New review fields and the folklorists of digital environment: The case of Ekşisözlük

The products of Oral Cultural environment, which is dominated by the systematic elements of voice and words, meaningful mimic and styles supporting voices, and face-to-face communication; the products of written cultural environment (writings age/pressing age), which emerged in the process of coding words from oral memory to writing via the technology of fonts, forms, and texts; and the products of electronic cultural environment, which have appeared after telephone, radio, television, and the internet technologies; are reviewed and investigated in cultural studies through various methods and approaches. Oral cultural environment, unlike written cultural environment, keeps its existence through the structures imitated by the specific formulas and coded into memory without coding the statements through the texting technology. In addition, the folkloric products of oral cultural environments have found new survival fields in electronic cultural environments, which are defined as “secondary oral cultural environment” and include voice and video in addition to demonstration-centered, written performance, with the law of “traditions’ protection of their continuity by updating them”. It is considered that Ekşisözlük and similar digital sharing sites, where such literary genres as proverbs, idioms, anecdotes, stories, riddles, and folk songs are re-experienced and re-updated, are one of those survival fields. This study aims to draw attention on the new review fields of folkloric data, which have always found new survival fields, a new cultural environment on Ekşisözlük, the sharers of these fields, and the shared folklore products. It is specifically aimed to reveal concrete information pertaining to these functional products shared on the internet.