All very interesting, but much misses the point.

The better question is not "Has the folk process died?" but "What has it done for us lately?"

No number of anecdotes about mondegreens and forgetting and occasional revised lines and altered pub songs and ad-libbed lines to chanteys and even respectful Carthy-style pastiches can match the output of the "folk process" before the appearance of the phonograph.

Ask yourself. Where is the mass of new, post-1900 Child-type ballads, other than the occasional imitation that may get sung (but probably not much changed) by a handful of people? Where are hundreds of post-1900 broadside-type ballads known and sung, often to competing airs, by a fair part of the population?

Where, for that matter, are the recent, folk-processed tales of Arabian Nights quality?

Etc.

The most vital folk traditions in the English-speaking world today are in Anglo-Celtic and American "old-time" music , in jokes, in African-American "toasts," and in bawdy songs.

Except for the anonymous jokes (mostly here today and gone tomorrow), these minor genres are appreciated and furthered by comparatively few.

Hip-hop lyrics are surely a folklike genre, but the individual songs are either strictly copyrighted and/or performed by very, very few.

With the minor residual exceptions noted above, the "folk process," by any normal definition, has been supplanted by the all-pervasive (and all-copyrighted and all-technically sophisticated) "pop culture."

Or so it seems to me.