Internet culture

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

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

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

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]}

• 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. ^{[11] [3]}

• Influencer cultures merge self branding, algorithmic engagement, and advertiser relationships. Researchers highlight precarious labor, audience labor, and aspirational entrepreneurship within these economies. ^{[17] [20] [21]}

• 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. ^{[18] [4]}

Memes and virality

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

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]}

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. ^{[19] [1]}

Identity and pseudonymity

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]}

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.

A "Top questions" page on Stack Overflow

• 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. ^{[6] [11]}

• 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]}

• 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. ^{[9] [13]}

• 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. ^{[18] [10]}

• 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. ^{[4] [14] [32]}

• 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. ^{[1] [2]}

• 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. ^{[1] [33]}

• 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. ^{[3] [13]}

• 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. ^{[34] [35]}

See also

• Internet portal
• Society portal

• 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

References

1. Baym, Nancy K. (2015), Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN   9780745643328
2. Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture, Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, ISBN   9780814742815
3. Benkler, Yochai (2006), The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN   9780300110562
4. 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. Abbate, Janet (1999), Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN   9780262511155
7. Rheingold, Howard (1993). "Daily Life in Cyberspace" . The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier . HarperCollins. ISBN   0-06-097641-1.
8. Jenkins, Henry; Ito, Mizuko; boyd, danah (2015), Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN   9780745660707
9. boyd, danah (2014), It's Complicated, The Social Lives of Networked Teens, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN   9780300166316
10. Phillips, Whitney; Milner, Ryan M. (2017), The Ambivalent Internet, Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, Cambridge: Polity, ISBN   9781509501267
11. 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. 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. 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. Marwick, Alice E. (2013), Status Update, Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, New Haven: Yale University Press
18. 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. 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. 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. 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. Crystal, David (2006), Language and the Internet (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN   9780521868594
30. 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, hdl: 1959.4/unsworks_73307
35. Gehl, Robert W. (2018), Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ISBN   9780262038263

Further reading

• Apprich, Clemens (2017). Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ISBN   978-1786603142.
• Baranski, Sandrine (2010). La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité ?. Éditions universitaires européennes.
• Bell, David J.; Loader, Brian D.; Pleace, Nicholas; Schuler, Douglas (2004). Cyberculture: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge.
• Gunkel, David (2001). Hacking Cyberspace. Westview Press. ISBN   0-8133-3669-4.
• Haraway, Donna (1991). "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. pp. 149–181. Archived from the original on 2012-02-14. Retrieved February 4, 2009.
• Haraway, Donna (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Haraway, Donna (1997). Modest Witness Second Millennium FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Hayles, N. Katherine (Fall 1993). "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers". Archived from the original on 2009-03-17. Retrieved February 4, 2009.
• Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
• Jarzombek, Mark (2016). Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Lévy, Pierre (2001). Cyberculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN   9780816636105.
• Marwick, Alice E. (2008). "Becoming Elite: Social Status in Web 2.0 Cultures" (PDF). Dissertation. Department of Media, Culture, and Communication New York University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 January 2012. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
• Paasonen, Susanna (2005). Figures of fantasy: Internet, women, and cyberdiscourse. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN   978-0-8204-7607-0.
• Turkle, Sherry (1997). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Inc.