(Originally Published Elsewhere: February 13th, 2012. I didn’t put any new editing or writing into this, but this is perhaps the one article that I really want to expand upon further, and likely will in the future. I have a few more ideas and some really good research to share that I’ve been sitting on for for some time. I added ONE new embedded video for some added context to a paragraph and ONE link to a JOKE VIDEO for a laugh.
The original post was also cited and linked on the now dead Gawker.com in an article about Goatse by Adrian Chen. I didn’t realize that Gawker doesn’t even exist anymore, so I can’t link to it anymore, but here is the text of the URL: https://gawker.com/5899787/finding-goatse-the-mystery-man-behind-the-most-disturbing-internet-meme-in-history. Adrian was a really nice dude who exchanged some emails with me. You can find him here – https://dispatches.substack.com/)
This image is an internet artifact about Everything/Nothing culture, cam culture, and cam girl culture (YM Magazine, publication information unknown). But, of course, this article only focuses on one aspect of the life style – the openness. I say “of course” here, because at that time it was a rather shocking thing to do – tell potential strangers and “fake” friends about your personal life on the internet. Facebook, however, has transformed that shock into a banal yawn. Nevertheless, this was at one point the moral panic for the parents and friends of a particular set of internet-people. Blogging was barely a thing. There were no content management systems you could just log into and make pretty and use easily. Writing about your life, openly and honestly, for a stranger to read about was a hugely subversive process. Luckily, the internet was at a point in its development where this attracted more like-minded individuals to each other than the serial killers from Lifetime Original Movies.
Liking the internet used to be a mark of shame. Having friends on the internet used to be worse – you could tell no one about it, you had to lie to other people about them, and people were concerned about your attachment to the non-reality of the computer. “My friend said something really funny today” to a meatspace human being would be a clever cover for “My friend updated their LiveJournal with a hilarious story.” Daring to meet that person was also something that required several lies. Why were you traveling to Indiana? How did you know this person? How were you friends with someone in Indiana? It took me years before I was comfortable with telling my parents I had met people off the internet, and that the majority of my now-real-life friends were from there. However, even if you were able to confess that you spent a lot of time on the internet, it was still impossible to admit that you were a blogger, or had a website, a journal, or a cam.
Continue reading Internet Culture – Everything / Nothing
No Internet 