The internet, specifically internet media and its content, is cumulative and reactionary. No other previous system of communication, media, or production is similar in these foundational structures, and therefore no other medium offers a specific or holistic critical framework to analyze online content. The internet and the collective of all its content, though subject to platform colonization by Silicon Valley's technological innovations, are much more than the popular websites and massive social media networks that inhabit the 2020s user experience. The internet is designed to scale at all costs and requires an expansion of labor in all aspects of its use, encouraging users to create as well as consume, brands to develop multilayered advertising, and political parties to engage with more diverse communities than ever.
The internet is not beholden to any state or government actor, nor representative of an overarching authority, or even a single oversight committee, but fully functions as a super structure within capitalism and its market values. Its creators, its users, and its media are fully framed by a unique form of commodification, transposed across both digital and physical spaces, from like counts on a post to social clout in influential communities. The internet is also a culture industry that is better described as culture itself. The internet in its entirety is inconceivable, much the way we may not understand the sheer volume of stars in the sky. In its inter–objectivity, nearly everything on the internet contains multiple meanings. As such, it can only be viewed and investigated by its elements as it exerts influence on other things proving its existence; the internet is a hyperobject.
What the internet enables is a participatory mechanism on a machine that continually scales in all directions, encompassing labor (both hidden and visible), exploitation and externalities (like environmental impact), and sociopolitical influence (both soft and hard power). The internet, over the last four decades, has been a place where new language has been forged and pushed outward, overlapping common vernacular, through its textual, visual, and auditory elements. Functionally, internet–born aesthetics change visual grammar, fashion, and marketed products, simultaneously overwriting previous iterations and unused styles. Even more unique, the internet is self–healing, like endgrain wood on a cutting board. Cultural shifts on one part of the internet may “heal” over time through market forces and lapses in cultural memory, all enforced by the power of the never–ending presentness of its use.
The internet is also a de facto host of the fringe. It is a place that enriches, or maybe even enforces, extremism as it slowly normalizes malicious material and harmful content by absorbing the volume of media into its array of predictive algorithms, language learning models, and archived datasets. As bad faith actors shift their discourse to avoid content moderation, the Overton window widens just a bit more until it is unable to contract further. Encoding harmful speech is an ongoing game played by those most interested in disrupting conventional conversation in politics and social environments, and promoting a perverted version of civic engagement. All culture is cumulative, but the internet doesn't forget – it builds upon itself in a never–ending scaffolding and construction. Each day you use the internet is the cumulation of every day the internet has been active. There is no turning off parts of the internet's past: it uses all that has ever been created purposeful to the present.
The result of decades of cumulative interaction and reactionary content creation has resulted in the development of internet culture, including a possible infinite number of subcultures. Internet culture is the creator, the content, the critic, the commenter, and the code. It is the video that does not work without a caption; it is the image that contains a multitude of references and nuance; it is media shared among those literate enough to receive the messaging within; it is the young person who wishes to be a creator and the seasoned chef making videos of new recipes on TikTok. Internet culture is the user watching a helpful YouTube video while on the side of the road fixing a tire and the mom sharing a funny image with her friends. Internet culture is a power dynamic that cannot be contained, nor explained easily, but affects everything around us in our mediated realities. Importantly, internet culture is also built on elision, and it is paramount to confront the ideas of access, exclusion, and inequality inside both the mechanics of the internet (such as code, algorithms, and platform structures) and the attention given to the media creators (popularity, implicit or explicit censorship, income distribution, and privilege). Like other communication systems, we may also define internet culture by what it is not by interrogating why some people do not have the opportunity to express themselves equally or use the systems tactically. And unlike traditional media systems, we also must acknowledge how internet culture can be a space for the support, uplift, and growth of vulnerable communities, increasing the overall safety and exposure of LGBTQ+ people and trans rights, but unfortunately simultaneously exposing them to malicious actors who may attempt to put them in harm's way.
It is no longer cute or novel to refer to the internet as a place to go, but rather an all encompassing immersive environment. Political and activist movements have been forged in online spaces and permeated hundreds of times onto the streets around the globe and up the US Capitol steps. We experience these movements as distinctly physical – happening “in real life” – rather than seeing nearly everything as an overlap of the digital on the physical. While today we are not directly driven by the predictive algorithms, we are somewhat passive participants in the engagement systems on our ubiquitous devices and social media sites. The internet is always on even when we are off.
Further, the media created online has developed an economy of its own, existing solely in reaction to media that precedes it while simultaneously supporting the inequities and hegemony of those systems. This in turn has enabled some media to devolve into grifts, misinformation, conspiracy, rabbit holes, and fascistic behaviors, many of which result in realworld complications with consequences far beyond the control of regulation, law, and education. In many ways, the only way to manage these spaces is to negotiate our role within them, understand the cultures, and apply a moderate amount of fair necessary criticism to the power structures that enable, reinforce, and maintain hegemonies of traditional media structures.
Now this said, in its three decades since the launch of the web browser, the internet is visibly aging. Due to the overabundance of advertising in search and the intrusion of artificial intelligence and bots, Google search no longer functions the way it was intended. TikTok has leaned into shopping, like its Douyin version in China, making the interface nearly unmanageable. Tech reporter and author Cory Doctorow refers to this process of degradation as “enshittification.” In addition, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has gutted the platform's integrity, incentivizing outrage bait, and meaningless chum to dominate the site where innumerable racists, antisemites, bigots, and bad actors to swarm anything they deem “anti–free speech.” And overall, the internet is rotting. As journalists are laid off en masse and local news dries up, links have stopped working unarchived websites have disappeared into the ether, and valuable cultural artifacts are no longer accessible in context.
This book is an attempt to critique parts of the present extant internet, read events more fully, and reconsider how internet media operates in our daily lives and how we may use our knowledge to empower more intentional use, increase our collective safety, and inspire young people to manage the growth of the internet as new apps and platforms emerge. To apply critical literacies of the internet is to recognize its role in the hegemony of traditional media while recognizing its role as both a reactionary space and a tool of cultural atomization.
There is no way for any book on this subject to be fully comprehensive, it would take eons to catalog the material and contextualize the evidence. This project was conceived as a way to make discussions surrounding the internet and its media more accessible, less novel, and more part of our daily conversations. The most important part is to push back against a dualist mindset where the internet is a separate space and recognize we exist on the internet even when “offline.” This project also hopes to destigmatize the concept of internet culture and the creators who produce internet media who simultaneously navigate the shifts in digital environments they have little control over.
The impetus to begin this project is to recognize that the shifts which occurred in the early 2010s, especially in 2014, that have vastly altered the culture of the internet and the industries that rely on its existence. Internet culture flourished within these formative years while the utilitarian internet concretized globally. This book aims to look at the way the internet has influenced its consumers to move beyond the idea of the “prosumer” and accept a commodified user experience, where each user is a potential “creator,” and in a world where about 50 percent of young people wish to be a creator of some sort, it is our responsibility to have a nominally approachable language to discuss digital culture and its effects.
This book is broken into eight chapters, each representative of a major aspect of internet media, the creators, and the ways we moderate and maintain safety in the present and into the future. The first half is an overview of the widest accessible sectors of the internet, its culture, and the environments. We'll interrogate the “creator economy,” the visual language of memes and their resounding political power, and how we develop new language. The second half introduces critical approaches to boundary content and awareness media, enabling us to better read coded messages and agenda–based propaganda disguised as entertainment and also introduces new ways of understanding content moderation, safety, accessibility, and community growth. The overall goal is to increase our comfort when discussing how the internet operates, what it does to ourselves, our relationships, and to young people. Culture is shaped by the power dynamics around us, and internet culture is a dominant structure that requires an investigation.