Internet Culture Memes

Internet culture — the distinctive styles, references, humor, communities, and practices that developed on the internet, particularly from the early 2000s onward — represents a genuinely new form of human cultural production: participatory, remixable, global, and accelerating. The internet meme (a unit of cultural information that spreads and mutates through imitation, named by Richard Dawkins in 1976 for a different concept) became the fundamental unit of internet communication — images, videos, phrases, or formats that spread virally with variations. Key milestones: 4chan (2003) — anonymous imageboard that generated much of early internet culture (LOLcats, Rickrolling, rage comics, the idea of 'going viral'); Reddit (2005) — organized community-based discussion; YouTube (2005) — democratized video creation (Charlie Bit My Finger, 2007, 900M views; Gangnam Style, 2012, first YouTube video to 1 billion views); Twitter (2006) — real-time commentary culture; TikTok (2016, global launch 2018) — short-form video replacing text and images. The internet has created new folklore: Slender Man (2009, invented fiction that people began believing); QAnon (conspiracy theory as ARG/game that was mistaken for reality); and the 'main character' phenomenon where ordinary people become briefly famous for public behavior.