Critical Internet Literacies: Reconsidering Creativity, Content, and Safety Online

We are always online and the culture we interact with online is our culture. On a global scale, new economies have emerged that shape markets and brands have shifted to their techniques to attract new and unique consumers, and in general, our interactions with one another are guided by the overlapping of our off-platform and electronic lives. This chapter delves into the dangerous TikTok trend “Devious Licks” and the “Slap a Teacher” challenge hoax, a month-long event that combines all facets of the internet in its current form. This establishing chapter helps us see how critical internet literacies increase our ability to discuss cultural shifts and safety. In just one event, we may see how teen anxieties and peer pressure mix with digital cultures, fear of missing out, and media spectacle and moral panic. Under the surface of the event are structural issues at play like algorithmic boosting, digital trends, misinformation, and wasted resources.

Sections:

• A Call for Internet Literacies

• Caught in the Machine: The “Slap a Teacher” Challenge Hoax

• The Internet, The Content, and The Creators in the 2020s: An Overview

• Extending Critical Media Literacies to Internet Literacies

• A Reverse Analysis of a Hoax

Digital cultures are affinity groups online that emerge from the digital environments and contain their own political economy, history, lore, expression of identity (through media), and maintain and police their own ethical and moral boundaries among their participants. In this chapter, we consider digital cultures to be the building blocks of internet culture at large. Digital cultures are representative of their members, but also must be willing to mature, include more people, and attempt at inclusion rather than exclusion as culture inevitably shifts. Digital cultures can be based on fandoms, collective movements, political ideologies, autonomous zones of expression within a platform, creative misuse of technologies, and collaborative creator movements, to name a few. Through a variety of examples, from 4chan to Black Twitter, we explore how digital cultures create internet culture and we later meet the journalists who work to help the public understand these spaces.

Sections:

• From Digital Culture to Internet Culture

  • Early Cultural Developments

  • “The New Home of the Mind”

• Early Critical Work on Digital and Internet Culture

• Social Media’s First Success was Community (BlackPlanet)

• Some Origins of the Problematic Web

  • The Long-Lasting Spectacle of 4chan

• A Collective of Mistrust and Missed Opportunities

• Creator Cultures, Communication, and Commodification

• The 2000s: Hype, New Media, Participatory Culture

• The Mobile Web and Atomization of Culture

• Anonymity for the Rest of Us: Tumblr, Teens, and Memes

• Digital Cultures of Conspiracy

• Black Twitter and Digital Migration

• The Rise of the Internet Culture Beat

According to Goldman Sachs, the “creator economy” is valued at $250 billion and will potentially reach half a trillion by 2028 and Oxford Economics claims YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed over $35 billion to the U.S. GDP and supports more than 390K full-time equivalent U.S. jobs. It’s no wonder that private equity is interest in this form of entertainment; unlike television or traditional media systems, the consumer data acquired through platform advertising, influencer endorsement deals, or subscriptions are so granular that profit seems inevitable. On the other hand, the creator economy is built on under-compensated labor, making all participants part of a precarious job market beholden to the whims of the platforms. This chapter primarily focuses on YouTube, its origin, growth, and existence, as representative of Silicon Valley’s overt role in the creator economy and while US use is second to India’s, it represents the cultural hegemony of the platform, the Forbes list of top earners on YouTube feature nearly all white men from the United States. This chapter is deep dive into creator media, through its historical underpinnings through the contemporary spaces of TikTok.

Sections:

• The Creator Economy and the Hyper-Niche

• The Beastification of YouTube

• Delineating Between Content versus Creator Media

• Early Foundations of the Creator Economy

  • Broadcast Yourself

  • The rise of the internet personality

  • The Foundational Video Codes of Creator Content

  • Web Television and the Mis-Adventures of an Awkward Black Girl

• The Soft Power of the Influencer

• Multichannel Networks: A Missed Opportunity

• “If you do it right you get to quit the day job”

• Algorithmic Normalization

  • The Populism Playbook

• TikTok Invents a New Creator

  • The TikTokification of Everyday Life

• Influencer Creep

• Changing Minds Through the Creator Economy

Memes are cultural surplus. Memes are decadent. And most memes are artifacts rather than canonical cultural material. They are built to represent an era of digital culture rather than act as long term cultural value, as they are cheap, fast, and disposable, losing their cultural value rapidly. The evolution of memes, from the aughts to the present, represent a medium of internet culture and today’s memes, challenges, trends, and content would not exist without our earliest examples. Some matter, some don’t, but our awareness of the cultural moment helps us read the present-day expressions of memetic tendencies. Using Limor Shifman’s definition of digital meme as our baseline: “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” we’ll dissect a series of memes and their cultural impact, especially memes that embed kinetic energy in the form of emotional content. This chapter focuses on digital memes from their origins through their aesthetic present.

Sections:

• Where’s your head at? The Roman Empire and Lobotomy Memes

• We Live in a Derivative World

• Usable Meme Literacies: The Doge Meme

  • How a Timeless Meme is Created

• Reading Metatext: Dead Plants, Ugly Shoes, Odd Flags, and Armed Militias

• Meme Codification: From Meaning to Performance, The “Karen” meme

• Decoding or Debunking Pepe the Frog’s Meme Magick

• The Feels Guy: The Everlasting Wojak

• From 4chanification to Fashwave: Rebranding Memes

  • On Cope, Meme Weaponization, and Dark Brandon

• Reading Memes in the 2020s

In our hypermediated present, the off-chance danger of getting radicalized is no longer confined to the internet’s information flows. Rabbit holes of conspiracies, reactionary ideologies, and harmful beliefs may now appear outside their formative sources, emerging in news reports about novel curiosities of the digital world or delivered through friends who “heard it on tv.” Most stories about internet phenomena are cute and engaging, but there are dangers that take aim at a public who generally lack the internet literacies to steel themselves from engaging with the material in a critical or skeptical manner. Over the last several years, there has been a normalization of extremist and harmful ideologies on the internet due to the long, and unfortunate, so-called “4chanification of the internet.” This chapter focuses on several case studies of mainstream media (even alternative mainstreams) laundering internet-based, encoded content directly to uncritical audiences. These examples represent an outgrowth of marketplaces that merge both the creator economy’s worst assets (like grifting, merch, and manipulative media) and the memetic flows of reductionist concepts that veil harmful origins.

Sections:

• Detecting and Decoding Uplifted Content

• Hoaxes, Challenges, and Viral Moments on TV

• Trad Wives: Encoding Multiple Layers of the Darker Internet

  • Excavating the Roots of the Tradwife Reactionary

  • Save the Children (Qanon)

• The Just Joking Paradox

• Memetic to Kinetic: Mainstream as a Tool

• Joe Rogan: The New Mainstream Uplift

  • Joe Rogan and Gamified Antisemitism

• Why it Matters: Media Manipulation as a Tactic

• Uplift Will Soon Be Unnecessary

Over the past several years, there have been dozens of awareness media projects that cover internet literacies and digital ephemera, produced to enlighten audiences to the quirks, the horrors, the trends, the careers, and the dynamic of power and control and nearly all popular projects aim to help the audience feel empowered to make change and increase control of the space beyond the screen. We also must be critical of these projects, as they are produced within the structural parameters of their distribution – meaning the producers, directors, and studios hope to return their investment through views, subscriptions, advertising, and especially growth. We hope these projects incorporate critiques of their subjects in terms of race, identity, class, access, and vulnerable people and they attempt to avoid platitudes, prospects of doom, or cherry-picked evidence to support their claims. This chapter presents a critique of Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma, the most popular piece of awareness media on the subject and pushes back against the moral panics that the film inspires. Further, this chapter provides an “Awareness Media Syllabus” with a collection of projects to help educators with the subject.

Sections:

• The Sky is Falling Dilemma (Moral Panics)

  • The 25-35-Year-Old-White-Guys in a Room Dilemma

• The Awareness Media Syllabus

  • Critical Internet Literacies Syllabus

We use an internet both moderated and filtered for our experience and this chapter looks at the human labor necessary to moderate our internet, the difficulty of managing harms, and how influencers bad actors are shaping off-platform issues. Moderators do a thankless job, damaging their mental health for the sake of user experience and many of these people come from the Global South, outsourced by companies like Meta or Alphabet, sitting in dark rooms with hoods around their computer monitors, watching content filled with horror, eliminating some, flagging others, striking user accounts, and outright banning some others. In this exploration, we’ll see how difficult it is to mitigate harms and categorize creator media safely. This chapter also introduces Mike Masnick’s “Moderation Game,” an interactive experience to teach how to read online media in a more nuanced way, looking at internet ephemera from a safety standpoint. This chapter also goes into the reactionary language “algospeak,” developed to resist automated content moderation systems. 

Sections:

• The Human Cost of a Better Experience

  • The Borderlands of Harm

• The Moderation Game (Moderator Mayhem)

• Reconsidering Slow Harms

  • When Harms are Systemic

• Toxic Masculinity

  • Public Misogyny: Mewing and Acting Out

• Fighting the Robots: Algospeak

As the web evolves to graphical representation and visual languages, keeping up with accessibility is an increasing concern. Hopefully accessibility is a division or service at a company, but accessible websites continue to be a problem on sites for higher education or compliance in healthcare sites where the necessary information may be buried several pages deep. According to the Center for Disease Control in the United States, up to 27% of US citizens have some type of disability, and the most common disability is regarding cognition (12.8%). Globally, over 15% of the world’s population, or around 1 billion people, live with disabilities. The internet, a space of visual ephemera, coded messages, memes, and videos, is an overwhelmingly inaccessible space for many people and only about 3% of the entire internet is considered accessible, meaning over 95% of all sites do not have proper visual contrast settings, proper alt-text for images, broken links, and non-operational buttons. This chapter focuses on ways to make the web more accessible while also exploring how “access” itself is a large concern for making an internet usable for all.

Sections:

• Making the Internet Usable for All

  • Global Access and Digital Literacies

  • Free Access is Never Free

• Digital Literacies and Making Creative Work Accessible

  • Accessibility for Creative Work

• Critical Issues with Alt-Text

• Making Internet Media Accessible

• New Users, New Opportunities for Internet Literacies

Journalist Taylor Lorenz writes in her conclusion of Extremely Online, that “Online creators don’t just produce content; they define the norms and dynamics of their medium.” This sentiment is echoed in this conclusion as well. The internet we use and the content we consume are made by the creators that develop it and nearly all are not compensated appropriately for their labor and while bad actors, grifters, and scammers have figured out ways to manipulate these spaces, enriching themselves over the benefit of the whole, the majority of creators are just trying to make the internet a more beautiful place for fun and joy. It is our obligation and responsibility to treat the internet seriously even when it’s content resists categorization and easy models of interpretation. This chapter also features a list of responsible creators and inspiring projects.

Sections:

• Creators Make Content and Build Communities

• Resilient Creators