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When Internet Culture Becomes the Culture

October 2nd, 2024 | 6 min. read

By Austin Gravely

when-internet-culture-becomes-the-culture

Try to define the word “religion”.

If you have a hard time coming up with a good definition, you’re not alone. “Religion” is notoriously difficult to define; philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians all answer the question in a different way. But imagine if I said, “Well, since there is no universally agreed-upon definition of ‘religion’, religion doesn’t exist.” You'd think I'd gone mad even if you weren’t an academic. Religion is everywhere! It may be hard to define, but you know it exists without having to think twice about it.

Now, try to define “internet culture”. Again, if you have a hard time coming up with a definition, that’s okay. Like “religion,” “internet culture” is challenging to define, and like “religion”, it’s definitely real.

The secular world recognizes that internet culture exists, and a new generation of writers and content creators have found immense success by trying to answer the question, “What do we do about it?” In contextualizing events and artifacts of “internet culture” for the masses, writers like Charlie Warzel, Casey Newton, Taylor Lorenz, and Ryan Broderick have created enormous audiences for themselves by taking the weird, niche, and/or dangerous aspects of internet life seriously. Dozens of highly successful YouTubers have followed suit, such as Tiffany Ferguson, Jenny Nicholson, Kurtis Conner, Wendigoon, and Supereyepatchwolf—just to name a few.

Christian thinkers and writers recognize the power of the internet and have been at the forefront of writing about the dangers of smartphone addiction, excessive social media use, and internet pornography. But where secular internet culture writers often approach their topics from a live-from-the-scene-of-the-crime perspective, Christian writers are frequently on the outside looking in. Both perspectives are important, but if we want to seek and save the lost where they are found, we cannot approach internet culture solely from the safety of the sidelines. Someone needs to call an ambulance, like a lifeguard team rescuing a drowning swimmer. Someone needs to be prepared to do CPR, but none of that matters if someone isn’t willing to dive into the water to bring the victim to the surface first.

The Three “Fs” of Internet Culture

 One way scholars study “religion” is to look for common categories that religions share despite their differences. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are all mutually exclusive religions with beliefs that are incompatible with each other. Still, each has a category for “holy texts,” “sacred spaces,” and even a “goal” to work towards. These categories can stand independently and overlap with other religious categories. 

We can take a similar approach to “internet culture”, and the nearly limitless internet sub-cultures. Though far from exhaustive, we can better understand “internet culture(s)” by examining three categories: fraternity, fandom, and fantasy.

Fraternity

American history is replete with fraternal orders—more casually known as “social clubs” or sometimes “secret societies”—that served as important community centers of power alongside churches and schools. Organizations like the Knights of Columbus, Lions Club International, and even the Ku Klux Klan sought to give like-minded Americans a place to belong and work together for a common goal, whether for charity through community service or reinforcing white supremacy. While most of these organizations were originally men-only (hence “fraternity”), parallel orders for women or women-only social clubs, such as sororities on college campuses, also existed. Each of these groups has its rites of initiation, vocabulary, customs, and expectations for how a good member participates in the group.

Discord servers, subreddits, and group messaging apps function as the “fraternal orders” of internet culture. Whether based on fandom, discussed below, or shared occupation, these groups exist to bring like-minded people together in a communal space for a communal purpose. Like any real-world fraternal order, each of these spaces has its initiation rites, vocabulary, customs, and expectations of its members. Of all the various subreddits, Discord servers, and group chats I participate in, no two are alike.

 The cultural impact of fraternal orders is often localized to the towns and regions where a particular order is established. If your town doesn’t have a Freemason lodge or a specific sorority, you’re out of luck unless you want to try to bring these organizations to where you live. internet culture has no such restraints. With 138,000 subreddits[1] and 19 million active Discord servers[2] (not to mention millions of Facebook groups), internet culture allows you to “belong” to as many or as few of these “fraternal orders” as you want when you want and how you want - each exerting their cultural influences and pressures on those who participate in them.

Fandom

This one section alone could be an entire article, and while I was working on this piece, someone was doing just that. Writing at American Reformer, Michael Thomas Jones writes in “The Future of the Church Is Fandom” that “Your future pastors, elders, teachers, church staff, writers, and theologians are not getting their primary theological formation from a seminary . . . They’re getting it, first and foremost, from their peer groups and chosen influences online[1].” 

Jones defines a “fandom” as “a culture developed between enthusiasts of a shared media interest, usually a fictional universe or media creator,” and goes on to list “Harry Potter, Pokémon, Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddie’s, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Homestuck, as well as K-pop and anime fandoms without number” as some of the most influential media fandoms of the past decade. But a fandom doesn’t need to be one of the largest franchises on the planet to influence someone’s life profoundly; personally, the two most influential fandoms in my life would be the Halo and Mobile Suit Gundam fandoms. 

It’s hard to grasp the scale of “fandom” as a concept, but the most important place to start is Fandom.com. A Wikipedia-style website, Fandom.com, with over 350,000 wikis for anime, gaming, film, television, and fiction series/franchises, boasts 40 billion page views a year with more than 350 million users a month—more than three times the size of the print circulation of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal combined. This fact is to say nothing of the digital footprint of Swifties and fandoms for K-pop groups such as BTS. It is not an over-exaggeration to say that fandom isn’t just a significant aspect of internet culture. It’s also a primary driver of all internet activity.

The overlap of fandom and fraternity is where “peer groups” and “chosen influences” collide. In an age of increasing social isolation, the internet is the most frictionless space for finding people who love the same things you do and looking to share that love with others. As James K.A. Smith has said, our beliefs do not primarily shape our behavior. Still, what we love, and the more we participate in cultures based on our loves, the more those cultures change us. If Swifties and Star Wars fans are any indication, what happens in online fandoms rarely stays in online fandoms, and the changes we experience from fandom and internet culture often carry into our everyday lives.

Fantasy

Whenever you see the words “internet” and “fantasy” together, your mind likely thinks of sexual content and internet pornography. It goes without saying sexual content is a significant part of internet culture. But when it comes to “fantasy” and internet culture, thinking solely of pornography is a mistake sexualization, and internet culture goes beyond just internet pornography.

When fandom and fantasy overlap, you get “shipping”, the “desire by fans for two or more people, either real-life celebrities or fictional characters, to be in a relationship, romantic or otherwise[1].” It’s almost impossible to find a fandom that doesn’t include some degree of “shipping”, and which aspiring artists and creators get some experience by bringing these “shipping” relationships to life. The head article image for the “Shipping” wiki on Fandom.com captures this dynamic well, albeit without much of the sexualization typically found in “shipping” content.

Picture1-3

But sexual content, from shipping to pornography, is just one item in the “fantasy” bucket. Fantasies of power, for example, r/maliciouscompliance, where 4.1 million users live vicariously through stories of employees sticking it to their bad bosses by following their orders to absurd lengths. Or fantasies of vindication, such as r/AITAH, where 1.9 million users tell stories of interpersonal conflict in the hopes of being declared “NTA” or “not the asshole”. As well as fantasies of financial riches, r/WallStreetBets during the infamous Gamestop short squeeze of 2021, which made some people rich for life and left hundreds of others destitute, are equally powerful fantasies that drive internet culture alongside our sexual fantasies. For both fantasies driven by desire and those driven by fear, loss, and uncertainty, if you’re captivated by some vision of the future, internet culture can bring you one step closer to turning that vision into reality and offers up hundreds of thousands of spaces filled with people who have the same fantasies too.

The Next Frontier of Discipleship Challenges

In Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, he sternly warns those who think they can shield themselves from television’s impact on culture by not watching television: “Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world where the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.”

Internet culture is, for most people, the most attractive thing to do at any time of the day or night. When the majority of Americans are addicted to smartphones and social media, they are not turning them off. Even if you personally participate little in internet culture, your neighbors are likely being reshaped on internet culture’s terms without even realizing it. Sooner or later, you will encounter the formative effects of internet culture in your life. Are you prepared to share the Gospel, defend the Christian faith, and make mature disciples of Christ against a backdrop of the fraternity, fandom, and fantasy that internet culture provides?

 


[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#:~:text=The%20site's%20content%20is%20divided,posts%20to%20continue%20the%20conversation.

[2] https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/#:~:text=4.,per%20week%20on%20the%20platform.

[3] https://americanreformer.org/2024/07/the-future-of-the-church-is-fandom/

[4] https://shipping.fandom.com/wiki/Shipping 

Austin Gravely

Austin Gravley is the Social Media Manager of The Gospel Coalition. He has a M.A. in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary. Previously he was on staff as an associate youth minister and deacon of social media at Redeemer Christian Church and the Executive Producer of Mending Division Academy for American Values Coalition. He is currently a cohost for the ‘What Would Jesus Tech?’ podcast and working on a book about Digital Babylon. Austin lives with his wife Melissa and newborn son Moses in Amarillo, TX.

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