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Internet culture refers to culture developed and maintained among frequent and active users of the Internet (also known as ) who primarily communicate with one another as members of online communities; that is, a culture whose influence is "mediated by computer screens" and information communication technology, specifically the Internet.
Internet culture arises from the frequent interactions between members within various online communities and the use of these communities for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Studied aspects of Internet culture include anonymity/pseudonymity, social media, gaming and specific communities, such as fandoms.
Though Internet culture originated during the creation and development of early online communities – such as those found on bulletin board systems before the Internet reached mainstream adoption in developed countries – many cultural elements have roots in other previously existing offline cultures and subcultures which predate the Internet. Specifically, Internet culture includes many elements of telegraphy culture (especially amateur radio), gaming culture and hacker culture.
Initially, digital culture tilted toward the Anglosphere. As a consequence of computer technology's early reliance on ASCII that were mainly adapted to the English language, Anglophone societies—followed by other societies with languages based on Latin script—enjoyed privileged access to digital culture. However, other languages have gradually increased in prominence. In specific, the proportion of content on the Internet that is in English has dropped from roughly 80% in the 1990s to around 52.9% in 2018.
As technology advances, Internet Culture continues to change. The introduction of and and the growing computer network infrastructure around the world have increased the number of Internet users and have likewise resulted in the proliferation and expansion of online communities. While Internet culture continues to evolve among active and frequent Internet users, it remains distinct from other previously offline cultures and subcultures which now have a presence online, even those cultures and subcultures from which Internet Culture borrows many elements.
One cultural antecedent of Internet culture was amateur radio (commonly known as ham radio). 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. 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 plain text, such as interpersonal messages and
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Text on these digital networks 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. The origins of social media predate the Internet proper. The first bulletin board system was created in 1978, GEnie was created by General Electric in 1985, the mailing list Listserv appeared in 1986, and Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988. The first official social media sites, SixDegrees and Classmates.com launched in 1997.
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 .
Commercial use became established alongside academic and professional use, beginning with a sharp rise in unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly called email spam. Around this same time, the network transitioned to support the burgeoning World Wide Web. Multimedia formats such as Sound, 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 scarcity. In 1998, there was Hampster Dance, the first successful Internet meme.
The moderator's credibility can be damaged by overly aggressive behavior.
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