Internet Culture

How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?

An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging

... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

... See more

As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.

Prior to Spotify and Steve Bannon, the collective thinking on pop culture underwent a radical transformation. A new critical consensus demanded that we stop thinking about creativity in a hierarchical way: there was no "high" culture and "low" culture — just culture.

This ideology has become known as "poptimism," although I understand that most crit... See more

we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

Much has been said about memes as art and the collective labor and imagination that goes into their creation, but it extends further than that. It’s not just memes. Creating mood boards on Pinterest or curating aesthetics on TikTok are evolving art forms, too. Constructing an atmosphere, or “vibe,” through images and sounds, is itself a form of sto... See more

The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics. Most of it is considered throwaway trash by casual viewers. Crucially, many of those viewers would be correct: not every social media personality is well-constructed, and not every example is art, in the same way not every movie is... See more

Users also create reaction videos to other videos, showing a selfie shot next to the original clip. Everything is participatory, and the nature of the algorithm makes it so that a video from an unknown account can go as viral as easily as one from a famous account.