibrant digital venue for performative discourse and play. This essay examines how and why these commandeered product pages on Amazon proliferate, and analyzes how individuals interact with the digital space in pursuit of meaningful interaction online. So doing, this essay demonstrates how individuals collaborate through performative humor and narrative-smithery online to further turn the tables on institutional forces.

The Death of Doge: Institutional Appropriations of Internet Memes

“…In many ways, scholars like Blank and Howard (2013b) were at the forefront of the current digital turn in folklore scholarship. In the last ten years, this corpus of digital folklore scholarship has grown to include studies of vernacular religion , contemporary legends (Tucker 2012;Tolbert 2013;Peck 2015;Blank and McNeill 2018), legend trips (Kinsella 2011;Tucker 2018), ostension (Peck 2016;Tolbert 2018), humor (Blank 2013(Blank , 2015Peck 2015;Rezaei 2016), memes (Phillips and Milner 2017;Blank 2018;Peck 2019), tradition (Blank and Howard 2013b;Szpila 2017), performance (Buccitelli 2012), curation (Kaplan 2013), fan communities (Ellis 2012(Ellis , 2015, virtual worlds (Gillis 2011; Lau 2010), blogging (Glass 2016), fake news (Frank 2011(Frank , 2015Mould 2018;Peck 2020), health and medicine (Kitta 2012(Kitta , 2019, computational methods (Tangherlini 2013(Tangherlini , 2016, indigenous voices (Cocq 2015; Dubois and Cocq 2020), race (González-Martin 2016; Bock 2017; Buccitelli 2018b), disability (Blank and Kitta 2015;Milbrodt 2019), social movements (Thomas 2018), posthumanism (Thompson 2019), and intersections between folk and popular culture (Foster and Tolbert 2016; Blank 2018). 2 In other words, despite Blank's well-founded worry that the field was "late to the [digital] dialogue" (2009,…”

Trickster Remakes This White House: Booby Traps and Bawdy/Body Humor in Post-Election Prankster Biden Memes

“…In many ways, scholars like Blank and Howard (2013b) were at the forefront of the current digital turn in folklore scholarship. In the last ten years, this corpus of digital folklore scholarship has grown to include studies of vernacular religion , contemporary legends (Tucker 2012;Tolbert 2013;Peck 2015;Blank and McNeill 2018), legend trips (Kinsella 2011;Tucker 2018), ostension (Peck 2016;Tolbert 2018), humor (Blank 2013(Blank , 2015Peck 2015;Rezaei 2016), memes (Phillips and Milner 2017;Blank 2018;Peck 2019), tradition (Blank and Howard 2013b;Szpila 2017), performance (Buccitelli 2012), curation (Kaplan 2013), fan communities (Ellis 2012(Ellis , 2015, virtual worlds (Gillis 2011; Lau 2010), blogging (Glass 2016), fake news (Frank 2011(Frank , 2015Mould 2018;Peck 2020), health and medicine (Kitta 2012(Kitta , 2019, computational methods (Tangherlini 2013(Tangherlini , 2016, indigenous voices (Cocq 2015; Dubois and Cocq 2020), race (González-Martin 2016; Bock 2017; Buccitelli 2018b), disability (Blank and Kitta 2015;Milbrodt 2019), social movements (Thomas 2018), posthumanism (Thompson 2019), and intersections between folk and popular culture (Foster and Tolbert 2016; Blank 2018). 2 In other words, despite Blank's well-founded worry that the field was "late to the [digital] dialogue" (2009,…”

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