Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

It's my first post here, and I'm not sure if this belongs here, in General, or somewhere else. It's also very long-winded, so feel free to skip the earlier parts if you aren't interested in my musings on the history of technology, or just scroll to the bottom for the tl;dr if you want the basic skinny on what I'm aiming for with this thread.

I'm not as big into memes as I was in my teenage years, and my main exposure to them in the last decade has been through my YouTube recommendations and occasional visits here. Nevertheless, I am a heavy habitual Internet user, and a quick learner, so hopefully this little exercise will blossom into something with some help.

I have something of a fascination with the concept or periodization, both within the general context of human history and specific subjects (PC games, Western animation, and comic books, for example). I have in recent years had a tendency to view these as a sort of skeleton around which various cultural and technological phenomenon orbit, and like a skeleton some eras are themselves nested within others.

The history of the Internet is a subject of some interest to me, but which seems to have received scant coverage in either mainstream or non-mainstream channels, although i must admit my research in this regard has not been particularly extensive. For the purposes of this discussion, I primarily want to focus on the English-speaking Internet, as I lack knowledge of the requisite languages to speculate much about, say, Spanish or Chinese Internet history.

The Internet seems to me to embody in many ways the cosmopolitan and globalized nature of the broader culture within which its rise has been situated: while there is a clear predominance of American culture within the English-speaking Internet, (which I imagine is not only a product of America's prominence in geopolitical and economic contexts (as well as its massive population), but also its oft-forgotten by detractors prominence in fields of science and technology, particularly information technology.), the very nature of the Internet tends to enable all but the most parochial of memes to spread like wildfire across national boundaries (and occasionally even language boundaries; I've certainly seen a few Spanish rage comics around back in the day).

I would like, in this thread, to engage in something of an exercise in thought, one of dividing the history of what is perhaps the current historical eras most prominent and transformational invention into distinct periods, while sketching out the details of thse periods and reflecting upon what impact these trends have had in the larger picture. I don't intend this to be fully comprehensive of the broader aspects, but I would at least like to get a reasonably thorough coverage of these impacts within the Internet itself.

In my other exercises in periodization, I have typically started with a "Prehistoric" era, one encompassing history prior to some particular point marked as the "beginning" of a particular phenomenon. The Internet as we know it may be coterminous with the cultural dawn of the 90s, but I think it is only fair to note its predecessors and give them at least some coverage (albeit I don't imagine many here, myself included, would be of the generation to know much of these early periods).

As such, I would define the first era of the Internet as The Pre-Internet Days, encompassing any time prior to sometime in the 1970s (the dates I choose are somewhat tentative, especially as we get further and further back in time and beyond my own personal experience of the eras in question). The Internet is a phenomenon few grasped the possibility, let alone the potential of, although some science fiction authors, whether or not they intended it a serious possibility, did come close. There's a TV Tropes article on that subject that might prove informative: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAlternet

The next era would be The Proto-Internet Days, from sometime in the 1970s to the late 80s. It is my understanding that some prototypical forms of computer networking existed both in professional usage (although that could well date back further than this era, and might blur with the history of other communication mediums like the telegraph) and home use. However, the Internet was very much a niche phenomenon, taken up only by scientists, univesity students, and computer nerds. I don't know if memes had become a thing at this point, but I have heard hacking was very much a thing in this era; look at WarGames for a fictional exposition of such, as well as much of early cyberpunk fiction.

Over time, computers would advance by leaps and bounds and become more of a part of daily life, particularly in the workplace. PC gaming emerged as a niche hobby, no doubt in part spurred by the popularity of tabletop role-playing games and wargames, as well as the fascination of the 80s with fantasy and sword and sorcery (i.e. the Schwarzenegger Conan movie)

In terms of social media, this era would see the early heyday of Usenet, along with prototypical bulletin board systems. However, these would, like home computing and PC gaming in general, be very much a niche phenomenon.

Next would come The Beta internet Days, from the late 80s to 1991. This era would be distinguished by the early stages of the development of the modern World Wide Web; computers would slowly develop into the home PC revolution of the early 90s,

In many ways, this era would be one of transition; I have it seperated here given the significant of the developments to follow.

The next era, which I would tentatively designate Eternal September, occured in the cultural context of the end of the Cold War, ans I would see it as beginning with two major events that would forever change the face of the internet: the release of the World Wide Web to the general public, and the eponymous Eternal September release of Usenet as an AOL feature. I would venture a guess the most ancient of memes to gain traction outside of one community (there ought to be some sort of term for that, actually) would date to this era.

Along with the Internet occured the home PC revolution; this would probably mark the height of Microsoft and Apple's corporate competition in said market. Indeed, it amuses me, reflecting back on my memories of the early 2000's, how quickly the trope of Apple as the quintessential underdog company, the Rebel Alliance to Microsoft's evil Empire, has faded from the public consciousness, as Apple made it big with the iPod and iPhone and is now just another tech giant subject to the same scrutiny as its now-dwarfed competitor.

This era would last until the late 90s: me and my best friend actually once had a brief discussion concerning when we thought the internet became mainstream, with me fronting 1996 or 1997 and eventually settling on the latter. While I would in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner dub this era The Golden Age of Yahoo, I would actually use the Internet's full assimilation into the mainstream and the founding of Google as the beginning events of this epoch, and would definitely consider The Google Explosion ad an alternate name of choice.

I recall someone commenting that Yahoo's basic problem these days (said comment having been made in the early 2010s, but I think it's still valid) is that it is perpetually stuck in 1997, and would remain that way until it went bankrupt. This would be a time in which the Internet's application to education below the tertiary level would become explored, although not to the extent of things like Kahoot in the present era (for a mixture of economic, cultural and technological (particularly bandwirth) reasons.

Usenet would begin to give way to the forum as the main social media (except email, although I wouldn't quite consider that socia lmedia) of this era, it would not surprise me if this process involved a considerable degree of user migration, particularly from the alt communities.

Another aspect of this era was search engine competition; this was the early days of ths search engine as a major force on the internet, and aside from Google and Yahoo there were quite a few alternatives, such as Ask Jeeves. These would later slowly peter out over the course of the 2000s until becoming veritable relics by the dawn of the 2010s (although alternatives to Google seem to have found a niche audience as of late due to privacy concerns, such as DuckDuckGo)

(Splitting at this point because of charlimit and because the later eras are probably more of interest to the folks here)

The next era is the first one I have clear memories of, and as such the first in which my focus primarily shifts to the meme side of things. There were certainly plenty of classic memes in the prior era (the O RLY Owl, and while I'm not sure if counts as a meme per se, Victor Navorre's I Will Survive Alien video), but I would say it is in this next period that memes really came to the fore as a major facet of the Internet's growing culture, and were at their freshed, most prolific and most dominant within the general cultural context of the Internet. As such, I would dub this next period The Golden Age of Memes, and would see it as lasting from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s.

The main events I would see as beginning this era would be the founding of 4chan and YouTube; this would be the heyday of YTP/MV's and the rise of Internet video (including, for a brief non-English reference, sites like NicoNicoDouga, which cross-pollinated with YouTube). Forums would remain the dominant social media, although prototypical forms of modern social media like Facebook did exist (MySpace had its heyday here also, although I don't recall it ever catching on like Facebook did; it seemed to almost exclusively be used by teenagers and musicians).

I look with much appreciation back on this era: not only because memes were at their peak as a medium in my asssessment, but because the Internet was much less fractured and, partly as a precondition to the prior, much less affected by real world cultural and political issues. The mmes of this period may have been irreverent and occasionally veered into serious topics, but almost exclusively in a tongue in cheek way. My main exposure to memes was via YouTube and YTMND, for what it's worth; I've never used 4chan, so I don't know if this lack of polarization and toxicity was a thing there.

Next came the era I see as immediately prior to the current era, The Rage Comic Years. This era is very closely linked with the early 2010s in my mind, and I think it's important to keep in mind the broader context of post-Bush early Obama optimism, although I don't wish to drag this thread into politicized topics. I would see it as almost exactly coterminous with my peception of the early 2010s; from the Obama inauguration until around 2014. There were many changes around that point, one of which I'll be getting into in a minute, and I think, both online and offline, the malaise of the late Obama years played a huge part in it.

This would also mark the rise of modern social media, which previously had been the province of university students (aside from the aforementioned MySpace) and jet-setting corporate jockeys. It is around this point that an underdocumented but extremely important phenomenon occurred, partly as a consequence of this; the Second Eternal September of Meme Culture. This era, I would argue, was in many ways the peak of the mainstreaming of memes, which had been definite computer geek material in the golden age and in this day and age have become steadily more ironic, in-jokey, politicized, and at times outright incomphrehensible.

Which brings me to the current era, The Post-Ironic Era, which I see as encompassing the time from GamerGate to the present. While as mentioned earlier I don't wish to drag this thread too deeply into political areas, it is very difficult to really understand this era unless you can grasp the social and political dynamics that have shaped much of online culture during it. While undoubtedly some of the post-ironic tenor of this era has been shaped by broader cultural trends towards deconstruction and "subverted expectiations" (which, of course, are themselves shaped by larger forces), I think this era, with regards to memes, is best marked as the era of not only post-irony and "dankness", but polarization.

I think there may be something of a backlash forming to this era's increasingly extreme obsession with these themes, but I'm not sure that will necessarily mark the beginning of the next era, which I imagine will be coming in the next few years, if the lengths of prior 21st century internet eras are any indication. I think there's a possibility that the expansion of the Internet across the world will cause an even greater globalization of the Internet, with increased participation from the Second and Third Worlds, be it in memes, social media, or in general Internet things. I have noticed the increasing box office presence of non-Western countries, and China in particular, over the last decade; this has resulted in box office figures significantly increasing in height and breadth over the course of the last decade.

tl;dr I'm interested in coming up with a skeleton for the history and study of the internet (purely a private project of mine, I'm not a professional academic or student), and was hoping for review and contributuons by interested parties).