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Internet culture

Cultural practices shaped by networked communication From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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]

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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.[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]

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History

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Further information: History of the Internet
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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]

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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]

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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

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

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

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

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]

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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.

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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]
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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

Connection to physical identity

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

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.[36]

Moderation

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]

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See also

References

Further reading

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