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 AnOpte Project visualization ofrouting paths through a portion of the Internet |
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Internet culture is the set of practices, norms, aesthetics, and shared references that emerge innetworked communication. The term covers the languages, rituals, humor, and genres that circulate across platforms, as well ascommunities, identities, and forms of collaboration that are native to online environments.[1][2] Internet culture is shaped by the technical architecture of networks, thegovernance of platforms, and thepolitical economy of data, which together condition how people find audiences, cooperate, and contest power online.[3][4][5]
Writers have used related labels such as "cyberculture", "digital culture", and "network culture". Early work used "cyberculture" for the cultural imaginaries that formed aroundbulletin board systems,Usenet, and earlyweb 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]
Many features of Internet culture have precedents inamateur radio,zines,fan clubs, andscience fiction fandom, where enthusiasts built distributedpublics and shared lore.[6][2] These precursors established patterns ofpeer-to-peer communication,do-it-yourself publishing, andcollaborative meaning-making that would later flourish online.Folklorists note thatdigital folklore adapts long standing forms, includingjokes,legends, andcollaborative storytelling, to the speed and scale of networked dissemination.[10]
From the 1970s through the 1990s, networked sociality formed onbulletin board systems,Usenet,Internet Relay Chat, andmulti-user dungeons, where newcomers learned norms, jargon, and moderation practices.[6] These spaces normalizedpseudonymous identity, technical reputation, and volunteer governance that still influence contemporary platforms.[11] As the network expanded beyond academic institutions, the termeternal September was coined to describe the phenomenon that began in September 1993, whenAmerica Online providedUsenet access to its users. This marked the beginning of a continuous influx of new users,newbies, unfamiliar with established online cultural norms andnetiquette, effectively ending the cyclical nature of the previously observed September effect.
The first decade of theweb, 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, theWeb 2.0 wave introduceduser-generated content and service-oriented platforms that lowered the costs of publishing and circulation.[12] American media scholarHenry Jenkins described aparticipatory 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 throughalgorithmic ranking andrecommendation systems. Scholars analyze thisplatformization 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 theAnglosphere. The Internet's origins as a British–American invention, combined with computer technology's reliance ontextual coding systems primarily designed for the English language, gaveAnglophone societies, and subsequently societies usingLatin 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]
Internet culture codifies practices for quoting, linking, crediting, and remixing that build onhypertext andURL technologies. Researchers describe "networked publics" with overlapping audiences and context collapse, where people juggle multiple roles across platforms.[9][1][8]
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]
Memes function asunits of cultural exchange that travel and change through imitation and derivation, enabled by digital reproduction andnetwork effects. Israeli communication scholarLimor Shifman defines Internet memes as "groups of digital items" that are "circulated, imitated, and transformed" across platforms.[23] Scholars analyze formats such asimage macros,reaction GIFs, short form video, andcopypasta as genres with shared templates and norms.[10][19]
Playful transgression, irony, and in jokes are central to many communities, facilitated bypseudonymity andcontext collapse. American media scholarWhitney Phillips documents how subcultural humor can slide between "playful and poisonous" registers and can be amplified by news and platform dynamics.[18][10]
The online community can also have behaviors including conflict and aggression, such astrolling, the act of posting deliberately offensive or provocative content.
Remix practices borrow from existing media and from user generated artifacts, building ondigital sampling andhyperlink 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]
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Identity is negotiated through handles,avatars, and profiles, enabled byuser account systems andprofile technologies. Researchers have traced howpseudonymity fosters experimentation and risk taking while also enabling harassment and evasion. Work on race, gender, and class shows how offline inequalities are reproduced insearch 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 givenonline 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]
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 thedigital footprint, anonymity, while still possible, has decreased.[28]
Internet language blends technical slang with playful innovation, including abbreviations,leetspeak, and platform specific registers, shaped bycharacter limits andkeyboard constraints.[29][30]
Users supplement text withemoticons,emoji, stickers, andGIFs to manage tone and display affect, compensating for the limitations ofplain text communication. These practices act as pragmatic cues in low context environments and support rapidphatic communication.[29][30]
Textual play persists throughASCII art,code block aesthetics, andcopypasta that standardize rituals and inside jokes, building oncharacter encoding andmonospace font technologies.[10]
Image macros, screenshot essays, and stitched videos form recognizable vernaculars that travel across platforms and across languages, enabled byimage compression,video codecs, andcross-platform sharing protocols.[23][19]
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.
