Spending time on the internet can sometimes feel like navigating a treacherous sea full of shipwrecks and jagged rocks. For many of us, the online world is real life, just as much as our 3D interactions are, but that doesn’t mean navigating web culture is simple. Offline norms have taken millennia to develop, but we’ve had just a few decades to get used to living with the internet. So, if you truly want to “get” online culture in 2015, here are the five concepts you need to know.

Anti-virality and the Kool-Aid Point

You could have set your watch by it: as soon as articles praising the Serial podcast (“the most ambitious narrative non-fiction ever”) began to appear, a vacuum was created. This vacuum was swiftly filled by articles decrying the podcast (“a very popular version of cultural tourism and white privilege”).



Welcome to anti-virality. This is the idea that everything that goes viral will also create a backlash, as the popularity of the original phenomenon also creates a market for those who wish to debunk or demur from the tide of prevailing opinion. (In extreme cases, this can lead to Kneejerk Contrarianism, also known as Brendan O’Neill’s Disease. Please give generously, because more than a dozen Spiked contributors succumb to this tragic illness every year.)

For women on the internet, anti-virality can manifest as The Kool-Aid Point, a phrase popularised by blogger Kathy Sierra, who was driven off the internet by death threats. If a woman reaches the Kool-Aid Point, it means she has become so popular that some people become obsessed with “exposing” her as the charlatan she surely is – they want to stop others “drinking the Kool-Aid”. Alongside Sierra, another classic example is video games commentator Anita Sarkeesian, whose decision to crowdfund a feminist video series still causes burst blood vessels among angry basement-dwellers to this day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Women – beware of the Kool-Aid Point. Photograph: Robert Caplin/Bloomberg News

Civil inattention

In the 1950s, sociologist Erving Goffman described what happened to humans who live in cities. “When in a public place, one is supposed to keep one’s nose out of other people’s activity and go about one’s own business,” he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. “It is only when a woman drops a package, or when a fellow motorist gets stalled in the middle of the road, or when a baby left alone in a carriage begins to scream, that middle-class people feel it is all right to break down momentarily the walls which effectively insulate them.” Dara Ó Briain picked up this idea in a standup routine in which he dared people to get into a lift last, and then, instead of facing the door, turn and face the other occupants. It would be truly chilling.



Civil inattention happens all the time in everyday life, unless you’re the kind of a weirdo who joins in other people’s conversations on the train. But we haven’t got the grip of it in the “public squares” of the internet, like social media platforms and comment sections. No one knows who is really talking to whom, and – surprise! – a conversation between anything from two to 2,000 people can feel disorienting and cacophonous. There have been various attempts to combat it – Twitter’s “at sign”, Facebook’s name-tagging, threaded comments – but nothing has yet replicated the streamlined simplicity of real life, where we all just know there is NO TALKING AT THE URINAL.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Is it any business of yours? Photograph: Alamy

Conservative neutrality

We live in a world ruled by algorithms: that’s how Netflix knows what you want to watch, how Amazon knows what you want to read and how the Waitrose website knows what biscuits to put in the “before you go” Gauntlet of Treats before you’re allowed to check out. The suggestion is that these algorithms are apolitical and objective, unlike humans, with their petty biases and ingrained prejudices. Unfortunately, as the early computer proverb had it, “garbage in, garbage out”. Any algorithm created in a society where many people are sexist, racist or homophobic won’t magically be free of those things.



Google’s autocomplete is a classic example: try typing “Women are ...” or “Asians are ...” and recoil from the glimpse into our collective subconscious. Christian Rudder’s book Dataclysm discusses how autocomplete might reaffirm prejudices, not merely reflect them: “It’s the site acting not as Big Brother, but as Older Brother, giving you mental cigarettes.” Remember this the next time a tech company plaintively insists that it doesn’t want to take a political stance: on the net, “neutral” often means “reinforces the status quo”.

Context collapse

The problem of communicating online is that, no matter what your intended audience is, your actual audience is everyone. The researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick put it like this: “We may understand that the Twitter or Facebook audience is potentially limitless, but we often act as if it were bounded.”



So, that tasteless joke your best Facebook friend will definitely get? Not so funny when it ends up on a BuzzFeed round-up of The Year’s Biggest Bigots and you get fired. That dating profile where you described yourself as “like Casanova, only with a degree in computing”? Not so winsome when it lands you on Shit I’ve Seen On Tinder and no one believes that you were being sarcastic. On a more serious level, context collapse is behind some “trolling” prosecutions: is it really the role of the state to prosecute people for saying offensive, unpleasant things about news stories in front of other people who have freely chosen to be their friends on Facebook? I don’t think so.

What is happening here is that we are turning everyone into politicians (the horror). We are demanding that everyone should speak the same way, present the same face, in all situations, on pain of being called a hypocrite. But real life doesn’t work like this: you don’t talk the same way to your boss as you do to your boyfriend. (Unless your boss is your boyfriend, in which case I probably don’t need to give you any stern talks on the difficulties of negotiating tricky social situations.) To boil this down, 2015 needs to be the year we reclaim “being two-faced” and “talking behind people’s backs”. These are good things.

Performative piety

What’s Kony up to these days? Did anyone bring back our girls? Yes, surprisingly enough, the crimes of guerrilla groups in Uganda and Nigeria have not been avenged by hashtag activism. The internet is great for what feminists once called “consciousness raising” – after all, it’s a medium in which attention is a currency – but it is largely useless when it comes to the hard, unglamorous work of Actually Sorting Shit Out.

The internet encourages us all into performative piety. People spend time online not just chatting or arguing, but also playing the part of the person they want others to see them as. Anyone who has run a news organisation will tell you that some stories are shared like crazy on social media, but barely read. Leader columns in newspapers used to show the same pattern: research showed that people liked to read a paper with a leader column in it – they just didn’t actually want to read the column.

So, next time you’re online and everyone else seems to be acting like a cross between Mother Teresa and Angelina Jolie, relax. They might leave comments saying “WHAT ABOUT SYRIA?” but they have, in fact, clicked on a piece about a milk carton that looks like a penis. As ever, actions speak louder than words.

• This article was amended on 1 January 2015 to correct the spelling of Mother Teresa’s name.

