Internet culture
Template:Short description Template:Internet Internet culture is the set of practices, norms, aesthetics, and shared references that emerge in networked communication. The term covers the languages, rituals, humor, and genres that circulate across platforms, as well as communities, identities, and forms of collaboration that are native to online environments.<ref name="Baym2015">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Jenkins2006">Template:Citation</ref> Internet culture is shaped by the technical architecture of networks, the governance of platforms, and the political economy of data, which together condition how people find audiences, cooperate, and contest power online.<ref name="Benkler2006">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Gillespie2018">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Zuboff2019">Template:Citation</ref>
Terminology
Writers have used related labels such as "cyberculture", "digital culture", and "network culture". Early work used "cyberculture" for the cultural imaginaries that formed around bulletin board systems, Usenet, and early web forums.<ref name="Abbate1999">Template:Citation</ref> Howard Rheingold popularized the term "netizen" to describe citizens of virtual communities who participate actively in online civic life.<ref name="Rheingold-1998">Template:Cite book</ref> By the mid 2000s scholars emphasized participatory production and circulation, often using the language of "convergence culture" and "participatory culture".<ref name="Jenkins2006" /><ref name="JenkinsItoBoyd2015">Template:Citation</ref> Some researchers prefer "networked publics" to capture how publics form through technical and social networks.<ref name="boyd2014">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Benkler2006" />
History
Many features of Internet culture have precedents in amateur radio, zines, fan clubs, and science fiction fandom, where enthusiasts built distributed publics and shared lore.<ref name="Abbate1999" /><ref name="Jenkins2006" /> These precursors established patterns of peer-to-peer communication, do-it-yourself publishing, and collaborative meaning-making that would later flourish online. Folklorists note that digital folklore adapts long standing forms, including jokes, legends, and collaborative storytelling, to the speed and scale of networked dissemination.<ref name="PhillipsMilner2017">Template:Citation</ref>
From the 1970s through the 1990s, networked sociality formed on bulletin board systems, Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, and multi-user dungeons, where newcomers learned norms, jargon, and moderation practices.<ref name="Abbate1999" /> These spaces normalized pseudonymous identity, technical reputation, and volunteer governance that still influence contemporary platforms.<ref name="Coleman2014">Template:Citation</ref> As the network expanded beyond academic institutions, the term eternal September was coined to describe the phenomenon that began in September 1993, when America Online provided Usenet access to its users. This marked the beginning of a continuous influx of new users, newbies, unfamiliar with established online cultural norms and netiquette, effectively ending the cyclical nature of the previously observed September effect.
The first decade of the web, roughly 1990-2000, featured personal homepages, webrings, and topic forums. Scholars document how communities organized conversation, built archives, and crafted rules for inclusion and exclusion.<ref name="Baym2015" />
In the mid-2000s, the Web 2.0 wave introduced user-generated content and service-oriented platforms that lowered the costs of publishing and circulation.<ref name="Oreilly2005">Template:Citation</ref> American media scholar Henry Jenkins described a participatory culture with "low barriers to artistic expression", sustained by informal mentorship and strong sharing norms.<ref name="JenkinsItoBoyd2015" /><ref name="Jenkins2006" />
From the 2010s, social and search services centralized discovery through algorithmic ranking and recommendation systems. Scholars analyze this platformization of culture as a shift from open protocols to proprietary infrastructures that steer visibility and monetize attention.<ref name="VanDijck2018">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Gillespie2018" /><ref name="Aral2020">Template:Citation</ref>
Early digital culture was predominantly centered in the Anglosphere. The Internet's origins as a British–American invention, combined with computer technology's reliance on textual coding systems primarily designed for the English language, gave Anglophone societies, and subsequently societies using Latin script-based languages, preferential access to digital culture. Over time, however, the linguistic landscape of the Internet has become more diverse. The proportion of English-language content on the Internet declined from approximately 80% in the 1990s to 52.9% by 2018.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Characteristics
Internet culture codifies practices for quoting, linking, crediting, and remixing that build on hypertext and URL technologies. Researchers describe "networked publics" with overlapping audiences and context collapse, where people juggle multiple roles across platforms.<ref name="boyd2014" /><ref name="Baym2015" /><ref name="JenkinsItoBoyd2015" />
Dominant subcultures
Scholars describe several subcultures that structure online practice, including participatory fan networks, hacker and free software projects, influencer economies, and fringe communities that mobilize around niche interests.<ref name="Jenkins2006" /><ref name="Coleman2014" /><ref name="Marwick2013">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Phillips2015" />
- Fan communities organize around serial storytelling, participatory archiving, and gift economies. American media scholar Henry Jenkins shows how fans extend narratives, coordinate creative labor in public, and negotiate authorship with media producers.<ref name="Jenkins2006" /><ref name="Jenkins2013" />
- Hacker and free software communities stress peer review, version control, and moral claims about openness. Ethnography documents how "meritocracy" narratives coexist with gatekeeping practices and episodic protest.<ref name="Coleman2014" /><ref name="Benkler2006" />
- Influencer cultures merge self branding, algorithmic engagement, and advertiser relationships. Researchers highlight precarious labor, audience labor, and aspirational entrepreneurship within these economies.<ref name="Marwick2013" /><ref name="Duffy2017">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Abidin2018">Template:Citation</ref>
- Niche communities form around specialized interests, while fringe networks use platform affordances for antagonistic and extremist mobilization. Researchers track radicalization pipeline dynamics, cross-platform migration, and the role of recommendation systems.<ref name="Phillips2015" /><ref name="Gillespie2018" />
Memes and virality
Memes function as units of cultural exchange that travel and change through imitation and derivation, enabled by digital reproduction and network effects. Israeli communication scholar Limor Shifman defines Internet memes as "groups of digital items" that are "circulated, imitated, and transformed" across platforms.<ref name="Shifman2014">Template:Citation</ref> Scholars analyze formats such as image macros, reaction GIFs, short form video, and copypasta as genres with shared templates and norms.<ref name="PhillipsMilner2017" /><ref name="Jenkins2013">Template:Citation</ref>
Humor, irony, and play
Playful transgression, irony, and in jokes are central to many communities, facilitated by pseudonymity and context collapse. American media scholar Whitney Phillips documents how subcultural humor can slide between "playful and poisonous" registers and can be amplified by news and platform dynamics.<ref name="Phillips2015">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="PhillipsMilner2017" />
The online community can also have behaviors including conflict and aggression, such as trolling, the act of posting deliberately offensive or provocative content.
Remix, sampling, and intertextuality
Remix practices borrow from existing media and from user generated artifacts, building on digital sampling and hyperlink technologies. Scholars frame this as vernacular creativity that draws on collective archives, with creators attributing sources, annotating with links, and iterating formats in public.<ref name="Jenkins2013" /><ref name="Baym2015" />
Identity and pseudonymity
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Identity is negotiated through handles, avatars, and profiles, enabled by user account systems and profile technologies. Researchers have traced how pseudonymity fosters experimentation and risk taking while also enabling harassment and evasion. Work on race, gender, and class shows how offline inequalities are reproduced in search algorithms and visibility metrics.<ref name="Nakamura2008">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Noble2018">Template:Citation</ref>
One early study, conducted from 1998 to 1999, found that the participants view information obtained online as slightly more credible than information from magazines, radio, and television, information obtained from newspapers was the most credible.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Credibility online is established in much the same way that it is established in the offline world. Lawrence Lessig claimed that the architecture of a given online community may be the most important factor in establishing credibility. Factors include: anonymity, connection to physical identity, comment rating system, feedback type (positive vs positive/negative), moderation.<ref name="Lessig-Book">Template:Cite book</ref>
Template:See also Many sites allow anonymous commentary, where the user-id attached to the comment may be labelled as a "guest" or any other sort of automatic name. In an architecture that allows anonymous commentary, credibility attaches only to the object of the comment. Sites that require some link to an identity may require only a nickname that is sufficient to allow comment readers to rate the commenter, either explicitly, or by informal reputation. However with the rise of oftentimes "careless" spreading of personal data with the integration of the internet into society, and the rise of concepts like the digital footprint, anonymity, while still possible, has decreased.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Language and communication
Internet language blends technical slang with playful innovation, including abbreviations, leetspeak, and platform specific registers, shaped by character limits and keyboard constraints.<ref name="Crystal2006">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="McCulloch2019">Template:Citation</ref>
Users supplement text with emoticons, emoji, stickers, and GIFs to manage tone and display affect, compensating for the limitations of plain text communication. These practices act as pragmatic cues in low context environments and support rapid phatic communication.<ref name="Crystal2006" /><ref name="McCulloch2019" />
Textual play persists through ASCII art, code block aesthetics, and copypasta that standardize rituals and inside jokes, building on character encoding and monospace font technologies.<ref name="PhillipsMilner2017" />
Image macros, screenshot essays, and stitched videos form recognizable vernaculars that travel across platforms and across languages, enabled by image compression, video codecs, and cross-platform sharing protocols.<ref name="Shifman2014" /><ref name="Jenkins2013" />
Platforms
Digital platforms serve as the primary infrastructure through which internet culture is practiced, each embedding particular affordances, governance models, and social dynamics that shape how communities form, communicate, and create meaning online. These platforms are not neutral containers but actively mediate cultural expression through their architecture, purpose, and design choices around identity, visibility, temporality, and interaction.
- Forums and message boards feature thread based conversation, volunteer moderators, and repost norms. Scholars link these governance repertoires to earlier Internet protocols and to hobbyist computing cultures. Examples include Reddit, 4chan, Stack Overflow, and Discourse.<ref name="Abbate1999" /><ref name="Coleman2014" />
- Wikis and collaborative knowledge coordinate large scale collaboration through version control, talk pages, and rule making. Researchers analyze how openness coexists with gatekeeping and how policies routinize debate and consensus seeking. Wikipedia, Fandom, and GitHub wikis exemplify these practices.<ref name="Baym2015" /><ref name="Benkler2006" />
- Blogs and microblogs organize reverse chronological updates and link based discovery. WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter, and Blogger enabled niche publics and new forms of commentary before feed algorithms reordered attention.<ref name="Benkler2006" /><ref name="Bruns2019">Template:Citation</ref>
- Social networking services tie profiles to social graphs and feed based interfaces on mobile devices. Scholars track how design decisions shape visibility, privacy defaults, and self presentation. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok exemplify these designs.<ref name="boyd2014" /><ref name="VanDijck2018" />
- Imageboards and ephemeral media enable rapid circulation and low friction posting. Researchers connect their vernaculars to anonymity, tactical visibility, and collective authorship. 4chan, 8chan, Snapchat, and BeReal represent these approaches.<ref name="Phillips2015" /><ref name="PhillipsMilner2017" />
- Video platforms and livestreaming concentrate creator economies, recommendation engines, and advertising markets. Studies examine how creators optimize for watch time, how moderation addresses harm at scale, and how recommendation systems structure discovery. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Vimeo dominate these spaces.<ref name="Gillespie2018" /><ref name="Aral2020" /><ref name="BurgessGreen2018">Template:Citation</ref>
- Gaming platforms and virtual worlds host guilds, economies, and creative modding. Platform policies and player cultures shape voice chat, streaming, and esports spectatorship. Steam, Discord, World of Warcraft, and Roblox exemplify these environments.<ref name="Baym2015" /><ref name="Jenkins2006" />
- Messaging apps and group chats support intimate publics and community care through private and semi private group messaging. Researchers note how end-to-end encryption and forwarding features also enable rapid rumor spread. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Slack represent these platforms.<ref name="Baym2015" /><ref name="WardleDerakhshan2017">Template:Citation</ref>
- Decentralized and federated networks foreground open protocols and federation, which distribute control and complicate centralized governance. Scholarship links these designs to long standing debates about common carrier, interoperability, and public values online. Mastodon, Diaspora, Matrix, and ActivityPub based services exemplify these approaches.<ref name="Benkler2006" /><ref name="VanDijck2018" />
- Dark web and anonymity networks enable privacy focused communication through Tor, I2P, and other onion routing protocols. Research examines how technical anonymity shapes community norms, market structures on Silk Road, and information sharing practices distinct from surface web platforms.<ref name="Barratt2012">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="Gehl2018">Template:Citation</ref>
Platform features
Connection to physical identity
Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect.<ref name="Lessig-Book" />Template:Rp However, to require linkage to a physical identity, sensitive information about a user must be collected and safeguards for that collected information must be established – users must place sufficient trust in the site. Irrespective of safeguards, as with Counsel Connect,<ref name="Lessig-Book" />Template:Rp use of physical identities links credibility across the frames of the Internet and real space, influencing the behaviors of those who contribute in those spaces. However, even purely online identities can establish credibility. Even though nothing inherently links a person or group to their Internet-based persona, credibility can be earned, because of the time required.<ref name="Lessig-Book" />Template:Rp
Comment rating system
In some architectures, commenters can, in turn, be rated by other users, potentially encouraging more responsible commentary, although the profusion of popular shitposters belies this.
Feedback type
Architectures can be oriented around positive feedback or allow both positive and negative feedback. This feedback can take form through likes or upvotes, dislikes or downvotes, emoji reactions, rating systems, and written responses like comments or reviews. While a particular user may be able to equate certain responses with a "negative" evaluation, the actual meaning may be contextual.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
See also
Template:Portal Template:Div col
- Anonymous
- Cicada 3301
- Creepypasta
- Cyber law
- Cyberdelic
- Cyberpunk
- Digitalism
- Doomscrolling
- Information ethics
- Infosphere
- Internet trolls
- Meme
- Netnography
- Postliterate society
- Rules of the Internet
- Technology and society
- Techno-progressivism
- Technocriticism
- Technolibertarianism
- Technorealism
- Terminally online