1 Folklore and New Media communications: an exploration of Journey to the West, its modern orality and traditional storytelling in contemporary online spaces

This paper is the study of Journey to the West as a medium and cultural commodity rather than merely a novel; one that has been continuously told in one form or another for over a thousand years. I examine the story diachronically, through a media ecology lens, in an effort to understand the story's traditions through temporal synchronic studies. I propose that the study of the book has largely overshadowed the true scope of the story’s cultural importance. I posit that Journey to the West is a medium that should be considered separately from the technologies and media that use it as content. I assert that its components and structural elements are deeply rooted in the Chinese oral tradition, which is reliant on the interplay of orality and literacy. I complete a content analysis of film and television texts to validate this hypothesis. I use the results to identify patterns across the texts that can be explored more deeply across historical texts in the Journey to the West canon. The aim of this analysis is to identify storytelling motifs that can be traced back to the popularised novel and its antecedents. I also look at the discourse surrounding online culture and storytelling relating to the milieu of pre-literate societies, and how modern devices may also mimic elements of storytelling experience in Journey to the West's past. The evidence points to a complex relationship between medium, technology and audience, the investigation of which, I argue, demonstrates culturally contextual episteme within the story.

I finally assert that the story and the Monkey King are an environment that is immersive due to the multitude of texts and representations within Chinese culture. This I state, is why the story has such substantive cultural value; it goes almost unnoticed and therefore becomes a powerful medium to tell stories laden with messages that the storyteller wishes to make.