Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  A less subtle way of navigating the relationship between the public and the obscure is found in subtweeting (subliminal tweets) or vaguebooking (vague facebooking), the art of posting elliptically about a social situation without naming names. Posting a song lyric has plausible deniability: it could just mean you enjoy that song and it’s stuck in your head. But if someone posts, “I just don’t have time for this nonsense,” it’s obvious even to the completely uninitiated that some kind of drama is going on; it’s just that only certain people are going to already have the right context to interpret it. Asking what’s going on is like interrupting an arguing couple at a restaurant to ask for a detailed relationship history: a definite faux pas. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself or resign yourself to not knowing. A study of subtweets among college students found indirect posts were indeed considered a more socially acceptable way of conveying negative information than directly mentioning the person in question. (For example, “Thanks to a certain person for backstabbing and completely ruining my day. People like that are pathetic.” While people recognized the passive aggression, they preferred it to a version that named and shamed the specific person involved.) The inverse was the case for positive posts—it was considered better to tag someone directly in a post like “Thanks @RyanS for completely making my day. You’re awesome.”

  Gossiping, in-jokes, and hiding messages in plain sight are by no means just a teenage or internet thing. People have long written to advice columnists under pseudonyms, switched languages in front of foreigners, softened swear words (gosh hecking darn it), spelled words in front of children (“Are your kids allowed to have some C-A-K-E?”), and used creative imagery to hide political dissent. Chinese internet dissidents are especially famous for using puns. For example, they might write 河蟹 héxiè, “river crab,” which sounds like 和谐, héxié, the Mandarin word for “harmony,” but with different tones. “Harmony” itself is a Chinese euphemism for “censorship,” derived from the purported goal of a 2004 internet censorship law to create a “Harmonious Society.”

  The song lyrics that were ubiquitous in status messages of nineties teens on IM grew directly out of an existing youth cultural practice—teens previously sent hidden messages in yearbook quotes, doodled lyrics onto notebook covers or desks where they might be seen by the relevant person, and graffitied passive-aggressive drama anonymously onto bathroom stalls. Parents of young children often use a nickname or initial to post about their child, so that they can get support from fellow parents while not creating a searchable social media trail for a minor who’s not in a position to consent to the sharing of their childish antics. People who already know parent and child can decode the messages, but future employers won’t stumble across a twenty-year-old photo of Candidate McJobSearch as a toddler with their face covered in ice cream.

  The third places of the internet that are so effective at helping fans of knitting or videogames find each other, and the loose ties that are so effective at mobilizing protests against unjust laws or a beloved TV show being canceled are unfortunately just as effective at enabling hate mobs to assemble. In 2015, Reddit banned several of its subforums that had become strongly associated with hate speech. At the time, there was considerable doubt that it would work: Would the hateful commenters simply invade other subreddits and continue their hateful ways? A study that came out in 2017 suggested they would not. At least on Reddit, users who moved to other communities on the same site reduced their hate speech by at least 80 percent. Other accounts simply became inactive, however, and may have moved to other sites where this behavior was still tolerated.

  A German study of hostility in comments on soccer blogs provides a potential reason why the Reddit ban worked. Researchers asked soccer fans to write a comment on a blog post about a controversial soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit—and it didn’t matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts. Thinking about public and semipublic posting on social media sites as third places can provide a way of thinking about the responsibility of a platform to its residents: your local bartenders or baristas don’t generally interfere with your conversations, but they do reserve the right to kick people out if they’re disturbing other patrons, and this makes the space better as a whole. Every human society has figured out norms and systems for managing group behavior most of the time, and internet groups are no different.

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  We’re used to the idea that language changes, at least somewhat. One generation’s new slang is another’s tired cliché. We don’t talk like Shakespeare. And so on. But what’s less apparent is that macro-level conversation norms have changed and will keep changing. Sometimes they change because new technology arises; sometimes the underlying technology is practically unchanged but its social context is different. Telephones changed our greetings, and smartphones changed them again. Business communication spent a whole century getting less ornate, from memos to emails to chat. Posts have a long and complicated relationship with the public sphere. Chat became more intimate and conversational as more people started using it. Videochat may be switching in the opposite direction: becoming more like a third place hangout with the rise of video “chilling” apps like Houseparty, which lets you drop in on a group videochat with whichever of your friends happen to be around. The current configuration of sites that provide us with first and second and third places has changed before and will, in all likelihood, change again, but the appeal of having friends in your pocket is unlikely to go away.

  This chapter, more than any other, is a snapshot of a particular moment in time and how we got that way, not a claim to correctness or immortality. What it is instead is a call to humility. To saying, if conversational norms are always in flux, and different at the same time among different people, let’s not be over-hasty to judge. Let’s ask clarifying questions about what other people mean, rather than rushing to conclusions. Let’s assume that communicative practices which baffle us do have genuine, important meaning for the people who use them. We don’t create truly successful communication by “winning” at conversational norms, whether that’s by convincing someone to omit all periods in text messages for fear of being taken as angry, or to answer all landline telephones after precisely two rings. We create successful communication when all parties help each other win.

  Chapter 7

  Memes and Internet Culture

  When you say “The City,” which city are you referring to?

  This is a great way to start an argument. A lot of people will declare for a few classic regional lodestones: London, New York, San Francisco. People already in those metropolitan areas will explain that, actually, the true city is a more specific historic center like Manhattan or the City of London. A smaller number of people will champion a wide array of local centers of gravity, such as Chicago, Toronto, Winnipeg, Norwich, Detroit, New Orleans, Bristol, Seattle, Vancouver, Oklahoma City, Melbourne, Sydney, and Washington, D.C. When I was growing up in Nova Scotia, everyone knew that “I’m going to the city this weekend” clearly meant you were heading to Halifax. People disagree, but everyone who has an answer is really sure about it.

  This is not just the narcissism of modern urbanites. So clear was it to residents of medieval Constantinople that their city was The City that they eventually renamed it as such—Istanbul is a variant of Middle Greek stambóli, from colloquial Greek s tan Póli, “in the City.” (The same pol as in “acropolis” or at the end of “Constantinople.”) Medina, in Saudi Arabia, means “city” in Arabic, and no less than three places in Andhra Pradesh, a state in India, are named Nagaram, which is “city” in Telugu.

  Even if you don’t have your own The City, even if you throw your hands up and say, “I dunno, whatever city’s closest?” y
ou notice when visitors say your local landmarks and street names wrong. It’s not just that people disagree: after all, you and I presumably also disagree about where “home” is, and this doesn’t lead to arguments. But home is naturally personal—to claim otherwise would be like complaining that your “here” is my “there.” Cities, landmarks, regions—those are personal and also cultural. How we talk about them is a sign of where we belong.

  When it comes to the internet, the question of what truly belongs inside Internet Culture gets people just as passionate as the question of which city is The City. (I have, because I’m fun at parties, verified this through *ahem* extensive personal investigation.) When we write online, we don’t do so in a vacuum. We remix. We foster shared cultural references. We draw lines between insiders who get our references and outsiders who don’t.

  But one thing we know, if we spend more than a minute discussing internet culture, is that it somehow involves a thing called memes.

  The Meme Is Dead

  When Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of memes in 1976, he intended them as an ideological counterpart to genes: like how a gene (such as for brown eyes) spreads through sexual selection and physical fitness, a meme (such as the idea that the earth orbits the sun) spreads through social selection and ideological fitness. He based the word on mimeme, from Ancient Greek μίμημα, “imitated thing,” and shortened it to pair well with “gene.” But Dawkins wasn’t making any sort of pronouncement about internet culture: for all he was concerned, memes might have remained a relatively obscure concept in social science research.

  The extension of “meme” to the internet definition we’re familiar with today was directly related to the question of what should and shouldn’t be a part of internet culture. In 1990, a technologist named Mike Godwin was getting annoyed at how every Usenet discussion seemed to eventually devolve into hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler. (“Someone made an extension to change the word ‘millennials’ to ‘snake people’? That’s censorship! You know who else was a censor?!?!”) Godwin decided to fight back by creating a name for what he was seeing, and trying to make people replicate that idea instead: “I seeded Godwin’s Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it—the counter-meme was reproducing on its own!” A few years later, he described his experiment in an article for Wired, invoking Dawkins’s term to describe what he’d been doing and thereby introducing Wired’s readers to the term “meme” in a specifically internet context.

  “Meme” was seeded just in time for a major cultural rupture. In the early days of Usenet, September was the worst time of the year. It represented an annual influx of new users—students getting internet access for the first time via their universities—who had to be acculturated into proper Netiquette by the beleaguered old-timers. In September 1993, this changed. AOL began sending out internet connection CDs in the mail and thus, according to the book Net.wars, in the space of a single year “unleashed its one million users onto the Net in what was then the largest single block of new users the Net had ever been asked to absorb.” Existing netizens were unable to fully acculturate this influx and were Not Pleased by the results, dubbing the period thereafter Eternal September.

  Although counter-memetics may not have become quite the noble cause Godwin envisioned, the idea of memes—the meme of memes, if you will—certainly did spread and mutate online. A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral. It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture. I might put the idea of the earth orbiting the sun into my own words to spread it in the Dawkins sense, but for it to be an internet meme, I’d need to be one of many people remaking it. Perhaps I’d invent a solar system dance so hilaribad that people around the world would be unable to resist posting videos of themselves doing it, or riff on some crude art labeling all the planets as kinds of Canada (“Canada Major,” “Red Canada,” “Not-a-Single-Lady Canada,” “Canada That Is Totally A Planet,” and so on).* Once you’ve seen a few examples, you have a sense of what they have in common and can try your hand at your own version. When you’re fluent in meme culture, the logical next step is to mash several well-known memes together.

  Weird cultural artifacts spreading through a whole bunch of people deciding to replicate them is older than the internet: in the book Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman points to “Kilroy Was Here” (a graffiti sketch of a big-nosed man looking over a wall that became popular during World War II) as an example of a pre-internet meme. The new part is the connection of the name “meme” with the kind of cultural replication that happens on the internet. All the way back to Godwin’s Law and Eternal September, making and sharing memes is about policing what’s in and what’s out of internet culture. This became difficult as aspects of internet culture changed, especially the relationship between cultural and technical fluency. Like how the first wave of Internet People conflated knowledge of programming jargon and internet slang, the early waves of meme creators felt that there was a link between knowing the technical tools required to make memes and understanding the subcultures in which they fit. They worried that if meme-making became too easy, the culture itself would get diluted.

  One tool for easier meme creation was macros. Although “image macro” has come to be a synonym for “image meme,” a macro started as any short command that you could use to make your computer do a larger task, such as renaming a whole series of files at once. On the forum Something Awful in 2004, a macro made it easier to add an image to a comment. Rather than re-uploading the same image each time, you could just type, for example, [img-blownaway] to summon an image containing “I’m blown away!” in pale turquoise all caps. Using macros to make it easier to post images had an insider/outsider dynamic from the very beginning: according to a history of the forum, its moderator had created the image macro feature to prove a point about how annoying repetitive images were. Instead, people loved them. A further macro came with an even more popular meme: lolcats. People started sharing pictures of blissed-out cats with overlaid text on the anonymous forum 4chan starting in 2005, in a Saturday celebration of cats known as “Caturday,” and the lolcat phenomenon eventually occasioned articles everywhere from academic journals to Time magazine. Like the earlier memes, the first lolcats had their text added manually, using graphics programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Paint.

  As lolcats became popular, so did a second kind of timesaving macro, which would place the text automatically on the base image—much faster than downloading it to a separate program. These meme generator sites promoted a consistent meme aesthetic: the all-caps, black-bordered white Impact font (a brilliant innovation in automatic caption generation because it stands out easily no matter what colors or patterns are behind it).

  Making lolcat generation easier became controversial. Putting text on top of an image had formerly required a certain amount of technical knowledge of photo-editing software. Now, it was easy. Too easy, according to some “insiders.” Technologist Kate Miltner documented this split among two kinds of lolcat fans in the late 2000s. Self-described MemeGeeks had liked the early kind of lolcats on 4chan but had moved on to other memes, like Advice Animals, as lolcats became more popular and easier to create. Self-described Cheezfriends, on the other hand, tended to reside on the site I Can Has Cheezburger and demonstrated their community membership through fluency in the stylized lolspeak itself, rather than technical prowess creating the memes. At peak lolcat, posters on the lolcat forums at I Can Has Cheezburger would type entire messages to each other in lolspeak, and it was easy for them to linguistically tell apart the newbs from the true Cheezfriends, even without any cat images to help.

  Rather than dive into old Cheezburger forum posts, let’s look at the closest thing lolcat has to a peer-reviewed text: a translation of the Bible into lolspeak. It was written collaboratively on a wiki, wi
th multiple authors contributing and voting. I’m going to quote from lolspeak Genesis, which as the beginning of the text received a lot of editing:*

  Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

  Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

  At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

  An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

  An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

  Practically every single word in this excerpt is a reference to something. “Oh hai” is from one lolcat meme. “Teh” is early internet slang. Ceiling Cat is a specific cat in another meme. “Maded” and “eated” are from the “I made you a cookie but I eated it” meme that we saw above. “FURST” is one bit of internet slang, and “!!!1” is another. Not to mention, of course, all the references to the Bible as a source text. But to have a dense set of references explained to you like this is about as much fun as reading the Wikipedia article for a highly technical field that you know nothing about: by the time you click on all the words you don’t know, you’ve lost the thread of why the original topic was interesting. Creating a dense set of references, on the other hand, or just getting them when you see them, is a sheer delight, like meeting a compatriot when you’re far away from home: you get a rush of fellow-feeling simply from swapping familiar landmarks. The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.