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Internet culture

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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.[1][2] 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.[3][4][5]

Terminology

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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.[6] Howard Rheingold popularized the term "netizen" to describe citizens of virtual communities who participate actively in online civic life.[7] By the mid 2000s scholars emphasized participatory production and circulation, often using the language of "convergence culture" and "participatory culture".[2][8] Some researchers prefer "networked publics" to capture how publics form through technical and social networks.[9][3]

History

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Further information: History of the Internet
A screenshot of HexChat, an IRC client for GTK environments

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.[6][2] 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.[10]

A screenshot of a bulletin board system

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.[6] These spaces normalized pseudonymous identity, technical reputation, and volunteer governance that still influence contemporary platforms.[11] 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.[1]

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.[12] American media scholar Henry Jenkins described a participatory culture with "low barriers to artistic expression", sustained by informal mentorship and strong sharing norms.[8][2]


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.[13][4][14]

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.[15][16]

Characteristics

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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.[9][1][8]

Dominant subcultures

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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.[2][11][17][18]

  • 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.[2][19]

Memes and virality

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An example of the Doge meme, popular in 2013 and similar in style to earlier lolcats[22]

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.[23] Scholars analyze formats such as image macros, reaction GIFs, short form video, and copypasta as genres with shared templates and norms.[10][19]

Humor, irony, and play

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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.[18][10]

Remix, sampling, and intertextuality

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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.[19][1]

Identity and pseudonymity

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A Twitter post, with the user's profile picture

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.[24][25]

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.[26] 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.[27]

See also: Anonymous post

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.[28]

Language and communication

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Internet language blends technical slang with playful innovation, including abbreviations, leetspeak, and platform specific registers, shaped by character limits and keyboard constraints.[29][30]

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.[29][30]

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.[10]

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.[23][19]

Platforms

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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.

Cicada 3301 message posted on 4chan, beginning the first set of puzzles
  • 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.[1][3]
A WordPress blog, using the default theme in 2010.
  • 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.[3][31]

Platform features

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Connection to physical identity

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Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect.[27]: 94–97  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,[27]: 94–97  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.[27]: 113 

Comment rating system

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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

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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.[36]

Moderation

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Architectures can give editorial control to a group or individual not employed by the site (e.g., Reddit), termed moderators. Moderation may take be either proactive (previewing contents) or reactive (punishing violators).

The moderator's credibility can be damaged by overly aggressive behavior.[7]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g Baym, Nancy K. (2015), Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN 9780745643328
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture, Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, ISBN 9780814742815
  3. ^ a b c d e f Benkler, Yochai (2006), The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300110562
  4. ^ a b c d Gillespie, Tarleton (2018), Custodians of the Internet, Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300173130
  5. ^ Zuboff, Shoshana (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York: PublicAffairs, ISBN 9781610395694
  6. ^ a b c d Abbate, Janet (1999), Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN 9780262511155
  7. ^ a b Rheingold, Howard (1993). "Daily Life in Cyberspace". The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-097641-1.
  8. ^ a b c Jenkins, Henry; Ito, Mizuko; boyd, danah (2015), Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN 9780745660707
  9. ^ a b c boyd, danah (2014), It's Complicated, The Social Lives of Networked Teens, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300166316
  10. ^ a b c d e Phillips, Whitney; Milner, Ryan M. (2017), The Ambivalent Internet, Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN 9781509501267
  11. ^ a b c d Coleman, Gabriella (2014), Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, The Many Faces of Anonymous, London: Verso, ISBN 9781781685839
  12. ^ O'Reilly, Tim (2005), What Is Web 2.0, O'Reilly Media
  13. ^ a b c van Dijck, José; Poell, Thomas; de Waal, Martijn (2018), The Platform Society, Public Values in a Connective World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190889760
  14. ^ a b Aral, Sinan (2020), The Hype Machine, How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health, New York: Currency, ISBN 9780525574514
  15. ^ "The digital language divide". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2022-05-27. Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  16. ^ "Chart of the day: The Internet has a language diversity problem". World Economic Forum. Archived from the original on 2022-05-11. Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  17. ^ a b Marwick, Alice E. (2013), Status Update, Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, New Haven: Yale University Press
  18. ^ a b c d Phillips, Whitney (2015), This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN 9780262028936
  19. ^ a b c d Jenkins, Henry; Ford, Sam; Green, Joshua (2013), Spreadable Media, Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York: New York University Press, ISBN 9780814743508
  20. ^ Duffy, Brooke Erin (2017), Not Getting Paid to Do What You Love, Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work, New Haven: Yale University Press
  21. ^ Abidin, Crystal (2018), Internet Celebrity, Understanding Fame Online, Bingley: Emerald Publishing
  22. ^ "We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge". Gizmodo. 11 December 2013. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
  23. ^ a b Shifman, Limor (2014), Memes in Digital Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN 9780262525435
  24. ^ Nakamura, Lisa (2007), Digitizing Race, Visual Cultures of the Internet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 9780816646135
  25. ^ Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018), Algorithms of Oppression, How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York: New York University Press, ISBN 9781479837243
  26. ^ Flanagin, Andrew J.; Metzger, Miriam J. (September 2000). "Perceptions of Internet Information Credibility". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 77 (3): 515–540. doi:10.1177/107769900007700304. ISSN 1077-6990. S2CID 15996706. Archived from the original on 2021-02-25. Retrieved 2020-11-27.
  27. ^ a b c d Lessig, Lawrence (2006). Code 2.0: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03914-2.
  28. ^ "The reasons you can't be anonymous anymore". www.bbc.com. 2017-05-29. Retrieved 2025-06-15.
  29. ^ a b Crystal, David (2006), Language and the Internet (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521868594
  30. ^ a b McCulloch, Gretchen (2019), Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language, New York: Riverhead Books, ISBN 9780735210936
  31. ^ Bruns, Axel (2019), Are Filter Bubbles Real?, Cambridge: Polity
  32. ^ Burgess, Jean; Green, Joshua (2018), YouTube, Online Video and Participatory Culture (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Polity
  33. ^ Wardle, Claire; Derakhshan, Hossein (2017), Information Disorder, Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy-Making, Strasbourg: Council of Europe
  34. ^ Barratt, Monica J. (2012), "Silk Road: eBay for drugs", Addiction, 107 (3): 683, doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03709.x
  35. ^ Gehl, Robert W. (2018), Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN 9780262038263
  36. ^ Marin, Lavinia (2021). "Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic". Ethics and Information Technology. 23 (Suppl 1): 79–86. doi:10.1007/s10676-020-09550-2. ISSN 1388-1957. PMC 7449515. PMID 32868972.

Further reading

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