in defense of the internet culture beat

i promise i'm not just bitter

One of my earliest memories of political consciousness was in 2008, when MySpace and Rock the Vote held a voter registration competition between all the hot bands to galvanize the Youths into civic engagement. 

I was 12 years old and obviously too young to register, but it piqued my interest all the same. Many adults, however, treated the campaign with either dismissive curiosity or performative hand-wringing about the decline of American democracy. 

In 2020, AOC invited the hottest Twitch streamers to play Among Us on her voter registration stream, in an effort to galvanize the Youths into civic engagement. The stream had record viewership, and among many adults, was met with either dismissive curiosity or performative hand-wringing about the decline of American democracy. 

The iteration of internet culture that exists today looks nothing like the version that existed in 2008, but I’m as defensive of it now as I was then. It is incredibly cliché to start a newsletter immediately after being laid off from a media job, and a kind of sick irony that the layoff occurred during one of the most newsworthy weeks in this beat. 

California’s Senate passed SB 764, a landmark bill to protect child influencers and ensure that they receive a portion of their earnings once they turn 18. Nicki Minaj dropped a diss track so bad (she rhymed foot with foot!) that stans revolted in Gag City, removing her from her imaginary seat of power and replacing her with Megan Thee Stallion. Universal Music Group, the corporate behemoth that represents Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, pulled its songs from TikTok after failing to negotiate a licensing deal. In my personal Super Bowl, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Discord, Snap, and X were grilled in an excruciating Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about child safety. Also, everyone trauma dumped on Elmo. Joe Biden got involved. 

It’s devastating that so many other internet culture journalists were laid off at a time when, as my brilliant friend Kelsey said, we need them more than ever. This beat is uniquely collaborative; it can’t be nearly as competitive as other beats are because there are so few journalists covering such a vast space. Everyone is stretched so thin. 

Explaining what internet culture is, much less why it matters, to someone who isn’t chronically online is a herculean effort. How can you defend a subject that doesn’t fit into the neat confines of an SEO category? In the seven years I’ve spent covering this beat, I’ve seen platforms rise and fall, creators get canceled, come back, and get canceled again, and at least two FDA warnings about children ingesting toxic household items for clout. The internet evolves so quickly that the beat shifts just as I figure out how to articulate what it is. 

Internet culture, as a beat, is frequently overlooked as fluff. Talk about it with someone who doesn’t wake up and immediately check Twitter, and they’ll be as condescending as they are bewildered. Although the beat has developed enough for legacy newsrooms to prioritize covering it in recent years, internet culture still can’t shake the connotation that it revolves around whatever trend the Youths are into. 

While it’s true that trends are driven by younger generations who happen to be more present online anyway, Tiktok challenges and other viral stunts are such a small part of this area of coverage. I find myself defending this beat as often as I have to explain it, and pushing against the assumption that stories aren’t worthy of attention just because young people are involved. 

It’s apparent that this beat is increasingly relevant, despite the fact that it’s often undervalued and derided as “Gen Z reporting.” Misinformation is rampant online, which should alarm you — the presidential election is just around the corner. Social platforms continue operating with little regulatory restriction, and the creator industry isn’t stagnating anytime soon. And someone has to explain chronically online discourse to the offlines. 

In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep delivers a brilliant performance known as the “cerulean sweater monologue,” in which she reprimands her assistant for being dismissive of fashion. The color of her assistant’s cerulean sweater, she says, was chosen by runway designers and then imitated by others. She concludes her history lesson with an eviscerating, “Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.”  

I think of internet culture as a cerulean sweater: developed (though less intentionally) in unique spaces online and then distilled and unknowingly adopted by the masses. In 1996, presidential campaigns made headlines just for making websites, and in 2024, the U.S. president’s mentions inadvertently became a platform for voicing opposition to genocide after he quote tweeted Elmo. 

All aspects of internet culture are worthy of coverage, from the political theater of tech CEOs testifying before Congress to the weird little communities that form around hyperspecific interests. The internet, in all of its dazzling, hellish glory, will always shape how we interact with the real world — the boundaries between internet culture and life offline evaporate a little more every day. The influence that it has on every facet of our lives, online or not, is undeniable. 

And isn’t that worth exploring?