CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 55Cultural Studies and PostmodernismMedia and Digital CommunicationSocial Media and Politics

Teh Internet Is Serious Business

de Zeeuw, Daniël, Tuters, Marc·2020·Cultural Politics
DOI 10.1215/17432197-8233406
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

At the fringes of an increasingly hegemonic platform economy, there exists another web of anonymous forums and image boards whose unique “mask culture” the article aims to deconstruct by tracing its roots in the cyber-separationist imaginary of early internet culture, in a way that can be seen to undermine the new “face culture” of social media platforms like Facebook. The practices that characterize this “deep vernacular web” are anti- and impersonal rather than personal, ephemeral and aleatory rather than persistent and predictable, collective rather than individual, stranger-rather than friend-oriented, and radically public and contagious rather than privatized, filtered, and contained. Characterized by its ephemerality and anonymity, and preoccupied with dissimulative identity play, memes, and trolling, the set of subcultural attitudes that characterizes this part of the web can be summarized by the ironic and intentionally misspelled phrase “Teh internet is serious business.” By exploring the vernacular significance of this saying and how it can be seen to articulate an oppositional attitude to the currently hegemonic platform culture, this article simultaneously aims to contribute to contemporary debates on the reactionary turn in internet culture associated with the global rise of the alt-right.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1215/17432197-8233406

Cites

80 of 80 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • This process can be explained via normiefication and normalisation enabled by technological affordances, and the convergence of fringe misogynistic beliefs and widespread sexism.

    “We suggest that this process can be explained via normiefication (de Zeeuw et al., 2020) and normalisation enabled by technological affordances, and the convergence of fringe misogynistic beliefs and widespread sexism.”

    From Mainstreaming the Blackpill: Understanding the Incel Community on TikTok (2023) · cites this paper as de Zeeuw et al., 2020

  • These same tools are essential for the process of normiefication.

    “We argue that these same tools are essential for the process of normiefication (de Zeeuw et al., 2020).”

    From Mainstreaming the Blackpill: Understanding the Incel Community on TikTok (2023) · cites this paper as de Zeeuw et al., 2020

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 81 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
de Zeeuw, D., & Tuters, M.
ORCID
Tuters, Marc
Venue
Cultural Politics
Publisher
Duke University Press
Published
2020-07-01
Volume
16
Issue
2
Pages
214-232
ISSN
  • 1743-2197 (ISSN-L)
  • 1751-7435
DOI
10.1215/17432197-8233406
OpenAlex
W3039641262
Cited by
55
References
81
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 1
FWCI
10.17
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Cultural Politics an International Journal (publishedVersion)
  • UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (submittedVersion)
  • Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Cultural Studies and Postmodernism
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
Keywords
deep web, face culture, social networking sites, platform economy, online subcultures, trolling, memes, identity play, transience, alt-right, internet culture

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review