 Internet Culture:
for the lulz?
Tallulah Habib
Internet Culture may be entertaining and widespread, but it is more free and democratic than other
popular culture.
Recently, South Africa experienced its first-ever Internet meme. It was a grand moment for us. Despite the majority of the nation not knowing what a “meme” was, they all knew about “Don't touch me on my studio” - the comment made as AWB Secretary General André Visagie threatened a presenter on etv news.
An internet meme is any concept that spreads quickly via the internet – cats with captions, embarrassing pictures lablled “fail”, or even a saying such as “don't touch me on my studio”. They form a vital part of internet culture, and cannot be owned or controlled.
 The original word “meme” has its roots in sociology. It’s a term for a unit of culture that is transmitted from person to person through mimicry, binding us together. In the real world we are surrounded by them – every time you use an old saying (“it's raining cats and dogs!”), a nursery rhyme (“I feel like Humpty Dumpty”), or hum an old tune (Greensleeves), you are spreading a meme. It is part of our evolution, it is part of what makes us us. And... it is also part of what makes the internet what it is.
Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, the internet was a society open to a select few, mostly nerds or geeks. As they spent a lot of time chatting to each other, they became a society and thus developed their own culture – Internet Culture. As the web grew and more people began to gain access, the society grew and so did the culture, becoming richer, developing memes and even its own language. Words like “lol” acquired their own meaning (no longer translated directly from the English “laugh out loud” it was based on, but now meant as a sign of slight amusement), and memes like the “lolcat” were so widespread that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who uses the internet who has not seen a picture of a cat with an amusing caption.
The Cheezburger Network is a lucrative network of sites based on memes that was started with a collection of lolcats called icanhascheezburger.com. The Cheezburger Network CEO, Ben Huh, was recently interviewed by Mashable.com. During the interview, Huh emphasised that Internet Culture functions very differently from Popular Culture.
The difference, he says, is that Pop Culture is very top-down. Celebrities and studios make the decisions on what will be popular. Internet Culture, on the other hand, develops organically out of the minds of millions of people who take original artefacts and re-mix them.
“Because we're used to a world where pop culture is top-down-driven and someone has ownership, people sometimes try to put the same framework on Internet Culture,” says Huh, “and the moment you decide that that is yours, you actually start to restrict the creativity."
It is the same argument that is made by law professor, Lawrence Lessig, one of the people behind the Creative Commons movement. The internet, according to Lessig, has an ethos of sharing and community, embodied in the culture of what he calls “remix”, essentially, in memes.
The implication is that every person online has the ability to become part of the culture, to add to it and to change it. If this is so, the internet is the only completely democratic place in the world. A big problem with this idea is that up until very recently, the population of the internet has consisted almost entirely of the citizens of First World countries. With Seacom and other such projects, the net is becoming more accessible to more people. South Africa producing a meme is possibly a bigger step than most of us realise.
|
