Global Internet Culture

{{msg:soljo}}

This article was originally written in June 2004 for the Syndicate of London Journal.

The internet has been spreading across the world for nigh on 4 decades now. Starting in the USA and spreading to Europe and Canada, and then Asia and Australasia, South America and Africa. There are a few hundred million www sites out there, and every day thousands are spent by the west on sending credit card numbers and pictures of naked women down phone lines. I can log on to IRC any evening and talk to people from Britain, USA, Holland, Germany, Canada and little villages in the south west of Ireland. And they all know English. Communication is important to all of us. We must speak, we must listen, we must hear what people have to say, but not allow anyone to silence another, and the Internet has been a very useful tool for communication. English is the language of choice on the internet. Those 50 emails a day you get asking you to start a bank account for a Sudanese prince, or that pasta causes cancer and the Bible has all the answers; they're never in French are they? There are two good reasons for the predominant language on the internet being English. Firstly, the amount of corporate crap on the internet - shopping, trading and spamming are mainly a product of big US multinationals such as Microsoft (I don't mean Microsoft are spammers... well, you get my point). Secondly, well, some people just like to hide amongst their own kind:

The larger the internet gets, the more inter mingling of cultures takes place, right? Well, not quite. You can go to Google groups and take a look at the archives around the time of Chernobyl and find Brits, Russians, Fins, Greeks, Germans, Japs and Canadians talking about the effects of it. There are logs from Efnet in 1991 of Arabs, Americans, Europeans and Asians discussing the latest news in the gulf. But take a look at IRC nowadays. British teens go to #ukteens and talk about Will Young. Kuwaitis go to #q8 and talk about how their flood bots are going to destroy the west by taking down DALnet (oops, did I say that? - Ed). Fascists go to #stopimigration and talk about how good Pat Buchannen is, while Anarchists stick to #Anarchism, where they don't talk at all. I challenge you to find me someone from Japan on a mainstream IRC network. But is this just a product of an increased internet usage?

When the Chernobyl disaster happened university students and computer developers were logging onto Unix and pre-unix systems to discuss things on News Groups. There were no www dots, no msn and no aol. When the Gulf war broke out journalists and few interested users were logging onto Efnet to pass on the latest news. People started developing emoticons, and abbreviations for newsgroups. People forgot to read netiquette guides. Nowadays people log on to newsgroups to trade pictures of men having sex with goats, people log on to Efnet to packet opers, people log onto aol to say ?LOLOLOL?, people log on to MSN to say ?I <3 U?, and worse of all people go to chat.bbc.co.uk to say ?EYE LIEK EMINEM CHRIS MOYELS IS GAY?. The internet hasn't just been taken over by business, it's been taken over by illiterate 12 year olds!

The development of HTTP and HTML has made it much easier to present a number of different media formats and information in a user friendly interface, and the format grew rapidly in the mid nineties to become one of the most widely used protocols on the internet. Then MSN, AOL and ICQ started developing chat systems. There are now people who sit in front of their Disney world style Windows XP and Disney world style MSN messenger, because ?IRC is too complicated?. HTTP and MSN have made using the internet so simple, that people are no longer willing to learn how to connect to IRC with mIRC. Corporations have exploited people's laziness and stupidity to charge money for chat rooms which are no where near as useful as IRC, and forums which are not as useful news groups.

Rather than an intermingling of cultures taking place, a new set of cultures have developed, unique to the internet, but crossing borders. There is the corporate culture of e-business and affiliate schemes, spam and shopping. There is a culture of retards, unable to type properly, or spending hours each day packeting people. And there?s the other people. The people against the corporate invasion and against the retards.

So, whose to blame for this? While the European continent learns to speak English well, the British and American youth are learning how to type like retards. I know AOL is the easy way out, and they always get the blame for everything, but there?s a very good reason. AOL attracts 12 year olds and encourages them to type like retards. They then put them in a room with 100 other 12 year olds and let them all type like retards. Text messaging. It's convenient to talk like a retard when text messaging because trying to write a long message properly takes ages. The problem only comes when AOLers start to mingle with people who are able to type and hold a conversation. Or when people try to write seriously in the text message language. It's like someone whose learnt Visual Basic trying to code in C, it's never going to happen, they just won't understand the structure of the conversation, and why nobody's talking in all caps or substituting letters for numbers. AOL is the epitome of corporate bollocks on the net, a huge multinational, based in the US for good measure. Swallowing up smaller companies, using loopholes in the law to evade taxes in Europe, and putting rival companies out of business. A symbol of all capitalism's mistakes rivalled only by Microsoft.

How to counter the AOL culture:

1. Delete MSN messenger. Your real life friends who use it may be alright in real life but

they turn into retards when they use it.

2. Use irc.mooircd.org but:

2a. Don't type like an idiot, unless it's obvious satire (see: aol.bx).

2b. Don't claim to be a hacker and then talk about your DoS toys, even if you're ?just testing?.

2c. If an IRC channel claims to be ?leet? avoid it (but beware of irony). If an IRC user, e.g. DjEvil claims to be ?leet? laugh at them.

2d. When people aren?t talking about what you want to talk about, start a new conversation about it.

3. Read DOJ and SOLJO, but ignore idiots like Outbreak Magazine who think Microsoft's monopoly is a good thing.

4. Join BEX, do not join commercial affiliate schemes.

5. Speak English in a manner that both English and Germans can understand what you're trying to say, or don't bother speaking it at all.

6. Have an opinion, be an individual. Find somewhere to express your opinion where other people with opinions can discuss them with you. Become a regular on a news group, or forum such as cotch.net or urban75.net

6a. See 2d.

6b. Keep an open mind in all discussions.

6c. Don't leave your mind so open your brain falls out (-Richard Dawkins).

7. Don't let excess rules stop you having fun! :)

Followups

2004-05-23: Oops, I broke my own affiliates rule by using the Amazon thingy :(