Hawk Tuah Girl, explained by straight dudes

I was talking to a younger friend about this a while back—your Internet presence is increasingly more valuable than your real-life presence. Which is weird and dystopian and I don’t really know how to think about it. But it’s true, and I think people who are like,  I don’t need the Internet , don’t understand the extent to which much of the p

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Lately I have been reading a lot about The Internet and what it’s doing to us. I find it funny, if a little tedious. Because of course there’s no canonical experience of Being Online. Other than being followed around by mystifying ads because you clicked on something or, as they say, “fit a demographic,” there is no “us.” Everyone’s time here is di

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Before the internet demanded our attention 24/7, television, radio, and lifestyle magazines had a very specific grip on the zeitgeist, combing youth culture to determine the next craze. Now, gauging cool is a far more democratic endeavor, and the escalating speed of digital culture means that fads can come and go before they even peak. Mediated thr... See more

outside of superhero movies, there are few major cultural sensations anymore.

Now that internet culture is mainstream culture, virtually anyone can create a trend, but vanishingly few make a career from or even briefly monetize it.

Memes and trends are a record of how users experiment with the affordances of platforms, developing the vibe and brand of online spaces, steering and criticizing the direction of progress. When newspapers put stories about the internet in “tech” and “business” verticals rather than “politics” and “culture” verticals, it’s a symptom of how we’ve fai

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