After reading all the posts and thinking about how we use media today I am even more certain that 'Folk' as we were conditioned to think of it, is gone.

World music is not going anywhere while people move from passive to active media use; besides after I heard the latest cloned performance
of the same old standards, I wonder why people are singing them. Is this the folk version of 'Elvis'?

So what do we know that is unique to our place?

At this time very little I bet, but that is how it begins .....