I Can Haz Cancel Culture?
How we take back our lives from the internet
I’ve been online almost as long as I’ve been alive, and that is actually still something to brag about because I still had a few years of existing only in physical space. Now, this is not a log of all the times I have shaken my fist at the youth. I think my bragging rights come from the luck of merely being sentient before social media was an expectation. People in my age range can escape accountability based on the fact that we were guinea pigs for experimentation of the early internet. Although there were moderators and admins and a few children-specific gaming sites, there was a collective failing happening slowly and quietly. No one ever set the rules of the internet before the World Wide Web trapped us like the content flies that we are, to be eaten by big media conglomerates empowered by ad revenue.
Nowadays, no one will dare say that the internet is the same as it was in the olden times of forums and one-factor authentication. Many days, change for the internet may seem hopeless when you are scrolling through a comment section or, God forbid, fighting for your life through unwanted virality. I believe in hope and am here to spread some of it. Although other authors, social critics, and internet users have made similar critiques before, this discussion includes new points of internet regionality and context-specific norms.
The Computer Room
Have you ever referenced a video from the 2000s that you thought was universally watched just to be met with confused looks from your adult friends? This is because our virality was different. Even when we had flash games or videos that large swaths of people engaged with, it required physical proximity.
Without social media, you had to either 1) invite a friend over to see the video, 2) be told in-person about the content and how to reach it to then go home and search it up for yourself, or 3) text or email the video to someone you had contact for because you (gasp) knew them in the physical regionality of your life.
It is obvious how international our reach has gotten through social media. However, I don’t know if it is equally obvious how this reach connects to recent shifts in how we engage (or refuse to engage) with each other in person. Even when social media first emerged, it was people you actually knew with whom you could connect. These large LinkedIn-esque networks of like-minded strangers cross-globe were not common. You might know Robert-Joe from Minnesota because he posted on the same obscure forum about Furby repair but even then, we had anonymity to our user profiles. You could know intimate details about Robert-Joe’s life but you would know him as FurbyMaintenanceFiend only. Although the perspectives and experiences on the internet were diverse, they were also shielded from interfering with our physical existence.
Stranger Danger?
Now, the concept of social capital has textbooks worth of theory and specificity to it. However, let’s agree for a minute that social capital refers to the abstract “credit” and benefits we get from knowing one another. In the early Internet, our social capital online was not a line of credit that extended to the physical networks you had. Think of FurbyMaintenanceFiend - he may have been a deity of circuit boards and discussion boards alike, but I promise that no one in his workplace clocking a 9-to-5 would care what kind of magic he could mod into a children’s toy.
In the beginning, we were all peasants, newbs, and obscure weirdos, and we didn’t need comment sections to shame us into having privacy around our internet usage. We were taught stranger danger with the understanding that everyone online was a stranger, including us to others. We didn’t have follower counts, and even our friend list was more equalized - at least until the emergence of the infamous top 8 on Myspace. The social capital that we exchanged with each other was based on shared interest, not content clout. Although those may seem hard to distinguish, I think the clearest example is the move from hobby-centric bonding on the internet to moral-centric bonding. Do I even need to explain further? If so, go read They Can’t Sell You a Conscience from earlier on my page. A number of metrics can mark this shift. I am loosely referring to 2006-2009 as the transitional period where things changed from regional-internet engagement to the Great Boom of connection. In 2006, Myspace was the most visited website in the world, and by 2008, Facebook had taken that crown.
As we have expanded our networks beyond the people we already had attachments and dynamics with, we have reversed the flow of social capital in our lives. Instead of earning social capital through sustained relationships in physical regionality to our lives, we look toward follower counts and other metrics to tell us how much social capital someone’s internet presence should have in our frameworks for our personal lives. Stranger danger has been reversed to influencer worship. That’s not what this rant will be about, but I need the general phenomenon to be acknowledged as a shift: we used to take the internet out to share with the people we knew in real life when we wanted to, or we lived in anonymous bubbles of shared interest. Now, nothing is anonymous, and we take curated internet personalities we’ve never met and use them as barometers of how our physical lives should proceed. What do we buy? What do we care about? How do we talk? How should we interact with each other?
Intermission and Catch-up
Let’s take a brief intermission to talk about social constructs. You know them, use them, and may love or hate them. Some are unavoidable: currency, time, measurements of distance. Some are hotly debated: gender, sexuality, and mental health diagnoses. However, what is standard across all of these is that they are defined by an agreement among those referencing them. They exist because we all agree that they do—at least…when we agree. When I referenced social capital, I gave you the definition I am using because it is a social construct itself, and maybe you never signed the contract of agreement. Hopefully, I haven’t lost you yet.
Follower? I Hardly Know ‘er!
Over history, many social constructs and norms have shifted like tides, leaving marks on the seawalls of our social circles. We all know an older relative with views that we consider “part of their generation,” that perhaps we used to turn the conversation away from with the understanding that they just weren’t with the times. Now, I am not advocating for a lack of accountability for people with harmful behaviors or who have not been educated on the most respectful ways to engage with others. I’m just pointing out that this has been a historical cycle, probably since the beginning of human society. I’m sure we have an early ancestor that someone had to pull aside and teach a new standard, just as we had ancestors who were on the cutting edge. As the stories of history are not unbiased, I don’t believe we have a perfect record of how social norms have changed, but we can see that there have been shifts (hopefully for the better.)
Social constructs, again, exist as a truth based on the agreement of many. Social norms are expected behaviors or behaviors that are considered acceptable and they are typically influenced by the ways that we define social constructs. A quick example of a norm of a construct changing is that prior to the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women could not reliably open their own bank accounts without a husband's approval. This should be one obvious norm that has changed the social construct of gender roles. If you’re just learning this, welcome to the point of education about changes in what we consider acceptable. I could chide you, but I won't, as that is not what my values align with. (However, if you can find me a site where someone has been demeaned for not knowing about it, I will give you a hypothetical Dawson Crown of Evidence to wear as a badge of honor. I believe it exists.)
Although I am trying to keep this discussion light, I would like to provide another example with an obviously far-reaching influence on norms. Although gender roles and beliefs have never been uniform across the globe, in the Western context, colors were not assigned to gender children until the 1800s. Children, regardless of their perceived gender, would be dressed in white dresses. The 1950s spurred the color line of gender, but initially, Christian beliefs pushed blue as a feminine color. The Nazi movement brought a feminization of the color pink. Then, finally, mass textile production and marketing sold us the rest that we are still unworking. Coca-Cola may even be part of the reason that Santa wears a red coat and not a green or white one.
Who Changed the Rules?
Now, in the early internet (the pre-2009 one), moderators and admins were the arbiters of norms and constructs. If you were on a forum and you said something hateful, there was a moderator and a list of guidelines that they could point to in order to kick you off and delete your comments. Think Terms and Agreements but much more straightforward, enforced, and designed to keep people safe instead of selling your data (and soul.) Not only were moderators and admins one the norms of the early internet but we had our own cultural expectations! There was an understanding of GIF usage, memes moved more slowly – some even had their own websites to check for the newest additions – and forum posts had signatures. Posts even showed up in chronological order (what a concept!) Finally, but not exhaustively, language was different and related specifically to the usage of the site: “bump,” for example, would be used to move a popular post up in a feed.
Although there are lightly comparable examples today, they are less connected to the culture of being an internet user of a specific site. They are meant to conquer algorithms. The “five words rule” of TikTok leads people to write comments of over five words to promote a post, even if that phenomenon is not explicitly mentioned in the comment content. You have to know what is happening behind the curtain to be part of the cultural behavior.
The biggest difference is that moderators were just…mostly regular people with separate jobs. Their investment in moderation was that of the investment in a community, not for a paycheck. The rules were dictated by the owner of the forum, not a giant corporation with flexible moral rules and motives. if FurbyMaintenanceFiend had been a veteran on the Furby repair boards for three years, he would be the one who enforced the rules of the posts. The rules were also clearly posted and set prior to joining a community - Reddit still employs this technique.
No wonder why Google is partnering with Reddit to bolster its search accuracy and internet traffic despite Google being cited in the autopsy of forum-based internet. Major search engines are partially to blame for the unfair death of our forums, but that is a discussion for another author. “‘Tis some visitor,” Google muttered, “searching at my engine page.” “Only this and nothing more.”
Often, moderators were nominated or chosen by page runners and veteran users. These moderators, therefore, had social capital based on reputable posting behavior and investment in the group of forum users. This true translation of physical-reality social capital value existed in the small, more private forums, which no longer rule the playground of social media.
Who Left This Digital Anxiety Here?
The problem now, the newest ill, is that we don’t have a rulebook or norms for how you are supposed to behave when your platform could easily be millions of people (even by accident.) There are currently 5.3 billion internet users, with that number geared to increase alongside global population growth and aging.
Picture this, you get invited to a small gathering of your closest friends at one of their homes. Imagine what the night would typically entail. Maybe drinks, chitchat, a movie, a board game, nothing particularly sinister (hopefully.) Now, imagine that as soon as everyone arrives, the host tells you all that you will be live streaming your kick-back to 11 million collective followers between the group. Would that impact your behavior at the hangout? I’d bet my meager life savings that it absolutely would, and I would argue that it should. However, in what ways should it change? The problem is all of the questions that arise. Whose followers? Which platform? What demographics? What shared interest? What is typical content consumption? There’s no guidebook for what the rules on the internet are that are agreed on by everyone, cross-site, and across posters. We are held to other people’s forum rules without knowing it, and unknowingly do the same to others.
Now take this hypothetical and try to internalize that every single post has the possibility to make it to millions upon millions of people - yes, even with privacy settings. Sometimes, even private communication takes only a few clicks to be public to that many people without context. I’m willing to bet that when you log in (or, realistically, just open an app), you are not consciously and explicitly thinking in those terms. If you were, you probably would never post anything or text anyone again. Should we realistically consider this more often?
The hypothetical above probably caught the breath in your throat if you’re not already an influencer. Why? What about the reality of “connection” on social media stirs so much fear and discomfort and sets the ground under our feet to sway? I believe the answer lies not only in the lack of regionality of connection but also in the lack of context-specific norms. We’ve established that there’s no singular playbook. So why not just be yourself? Realistically, some of us are! What’s the problem?
The Fast Track
Society’s constructs and norms are effectively democratically decided one by group think without a formal vote. The majority typically creates the shift. Let’s refresh on the definition: Social constructs exist because people agree that they exist and they agree on what they mean or look like. We used to have clearly delineated norms for internet interactions that were specific to limited groups of people. Now, most of the world, with their varied regional experiences and norms, are on platforms with each other.
So, Dawson, what did the internet do to our social norms and constructs? A lot, very quickly. Now, I think these changes would have occurred on their own, more slowly, without the influence of social media and mega-platforms on the internet. We’ll never really know. Constructs and norms historically changed but relatively slowly or generationally. The Information Age of the Internet was the industrial revolution for social constructs. With all of the world’s information at our fingertips, people can educate themselves and challenge old beliefs more quickly and effectively than almost ever before. I believe that is a positive thing; the world entered a period where each person could shed their cicada-like husks of old views in favor of more ethical, personal, and critical beliefs. In the beginning, they could do this fairly privately, methodologically, and with moderator oversight to reduce harm.
Until social media bloomed. Effectively, we now have each person, even our Uncle Bob, who is just a bit behind the times, on a platform with a loud and easily accessible voice weighing in on every social construct that has ever existed. The group decision making of what social constructs should or could mean is happening more quickly, more harshly, less regionally, and with less attachment than ever before. Instead of Aunt Jinny leveraging her personal relationship with Bob to help him understand what the kids are doing nowadays, it is a social purge. Without moderators, the consequences were initially unseen. Anyone trolling could be taken as seriously as an invested person who was well-intentioned, and there was little to control the fallout. Now, cancel culture has emerged as an attempt to gain back the reins on “platforming” voices about social constructs that are harmful. But it also has collateral consequences. The arbiters are not invested community members with a guidebook and a reputation for caring about the group. Sometimes, Uncle Bob is a wolf in sheep's clothing; sometimes, he’s a sheep that simply needs a herding dog to guide him in the right direction. Now, we take the consequences off the internet and back into physical life’s social capital. You are harmful on the internet so you will lose your job.
Scrolling Past
Again, I am not advocating for a lack of accountability. I’m advocating for awareness across all internet users that the rules of interaction on the internet should be different than those in real life. If you are talking to someone in real life who hasn’t signed the contract for a social construct’s new definition within a specific subculture, let’s work to default to our original norms in person: mutual respect and physical safety.
Every single post on the internet is a ballot for millions of people regarding innumerable constructs, cultural values, perceptions, and invisible experiences that influence our understanding of each other. Speak with humility. Speak as though you know that millions of people could be listening.
Every conversation in person comes with dynamics and attachments. Every conversation exists with social ties and held-over expectations from a pre-internet world. Do your best to remember that you are talking to a handful of people who live in your area and were first your community members before they were your followers. Remember that when the internet goes out or the power grid fails, Uncle Bob might bring you food or let you use his generator.
Start taking back both lives as separate entities as best you can. We should take what we learn on the internet back into our lives and translate it for people. Bond over shared interests on the internet again. Have a private relationship with your media consumption, and let your growth happen before you renovate your life or purge your friends list. Show people the important content again instead of assuming they have seen it. Discuss the material with someone, not just the takeaways and expectations. Get back on the same page. Let what lives on the internet have an influence but don’t be influenced. Let’s come back to both spaces not radical, but refreshed.
