general History of internet culture

[I used to be a stranger 7,989]

Young people trying to obscure their references from old people made me think of the fact that meme culture has not fundamentally changed very much in 20 years. And the day will come when you and I will probably talk about it with our children and grandchildren.

It's still making puns and jokes based on captioned images posted on forums, imageboards and chats, referencing specific topics in specific people groupings. Which makes me realize the day is coming when someone somehow is going to be cataloging these collections of experiences and telling them to modern people for reference and knowledge. A museum, if you will. Or else, we'll be doing it in person with our succeeding generations.

How do you feel about that?

When I was a child, the internet was some kind of network where you could go to HomestarRunner.com and wait 5 minutes to wait for a 3min Shockwave-Flash animated cartoon to load and play, on dialup internet that tied the home phoneline. Now, I can have an intelligent conversation about this or what a handshake is with a teenager who was born after Youtube was created. My opinion is that that is completely mindblowing: I thought the cultural phenomena I experienced as a teenager were unique and that no one else would ever feel the way I do. But now I see it's not so radical, and that's a good thing.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Blue

[Envy 6,000]

Oh, yeah, my mind is having a hard time comprehending that there are people using forums now that were born after I began joining forums. o.O I just wonder what it would be like to join a forum and see members that had joined forums before you were born. I suppose to them it's nothing significant... But to me, who was a teenager when the internet really began blowing up, and feeling like it was something so special and such a massive luxury to have once it switched over to high-speed, I'm just blown away. I can't imagine being someone who would think of that luxury as something that was always just there.

To join forums and see people who joined before you were born, or see YouTube videos from before you were born, that just... seems weird. These things are still fresh and new in my mind, like they were just introduced, even though they are to today's young ones like color cable television was like to me.

[Olly 1,008]

Older people are just usually slow on the uptake. 

this format of meme, and the phrase, "like a boss" were already years outdated when Wendy's made this ad. Flossing hasn't been trendy in awhile when sonic was doing it in the new sonic movie. Hearing someone say "I thought youtube was just for funny cat videos" is bizarre. In their mind they're thinking of Keyboard Cat, maybe Nyan Cat. Cat videos haven't been on Youtube's front page in a thousand years. 

 

[Luna the Great of all the Russias 2,704]

3 hours ago, Olly said:

Older people are just usually slow on the uptake. 

this format of meme, and the phrase, "like a boss" were already years outdated when Wendy's made this ad. Flossing hasn't been trendy in awhile when sonic was doing it in the new sonic movie. Hearing someone say "I thought youtube was just for funny cat videos" is bizarre. In their mind they're thinking of Keyboard Cat, maybe Nyan Cat. Cat videos haven't been on Youtube's front page in a thousand years. 

 

Ah yes. The advice animal and rage comics genre died as a whole by about the early 2010s (I think they were losing relevancy by around 2013).

Would "press F to pay respects" be considered to be the longest lasting one? Advance Warfare was released almost six years ago and is still being used today.

Edited March 17, 2020 by Luna the Great of all the Russias

[Olly 1,008]

6 minutes ago, Luna the Great of all the Russias said:

Would "press F to pay respects" be considered to be the longest lasting one? Advance Warfare was released almost six years ago and is still being used today.

It's possible term-based memes like that one have greater longevity, they could transcend being a meme and just become a common expression.

[Odyssey 5,713]

Is it bad to prefer older memes? Because I cannot stand new ones, and the rise of ironic culture. I feel a lot of humour on the internet these days comes from spite. You see people being "ironic fans" of anime, games, or anything else niche. And beyond that, there's also mocking of older memes by using old formats. Memes now are abused as a mouthpiece, instead of something that everyone can celebrate. A lot of memes these days also come from having something for people to relate to, which I find annoying because it's such an easy thing to do. Oh sure, I can see the appeal, but memes were never originally meant to be like that. It's the rise of social media that has changed what memes meant, and quality became quantity.

On 3/16/2020 at 8:10 AM, Blue said:

It's still making puns and jokes based on captioned images posted on forums, imageboards and chats, referencing specific topics in specific people groupings. Which makes me realize the day is coming when someone somehow is going to be cataloging these collections of experiences and telling them to modern people for reference and knowledge.

On 3/16/2020 at 8:10 AM, Blue said:

I thought the cultural phenomena I experienced as a teenager were unique and that no one else would ever feel the way I do. But now I see it's not so radical, and that's a good thing.

Why are these bad things?

Memes back in the mid 2000s were based on inside jokes; because it is something that can be shared among a niche group that can understand the punchline. But it has now shifted to the general crowd, because many of them don't really understand what these jokes meant, and in turn, they interject by turning memes to statements that they can relate to. That crowd just demonizes old memes, as if they were never funny in the first place, even though the internet was much, much smaller 10 years ago. For how much people whine about old memes, they sure love to not let go of their new ones, or treat memes like one giant trend where one new one stopped being funny a week ago.

I unironically would rather have more pun memes over the thousands now that are about sex or drugs. :\

[I used to be a stranger 7,989]

7 minutes ago, Odyssey said:

Why are these bad things?

I don't mean to imply there's anything bad about contemporary meme culture (circa 2020), I'm merely remarking how similar albeit different it is now compared to then.