Hello,
First off, I am very glad about the existence of this subforum. Internet sociology is something that has always fascinated me, and I am pleased that a medium to discuss it properly now exists.
One of the main ideas in my own previous thinking and writing about Internet sociology is the idea of there being set "ages" of Internet history. This may simply be due to my autistic brain wanting to classify and organize everything, or perhaps due to too much subconscious influence from reading Evola as a teenager, but I really do believe that the eras that I have outlined have distinct "vibes" that I have always intuited from their products. A short summary of my "ages" scheme is as follows, influenced by Hesiod & Evola's scheme of metallic ages.
1. The Primordial Age: 1980s through ~1994-5
The earliest stages of the Internet. Almost exclusively used by researchers, university students, eccentric hobbyists, and other assorted nerds. Usenet & P2P services are the norm, as are personal websites. An early colonization of parts of the Internet by a nascent furry community (before then only connecting via sparse newsletters and magazines) will eventually lead to an outsized influence by them due to a founder's effect.
A great little slice of this era and its culture is the website ram.org, which is the personal website of a New York computational biology professor by the name of Ram Samudrala. Very simplistic, basic, bare-bones design, and clearly the product of a culture of solely intra-academic nerds.
2. The Golden Age: ~1995 through 2006
The core of what we consider "Old Internet." YTMND, Ebaum's World, Newgrounds, embryonic 4chan, Gaia Online, Angelfire, Geocities. Personal websites still common, social media & Web 2.0 have yet to take off, with their seeds only being planted towards the very end of this era. The first viral videos and memes (then called "fads") take off here and occasionally leak into the normosphere AKA meatspace. Many of the first great trolling campaigns (i.e. Habbo Hotel raids, various Encyclopedia Dramatica antics) are had. Internet still mostly restricted to mid- or high-IQ white men due to the technical limitations and difficulties of personal computers at the time.
3. The Silver Age: 2007 through 2011, perhaps into early 2012
The first time that "normies" truly start getting online, thanks to various advances in technology, such as easier-to-use software, better Internet speeds, more wi-fi, the advancement and normalization of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and of course the first smartphones. This is when the average Internet user stops being a Gen Xer and starts being a Millennial. Various fandoms congregate online, but they are of a far more normie variety than those that did in the previous ages (i.e. scenes, goths, emos, & LARPers instead of furries & other bizarre fetishists and extreme weirdos). This is when funny Internet things stop being called "fads" and start being called "memes." Viral videos go from a sporadic novelty to a cultural institution with the advent and increased popularity of YouTube. While Web 2.0 social media websites have brought in more normies, they are still very free and unregulated compared to how they are today, due to having been too young and poorly-understood at the time to have drawn the ire of hysterical journalists and government regulators as a threat to liberal cultural hegemony. This is the era of your classic "epic memes xD" and is the first time you get children embarrassing themselves and others by brainlessly parroting Internet lingo (rage comics, "like a boss," "epic win/fail," "derp," troll face, etc.). Overall the Internet is seen as a crazy and fun place by the public at large, home to LOLcats, rickrolling, innocent trolling of silly emos, Reddit atheists escaping crazy Bush-era "fundies," and funny comics on Facebook.
This era was hated at the time by Golden Agers, but over time has become idealized by later newfags as a "golden era." Compare this older 4chan graphic:
[Image: https://i.redd.it/ify709jkcm7y.jpg]
To these far more recent video essay by Armenoid pseudointellectual Glink (before he fried his brain on psychedelics):
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6CuSMzNus]
4. The Bronze Age: 2012 through 2016-17
The edgy, insecure teenage years of the Internet. The first thing to observe here is that the Internet absolutely exploded in popularity in 2012. This is something that I have always intuitively felt - from about 2014 onwards, I always felt that something posted or uploaded in 2011 or before was "old," and something posted or uploaded in 2012 or later was "new." This is borne out by the facts.
[Image: https://saasscout.com/wp-content/uploads...bsites.png]
We can see that the total number of websites on the Internet doubled between 2011 and 2012, a massive shift. This was also the year of the 2012 Obama vs Romney presidential election, which was the first election in which the Internet was a significant factor, with tweets and memes gaining real importance in the news cycle. This was foreshadowed in the preceding year by Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, two political movements which both relied heavily on the Internet to spread their message and organize.
With this influx of new users, we saw two trends emerge and converge. First, we saw a truly massive influx of normies onto the Internet. It was no longer just nerds and computer scientists, as in the Primordial and Golden Ages, or even "hip" or "weird" normies like in the Silver Age - now everyone was online. This massive influx of people created a mixture primed for conflict, which emerged through the rise of a new, edgy, ironic, and sarcastic online culture. Long gone was the sincere and innocent goofiness of the previous ages - now that was "cringe." I think this was due in large part to a mutual reaction of sorts between the original Internet nerds from the previous ages and the normie newcomers. Nerds were mocked for being "cringe" or "weird" by normies, and normies were mocked for being out-of-touch and stupid by the smarter and more self-aware of the nerds. There is also something to be said for the long-documented phenomenon of people speaking and acting more harshly and meanly online, due to anonymity and/or lack of face-to-face interaction.
The memes of this era were much more self-aware and ironic than in previous ages, e.g. Shrekposting/"Brogres," doge, ayy lmao, & MLG edits; mischievous & mean Smug Pepe overtakes sincere & heartfelt Sad Pepe. This is the golden age of edge, and YouTubers such as Filthy Frank, iDubbbz, LeafyIsHere, Keemstar, Sam Hyde, and to an extent h3h3, all secure lucrative careers for a time by pushing the limits of acceptable entertainment. Edgy jokes about stereotypes, sex, and gross-out/shock humor are the norm. This culture of pushing the limits and rebelling against authority also extends to the now-politicized nature of the Internet, with the emergence of the alt-right and Gamergate both prefiguring the following age of further politicization. Donald Trump enjoys popularity among the "memers" of this age with his brash, trash-talking, "get rekt libtard" style.
5. The Iron Age: 2017-present???
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the American political class lost their shit, and clamped down hard on the emergent threat of online freedom of speech. Web 2.0 social media companies were bullied into implementing further and further censorship with hysterical articles about "hate speech," advertiser boycotts, and threats of legislation from Washington bureaucrats and congressmen. You had insane shit like George Soros saying that "Facebook got Donald Trump elected" and the entire libtard class living in a parallel universe in which Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are Hitler's top guys for not banning everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. This, combined with the general Trump-era media hysteria, led to much more politicization of the Internet and a steep decline in the edgy devil-may-care attitude and impish humor of the previous age. First content creators were bullied into submission with demonetization, bannings, and the "Adpocalypse," then afterwards they were moralized at and threatened with "cancellation" by the SJWs, once a laughing stock in the Bronze Age but now fully deputized by the powers that be. This is an age that has a facade of irony, but is in truth profoundly self-serious at its core. With the universality of smartphones and social media the Internet has now become completely normified and is now almost indistinguishable from "IRL" - everyone is online now, and as such memes and other trends come and go in the blink of an eye to satisfy an ever more impatient mass audience. Highly-regulated social media is the norm, and relics of older eras such as 4chan, Kiwi Farms, and other forums and sites remain only as relics of an older age of the Internet, slowly fading or extinguishing with the passing of time, like stars going out in the night sky.
Let me know what you think of this scheme of dividing Internet history. While it may come across as a bit LARPy, I do genuinely believe that each era I have listed has its own very distinct and noticeable "vibe" and feel to it.
(edited to fix spacing; please preview your posts before sending them out - Chud)
First off, I am very glad about the existence of this subforum. Internet sociology is something that has always fascinated me, and I am pleased that a medium to discuss it properly now exists.
One of the main ideas in my own previous thinking and writing about Internet sociology is the idea of there being set "ages" of Internet history. This may simply be due to my autistic brain wanting to classify and organize everything, or perhaps due to too much subconscious influence from reading Evola as a teenager, but I really do believe that the eras that I have outlined have distinct "vibes" that I have always intuited from their products. A short summary of my "ages" scheme is as follows, influenced by Hesiod & Evola's scheme of metallic ages.
1. The Primordial Age: 1980s through ~1994-5
The earliest stages of the Internet. Almost exclusively used by researchers, university students, eccentric hobbyists, and other assorted nerds. Usenet & P2P services are the norm, as are personal websites. An early colonization of parts of the Internet by a nascent furry community (before then only connecting via sparse newsletters and magazines) will eventually lead to an outsized influence by them due to a founder's effect.
A great little slice of this era and its culture is the website ram.org, which is the personal website of a New York computational biology professor by the name of Ram Samudrala. Very simplistic, basic, bare-bones design, and clearly the product of a culture of solely intra-academic nerds.
2. The Golden Age: ~1995 through 2006
The core of what we consider "Old Internet." YTMND, Ebaum's World, Newgrounds, embryonic 4chan, Gaia Online, Angelfire, Geocities. Personal websites still common, social media & Web 2.0 have yet to take off, with their seeds only being planted towards the very end of this era. The first viral videos and memes (then called "fads") take off here and occasionally leak into the normosphere AKA meatspace. Many of the first great trolling campaigns (i.e. Habbo Hotel raids, various Encyclopedia Dramatica antics) are had. Internet still mostly restricted to mid- or high-IQ white men due to the technical limitations and difficulties of personal computers at the time.
3. The Silver Age: 2007 through 2011, perhaps into early 2012
The first time that "normies" truly start getting online, thanks to various advances in technology, such as easier-to-use software, better Internet speeds, more wi-fi, the advancement and normalization of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and of course the first smartphones. This is when the average Internet user stops being a Gen Xer and starts being a Millennial. Various fandoms congregate online, but they are of a far more normie variety than those that did in the previous ages (i.e. scenes, goths, emos, & LARPers instead of furries & other bizarre fetishists and extreme weirdos). This is when funny Internet things stop being called "fads" and start being called "memes." Viral videos go from a sporadic novelty to a cultural institution with the advent and increased popularity of YouTube. While Web 2.0 social media websites have brought in more normies, they are still very free and unregulated compared to how they are today, due to having been too young and poorly-understood at the time to have drawn the ire of hysterical journalists and government regulators as a threat to liberal cultural hegemony. This is the era of your classic "epic memes xD" and is the first time you get children embarrassing themselves and others by brainlessly parroting Internet lingo (rage comics, "like a boss," "epic win/fail," "derp," troll face, etc.). Overall the Internet is seen as a crazy and fun place by the public at large, home to LOLcats, rickrolling, innocent trolling of silly emos, Reddit atheists escaping crazy Bush-era "fundies," and funny comics on Facebook.
This era was hated at the time by Golden Agers, but over time has become idealized by later newfags as a "golden era." Compare this older 4chan graphic:
[Image: https://i.redd.it/ify709jkcm7y.jpg]
To these far more recent video essay by Armenoid pseudointellectual Glink (before he fried his brain on psychedelics):
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6CuSMzNus]
4. The Bronze Age: 2012 through 2016-17
The edgy, insecure teenage years of the Internet. The first thing to observe here is that the Internet absolutely exploded in popularity in 2012. This is something that I have always intuitively felt - from about 2014 onwards, I always felt that something posted or uploaded in 2011 or before was "old," and something posted or uploaded in 2012 or later was "new." This is borne out by the facts.
[Image: https://saasscout.com/wp-content/uploads...bsites.png]
We can see that the total number of websites on the Internet doubled between 2011 and 2012, a massive shift. This was also the year of the 2012 Obama vs Romney presidential election, which was the first election in which the Internet was a significant factor, with tweets and memes gaining real importance in the news cycle. This was foreshadowed in the preceding year by Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, two political movements which both relied heavily on the Internet to spread their message and organize.
With this influx of new users, we saw two trends emerge and converge. First, we saw a truly massive influx of normies onto the Internet. It was no longer just nerds and computer scientists, as in the Primordial and Golden Ages, or even "hip" or "weird" normies like in the Silver Age - now everyone was online. This massive influx of people created a mixture primed for conflict, which emerged through the rise of a new, edgy, ironic, and sarcastic online culture. Long gone was the sincere and innocent goofiness of the previous ages - now that was "cringe." I think this was due in large part to a mutual reaction of sorts between the original Internet nerds from the previous ages and the normie newcomers. Nerds were mocked for being "cringe" or "weird" by normies, and normies were mocked for being out-of-touch and stupid by the smarter and more self-aware of the nerds. There is also something to be said for the long-documented phenomenon of people speaking and acting more harshly and meanly online, due to anonymity and/or lack of face-to-face interaction.
The memes of this era were much more self-aware and ironic than in previous ages, e.g. Shrekposting/"Brogres," doge, ayy lmao, & MLG edits; mischievous & mean Smug Pepe overtakes sincere & heartfelt Sad Pepe. This is the golden age of edge, and YouTubers such as Filthy Frank, iDubbbz, LeafyIsHere, Keemstar, Sam Hyde, and to an extent h3h3, all secure lucrative careers for a time by pushing the limits of acceptable entertainment. Edgy jokes about stereotypes, sex, and gross-out/shock humor are the norm. This culture of pushing the limits and rebelling against authority also extends to the now-politicized nature of the Internet, with the emergence of the alt-right and Gamergate both prefiguring the following age of further politicization. Donald Trump enjoys popularity among the "memers" of this age with his brash, trash-talking, "get rekt libtard" style.
5. The Iron Age: 2017-present???
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the American political class lost their shit, and clamped down hard on the emergent threat of online freedom of speech. Web 2.0 social media companies were bullied into implementing further and further censorship with hysterical articles about "hate speech," advertiser boycotts, and threats of legislation from Washington bureaucrats and congressmen. You had insane shit like George Soros saying that "Facebook got Donald Trump elected" and the entire libtard class living in a parallel universe in which Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are Hitler's top guys for not banning everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. This, combined with the general Trump-era media hysteria, led to much more politicization of the Internet and a steep decline in the edgy devil-may-care attitude and impish humor of the previous age. First content creators were bullied into submission with demonetization, bannings, and the "Adpocalypse," then afterwards they were moralized at and threatened with "cancellation" by the SJWs, once a laughing stock in the Bronze Age but now fully deputized by the powers that be. This is an age that has a facade of irony, but is in truth profoundly self-serious at its core. With the universality of smartphones and social media the Internet has now become completely normified and is now almost indistinguishable from "IRL" - everyone is online now, and as such memes and other trends come and go in the blink of an eye to satisfy an ever more impatient mass audience. Highly-regulated social media is the norm, and relics of older eras such as 4chan, Kiwi Farms, and other forums and sites remain only as relics of an older age of the Internet, slowly fading or extinguishing with the passing of time, like stars going out in the night sky.
Let me know what you think of this scheme of dividing Internet history. While it may come across as a bit LARPy, I do genuinely believe that each era I have listed has its own very distinct and noticeable "vibe" and feel to it.
(edited to fix spacing; please preview your posts before sending them out - Chud)
