I've been an Internet user since the mid 90s. Other than the tech itself, my biggest focus has always been Internet culture as a whole, but only to an extent. I saw personal homepages with reused gifs turn into early community websites with niche cultural echochambers for teens, for boaters, for emos, and so on. In parallell to that I saw forum culture lower the bar for small communities to form in a vBulletin/phpBB standardized form. Then blogs exploded and in time turned into a huge economic motor of opinion and marketing. Then Facebook and Twitter came along, quickly followed by Instagram and finally TikTok. The chan quasi-counterculture happened alongside it and since about 2005 legacy media has almost folded to the Internet and is playing catchup ever since. 4chan raids were covered in mass media, Pepe was used to root for the MAGA movement, and terrorists started writing memes on their guns.
I have absolutely lost touch with Internet culture and I am not a part of it, but I also want to understand what's going on. The latest political (?) assassination of Charlie Kirk showed police and reporters try to decipher what is apparently a furry meme from erotic fiction, together with other antique markers like the excellent Bella Ciao anti-fascist folk song.
The biggest takeaway right now is that there are loud, violent and even somewhat influential voices speaking to a majority that has no connection to the language of the Internet. This can lead to mistakes when reporters and opinionmakers try to force events into pre-existing molds such as "anti fascist", "fascist", "racist", "right-wing", "far-left", "transgender",
I stumbled upon the Panic World podcast and their latest episode Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme where the so far quite excellent hosts try to explain how society as a whole and even themselves may not understand what's going on.
I will check them out closer and try to keep up, because something tells me this disconnect will become more and more apparent and likely more important in the coming years.