Internet culture

The cultural antecedent of digital culture was amateur radio (commonly known as ham radio), which at this point was electronic, but not yet digital. By connecting over great distances, Ham operators were able to form a distinct cultural community with a strong technocratic foundation, as the radio gear involved was finicky and prone to failure. The area that later became Silicon Valley, where much of modern Internet technology originates, had been an early locus of radio engineering.[10] Alongside the original mandate for robustness and resiliency, the renegade spirit of the early ham radio community later infused the cultural value of decentralization and near-total rejection of regulation and political control that characterized the internet's original growth era, with strong undercurrents of the Wild West spirit of the American frontier.

At its inception in the early 1970s as part of ARPANET, digital networks were small, institutional, arcane, and slow, which confined the majority of use to the exchange of textual information, such as interpersonal messages and source code. Access to these networks was largely limited to a technological elite based at a small number of prestigious universities; the original American network connected one computer in Utah with three in California.

Text on these digital networks was usually encoded in the ASCII character set, which was minimalistic even for established English typography, barely suited to other European languages sharing a Latin script (but with an additional requirement to support accented characters), and entirely unsuitable to any language not based on a Latin script, such as Mandarin, Arabic, or Hindi.

Interactive use was discouraged except for high value activities. Hence a store and forward architecture was employed for many message systems, functioning more like a post office than modern instant messaging; however, by the standards of postal mail, the system (when it worked) was stunningly fast and cheap. Among the heaviest users were those actively involved in advancing the technology, most of whom implicitly shared much the same base of arcane knowledge, effectively forming a technological priesthood.

A screenshot of a bulletin board system.

The origins of social media predate the Internet proper. The first bulletin board system was created in 1978,[11] GEnie was created by General Electric in 1985[12], the mailing list Listserv appeared in 1986[12], and Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988.[12] The first official social media site, SixDegrees launched in 1997.[12]

In the 1980s, the network grew to encompass most universities and many corporations, especially those involved with technology, including heavy but segregated participation within the American military–industrial complex. Use of interactivity grew, and the user base became less dominated by programmers, computer scientists and hawkish industrialists, but it remained largely an academic culture centered around institutions of higher learning. It was observed that each September, with an intake of new students, standards of productive discourse would plummet until the established user base brought the influx up to speed on cultural etiquette.

Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia, opening the door for public participation. Soon the network was no longer dominated by academic culture, and the term eternal September, initially referring to September 1993, was coined as internet slang for the endless intake of cultural newbies.

Commercial use became established alongside academic and professional use, beginning with a sharp rise in unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly called spam. Around this same time, the network transitioned to support the burgeoning World Wide Web (largely erected on the emerging exchange cultures of free software and open source). Multimedia formats such as audio, graphics, and video become commonplace and began to displace plain text, but multimedia remained painfully slow for dial-up users. Also around this time the internet also began to internationalize, supporting most of the world's major languages, but support for many languages remained patchy and incomplete into the 2010s.

On the arrival of broadband access, file sharing services grew rapidly, especially of digital audio (with a prevalence of bootlegged commercial music) with the arrival of Napster in 1999 and similar projects which effectively catered to music enthusiasts, especially teenagers and young adults, soon becoming established as a prototype for rapid evolution into modern social media. Alongside ongoing challenges to traditional norms of intellectual property, business models of many of the largest internet corporations evolved into what Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalism. Not only is social media a novel form of social culture, but also a novel form of economic culture where sharing is frictionless, but personal privacy has become a scarce good.

Bongo Cat

In 1998, there was Hampster Dance, the first successful internet meme.[13]

In 1999, Aaron Peckham created Urban Dictionary, an online, crowdsourced dictionary of slang.[13] He had kept the server for Urban Dictionary under his bed.[13]

In 2000, there was great demand for images of a dress that Jennifer Lopez wore. As a result, Google's co-founders created Google Images.[13][14]

In 2001, Wikipedia was created.[13]

In 2005, YouTube was created because people wanted to find video of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl in 2004. YouTube was later acquired by Google in 2006.[13]

In 2009, Bitcoin was created.[13]

Since the 2010s, there has been an enormous rise in woke culture - highly emphasizing the importance of race and racism. This movement, having begun around 2014, has been called the "Great Awokening".[15][16]

Since 2020, Internet culture has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.[17]

Since 2021, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in the concept of the metaverse.[18][19] In particular, Facebook Inc. renamed itself to Meta Platforms in October 2021, amid the crisis of the Facebook Papers.[20]

The creation of the Internet has impacted our society greatly, giving us the ability to communicate with others online, store information such as files and pictures, and help maintain our government. As the Internet progressed, digital and audio files could be created and shared on the Internet, it became one of the main sources of information, business, and entertainment, and it led to the creation of different social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat.[22] Communicating with others has never been easier in our day and age allowing people to connect and interact with each other. The Internet helps us maintain our relationships with others by acting as a supplement to physical interactions with our friends and family.[23] People are also able to make forums and talk about different topics with each other which can help form and build relationships. This gives people the ability to express their own views freely. Social groups created on the Internet have also been connected to improving and maintaining our health in general. Interacting with social groups online can help prevent and possibly treat depression.[23] In response to the rising prevalence of mental health disorders, including anxiety and depression, a 2019 study by Christo El Morr and others demonstrated that York University students in Toronto were extremely interested in participating in an online mental health support community. The study mentions that many students prefer an anonymous online mental health community to a traditional in person service, due to the social stigmatization of mental health disorders.[24] Overall, online communication with others gives people the sense that they are wanted and are welcomed into social groups.

With access to the Internet becoming easier for people, it has led to a substantial amount of disadvantages. Addiction is a notable issue, as the internet is becoming increasingly relied on for various everyday tasks.[25] There are a range of different symptoms connected to addiction such as withdrawal, anxiety, and mood swings. Addiction to social media is very prevalent with adolescents, but the interaction they have with one another can be detrimental for their health. Rude comments on posts can lower individuals self-esteem making them feel unworthy and may lead to depression. Social interaction online may substitute face-to-face interactions for some people instead of acting as a supplement. This can negatively impact people's social skills and cause one to have feelings of loneliness. People may also have the chance of being cyber bullied when using online applications. Cyber bullying may include harassment, video shaming, impersonating, and much more. A concept called cyber bullying theory is now being used to describe that children who use social networking more frequently are more likely to become victims of cyber bullying.[26] Additionally, some evidence shows that too much internet use can stunt memory and attention development in children. The ease of access to information which the internet provides discourages information retention. However, the cognitive consequences are not yet fully known.[27] The staggering amount of available information online can lead to feelings of information overload. Some effects of this phenomenon include reduced comprehension, decision making, and behavior control.[27]

Many sites allow anonymous commentary, where the user-id attached to the comment is something like "guest" or "anonymous user". In an architecture that allows anonymous posting about other works, the credibility being impacted is only that of the product for sale, the original opinion expressed, the code written, the video, or other entity about which comments are made (e.g., a Slashdot post). Sites that require "known" postings can vary widely from simply requiring some kind of name to be associated with the comment to requiring registration, wherein the identity of the registrant is visible to other readers of the comment. These "known" identities allow and even require commentators to be aware of their own credibility, based on the fact that other users will associate particular content and styles with their identity. By definition, then, all blog postings are "known" in that the blog exists in a consistently defined virtual location, which helps to establish an identity, around which credibility can gather. Conversely, anonymous postings are inherently incredible. Note that a "known" identity need have nothing to do with a given identity in the physical world.

Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect.[33]^: 94–97 However, to require linkage to physical identity, many more steps must be taken (collecting and storing sensitive information about a user) and safeguards for that collected information must be established-the users must have more trust of the sites collecting the information (yet another form of credibility). Irrespective of safeguards, as with Counsel Connect,[33]^: 94–97 using 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 internet-based identities have credibility. Just as Lessig describes linkage to a character or a particular online gaming environment, nothing inherently links a person or group to their internet-based persona, but credibility (similar to "characters") is "earned rather than bought, and because this takes time and (credibility is) not fungible, it becomes increasingly hard" to create a new persona.[33]^: 113

In some architectures, those who review or offer comments can, in turn, be rated by other users. This technique offers the ability to regulate the credibility of given authors by subjecting their comments to direct "quantifiable" approval ratings.

Architectures can be oriented around positive feedback or a mix of both positive and negative feedback. While a particular user may be able to equate fewer stars with a "negative" rating, the semantic difference is potentially important. The ability to actively rate an entity negatively may violate laws or norms that are important in the jurisdiction in which the internet property is important. The more public a site, the more important this concern may be, as noted by Goldsmith & Wu regarding eBay.[34]

Architectures can also be oriented to give editorial control to a group or individual. Many email lists are worked in this fashion (e.g., Freecycle). In these situations, the architecture usually allows, but does not require that contributions be moderated. Further, moderation may take two different forms: reactive or proactive. In the reactive mode, an editor removes posts, reviews, or content that is deemed offensive after it has been placed on the site or list. In the proactive mode, an editor must review all contributions before they are made public.

In a moderated setting, credibility is often given to the moderator. However, that credibility can be damaged by appearing to edit in a heavy-handed way, whether reactive or proactive (as experienced by digg.com). In an unmoderated setting, credibility lies with the contributors alone. The very existence of an architecture allowing moderation may lend credibility to the forum being used (as in Howard Rheingold's examples from the WELL),[28] or it may take away credibility (as in corporate web sites that post feedback, but edit it highly).