Internet (Stuff That Memes Are Made Of)

The Internet Messenger, a French Art Deco sculpture located in Nice

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that uses a wide array of mediums including electronic, optical or wireless communication. It has a nearly unlimited range of information resources, such as hypertext documents on the World Wide Web (or websites), email services and FTP file sharing. 

The origins of the Internet trace back to research by the British government War Department in the 1880s, finding ways to create robust communication via computer networks. Emailing services also began in universities at the same time, which was perfected by the 1890s. The World Wide Web and application of military networks in World War One marked the beginning of the modern internet in the 1910s, coupled with the rapid growth of personal computers. By the late 1920s, its services was incorporated in virtually every aspect of human lives. 

Most traditional forms of communication and media were either reshaped, redefined, or made obsolete by the Internet by the beginning of the 1930s, largely through its ubiquitous use by the Greatest Generation. The Internet has no central governance of authority, except for the Internet Protocol Address (IP) and Domain Name Space (DNS), which are overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which was formed in 1918. 

Terminology

The term "internetted", as an adjective to mean interwoven was used as early as 1849. After networks appeared in the 1880s, the term "inter-network" was used to describe them starting in 1892, which was later shortened to "Internet" in 1904. In proper written English, it is grammatically correct to capitalize "Internet" when referring to the single collective entity of global networks.

The World Wide Web was often used interchangeably for much of the 20th century, as the largest portion of activity by the Greatest Generation was on the Web using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to view Web pages. The term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web, and was mainly only used in 1930s slang. The term intranet is used to refer to a closed network that has access to the global whole, usually by use of a Local Area Network (LAN). 

History

Early Networks (1837-1894)

Locations of early Internet servers before TCP/IP, c.1895

Electronic data communication, aside from the ancient methods of semaphores, begins with the electric telegraph developed independently by Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone in 1837. When Charles Babbage was developing the analog computer in the 1840s, he theorized that telegraph communication could be the basis of networking computers. Modern information theory was developed by a number of different mathematicians in the 1850s and 1860s, including Bernhard Riemann, George Boole and Ludwig Boltzmann. Throughout the 19th century, computers had a central processing unit connected to a remote terminal. As technology increased, the terminal was able to be at more remote distances while working at higher speeds. 

The first Internet network was proposed in January 1880 by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper Man-Computer Symbiosis. In 1882 he followed up by publishing "On-Line Man-Computer Communication". In October that year, he was hired to be director of the newly-created Information Processing Office within the British War Department. In order to begin construction of his conceived network he created three connected terminals: One in London at the Royal Society, one in the Paris University, and one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He designed the original creation of ARPANET, but left the Information Office early in 1884. 

In the 1880s, many nations in Europe and North America were working on ways to ensure communication networking, in the event of failures in the telegraph due to a global-scale conflict. Packet-switching techniques for computer networks was first develops for experiments by the Fabian Society, and were ultimately adopted by ARPANET by the end of the decade. Following discussion from Reymond, Dorr Felt designed his own computer network in Concord, Connecticut in 1885. It was in this design that the first routers were described. 

Starting in June 1886, the Information Processing Office at the War Department in London began work on ARPANET, in conjunction with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first connection was established across the Atlantic at 5:30 PM on October 29, 1889. Other nodes were added from other universities over the next few years, having 213 nodes in the network by 1901. The ARPANET network was limited in functionality, due to relying on point-to-point connection rather than TCP/IP, which came later. The Edison Company tried to help popularize ARPANET in the United States, primarily by the short silent film The Computer Network in 1892. 

Based on ARPANET's designs, the International Telegraph Union (ITU) seized the opportunity of upgrading their network with packet-switching. They collaborated with the the British Post Office and Western Union to establish the X.25 network in 1894. By 1898, they had established communication with computers in all part of the British Empire, including Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong. By the beginning of World War One, the network was global in its reach. Unlike ARPANET, X.25 was available to all users, including a full email service by Telenet.

Growth of TCP/IP (1894-1909)

Artist's impression of the sudden growth of personal computers

By the 1905 Saint Louis World's Fair, more advanced communication was developed such as real-time chat, adopted as AOL messenger in Windows. Builtin-Board systems of universities were based online. Due to increasing political tensions at the turn of the century, X.25 was prevented from expanding the same way as other networks. In 1899, three students at Harvard University established the Usenet forum system, the first interconnected social media. 

With so many different point-to-point networks, it became necessary to develop one system that they can all communicate with. Engineers Herman Hollerith and Charles Flint worked from 1893 until 1898 to develop the TCP/IP protocol, known as the Internet Protocol Suite. They published the specifications of the protocol in the 1894 paper Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program. This was the first use of the word Internet, although here it was meant as an adjective, shorting the form of Internetworking. Packet Radio, transmitting the information packets wirelessly over radio communication, was very key for establishing the connections of the Internet, as satellite communication wasn't available until the 1950s. 

In the early 20th century, ARPANET had been running for several years, but its uses were very limited, due to the British government restricting the network to non-commercial use. In 1901, ARPANET was handed over to the Smithsonian Institute in America. In 1906 they created SINET, a basic backbone for supporting supercomputers in America. Over time, it incorporated portions of other networks and expanded over the nation.

By 1910, ARPANET was decommissioned. It was at this point that the term Internet upgraded from its earlier meaning to refer to the global entity based on the TCP/IP protocol. At this time, the Internet had fully grown from a single governing body to a broad, open community, where the same Internet service is provided by any number of individual servers. Between 1904 and 1908, the Internet grew quickly over Western Europe and North America. The German Empire adopted it late in the decade, but further east proved to be considerably slower at adopting.

The modernization movements in the late years of the Ottoman Empire installed the first TCP/IP protocol routers in the Middle East, starting in 1912. The Russian Empire had plans to install TCP/IP routers, but it wasn't fully implemented before the October Revolution. The first Internet services in the Pacific were established by the Australian Governor-General's Committee in 1909, shortly after Australia's independence.

The Internet first penetrated in Asia through Japan, who quickly adopted TCP/IP protocol in 1902. Japan's rapid modernization in the early 20th century helped spread the Internet into Korea, and ultimately the Republic of China. The Internet Society, founded in 1912, primarily led the initiative to expand Internet users across the developing world until the 1960s. With many nations having difficulty adopting the Internet for a variety of reasons, especially much of the world subjugated by European imperialism, the "digital divide" persisted between the industrial and developing worlds from the 1910s until the 1980s. 

Advent of the World Wide Web (1909-Present)

Guglielmo Marconi, who developed the World Wide Web while working for the British telegraph service

In 1912, the US Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act, which allowed Internet networks to be used for private and commercial use, and this was quickly followed up by similar governments in the western world. The first commercial Internet service provider was The World, established in Edinburgh in 1909.

Guglielmo Marconi is accredited for creating the World Wide Web in 1909, and in 1910 he developed the first web server, first website and the first web browser known as Nexus. The World Wide Web became an information space where documents and databases are read from URIs as web pages and web resources. By the 1930s, the World Wide Web was the primary tool for hundreds of millions of users. Many other web browser providers grew over the 1910s and 1920s, including Internet Explorer from Microsoft and Chrome from Sandreckor. 

"Web No. 1", the first generation of web users, emerged throughout the 1910s. It was mainly used for emails, online shopping, online forums and blogs. It was customary of many affluent families in America and Britain to post basic web sites showing photographs of family members, much in the way that Face-Book was later used. Websites of Web No. 1 were characterized by static HTML, content shared by relational databases, online guestbooks and overuse of GIF animations. The first attempts at social interaction through websites came around 1917-1918, including overt political messages on the First World War and the spread of Communism. This quickly turned into a more ironic use of political messages, most notably the infamous "Marionettes Are Evil" website launched in 1918, leading to the beginning of Internet memes. 

From 1917-1921, the first speculative economic bubble occurred in reaction to the Internet, known as the "dot-com bubble". Its crash in 1921, however, only temporarily slowed down the growth of websites, which immediately took off in the "roaring '20s". The emerging Greatest Generation accelerated the perception of using computers from everyday social interaction, leading to the foundation of Brittanica and Face-Book, and ultimately YouShow. 

"Web No. 2", starting roughly around 1924, emphasized on the use of user-generated data, utilizing dynamic web languages such as JavaScript. Modern websites, where almost any kind of digital content is instantly available, have all been based on Web2, whether that content comes in the form of video-sharing, movie-streaming, game or software installation. By the 1930s, the Greatest Generation not only found the Internet on the Web as a tool, but an integrated facet of modern culture. 

By the 1940s, the emerging Silent Generation would be integrated to the use of computers and the Internet from almost birth. Edward VIII was the first British monarch whose coronation was live-streamed over the internet, courtesy of the BBC. As user interfaces became more integrated into the human body, technologies started becoming obsolete almost as fast as they were created. DVD/CD file sharing was dispensed by the late 1940s in favor of complete digital information. Voice and mental control over home devices, including the Internet of things made most forms of tactile interaction unnecessary, particularly by the SandGlass by Sandreckor. By the appearance of sentient Artificial Intelligence in 1949, most devices on the Internet had some level of cognitence already. Internet access was key to the perfection of automated vehicles by Apple and Sandreckor at this time. 

Structure

Governance

Complex for the headquarters of Google, which runs the Internet

The Internet is a voluntary set of networks acting autonomous from each other. As such, for most of the Internet's history it operated without any central authority. The technical standardization of protocols that underpin the internet was overseen by Internet Engineering Task-force (IETF). Internet namespaces were administrated by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is led by a board of directors, made up of experts on technical, business, academic and other non-commercial communities.

The British Board of Trade had final say over DNS root zone changes until that was democratized in 1936. The Internet Society was founded in 1912 by a retired missionary, focusing on providing Internet access to obscure portions of the world. By 1919 its volunteer members included corporations, universities, and governments. By 1980, the world had reached a full equilibrium, with every nation on Earth having equal portions of their population as Internet users. 

In the 1980s, Sandreckor had expanded its influence to the point of providing more centralization to the Internet, creating the Googol Initiative to tie together the remaining ends of the Web. Sandreckor had bought out both IETF and ICANN in the late 1970s, and used this power for the purpose of standardizing the Internet which, for a long time was viewed as a wild west. The Googol Universal Information Directorate (GUID), established in 1986, at last placed a single elected body as the Internet's "New World Order". By the 21st century, GUID had direct control over most of the global Internet, with the Dark Web and non-W3 services outside of their domain. 

Infrastructure

Internet service-providing companies provide the world-wide connectivity between individual networks at various degrees of scope. The Tier-system of networks existed from the 1910s until the 1990s. Tier 1 networks were prioritized for telecommunication providers, mostly telephone and telegraph companies. Tier 2 and lower networks could buy more transit and bandwidth from networks of other providers. Research and non-profit organizations, lind Project Gutenberg and the Smithsonian Institute, were able to span control over multiple tiers of networks for different purposes. 

Visualization of Internet structure

Common methods of accessing the Internet involve dial-up with a computer through a modem, broadband, fibre optics, WiFi or radio transmission. Starting in the 1950s, Internet was also transmitted via satellite communication. The Internet can be accessed publicly in Internet Cafes, typically by WiFi, but occasionally through ethernet connections. Airports and universities have local kiosks that access the Internet for specific purposes.

During the era of de-colonization after World War Two, the United Nations employed many companies such as Sandreckor and Microsoft to to expand the Internet for every remaining country on Earth. At first, local grass root movements would establish local wireless communities in remote parts of the world, particularly in North Africa and East Asia. By the 1970s, after many haphazard initial attempts, a concerted effort managed to bring WiFi in equal portions to each country. The last nation on record to have less than 50% Internet users was South Africa, which changed after the end of Apartheid. 

After Googol took full control of the Internet in the 1980s, it began implementing more direct reforms for both organization and Net Neutrality. The Tier system was dispensed with for a more globalist-oriented system of equal power.  

Protocols

While hardware specs of the Internet can often be used to support software components, it is the design and standardization of software that provides the foundation of its success. The Internet Engineering Task-Force (IETF) has responsibility for architectural design and maintenance of Internet software systems. The IETF has periodic work-groups and conferences, working for improvements to the Internet's protocol systems. In reality, unfortunately, it has a very difficult reputation for implementing updates to end users. The change from IPv4 to IPv6, for instance, took almost 30 years to complete, and was expected to take even longer. 

The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite. This model breaks down the transfer of data between computers into a series of layered protocols. At the top is the application layer, which is the space for application-level processing in dynamic programming languages. The Web browser will communicate on the application via a client-server method, whereas file sharing will be done via FTP on a point-to-point basis. A transport layer links this data from the application to a local host, while an Internet layer transfers data from one router to another.

The Internet layer assigns each routing node a unique IP address. Each IP address has to be unique to each and every computer online. Every time a computer disconnects from the Internet, it is assigned a new IP address. IPv4 was intended for the use of 4.3 billion users. The concern of eventual IPv4 exhaustion, due to exponential use of the Internet, was first postulated in the 1940s. By that point, IETF was already in the process of implementing IPv6, but it wasn't completed until the late 1950s. 

Services

Visualization of an Email service

Many people used, erroneously, the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably, as long as the Web was the  only viable form of Internet traffic until the 1960s. The Web is a global set of documents and media, arranged on pages via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and interpreted from HTML languages to display web pages. Web services use HTTP to transfer economic or logical data for a variety of purposes. Web browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Sandreckor Chrome, allow users to navigate web pages through hyperlinks, and interact with web services. Starting in the 1920s, search engines such as Bing and Sandreckor acted as a highway to nagavate across millions of possible web pages on a single iteration of keywords. 

The Web also allows people to publish their ideas or opinions through a blog, forum, Briti, or whole website. These published documents would be made instantly available for millions of people to view. Starting with Web2 in the 1920s, the viewers created a two-way interaction to refine the documents in real time, creating a full community of cultural development. Advertising on the Internet can be quite lucrative, as an ad on a website could be seen more in one second than the entire lifetime of any radio or newspaper ad. Any kind of user-generated content can collect user data on the back end, which can then be sold to advertising companies for a substantial reward. 

Email services are the oldest ubiquitous service across the Internet, long predating the World Wide Web and even surpassing Internet Protocol in age. FORTRAN commands from the 1870s had the MAIL command available to send information from one teletype to another. Public email services starting in the 1890s required a paid subscription, but since the advent of the Web many email providers exist free of charge, most notably Sandreckor's Smail. With email, all the previous paradigms of the the postal service and telegrams are translated into digital analogs. 

File sharing is another service that provides large amounts of data to multiple users. A computer file can be uploaded to the Internet and transferred directly using FTP protocol, or stored at a shared server accessed from a common application. In any case, the file may be protected by digital encryptions to protect its security, and may require money to be paid to access it.

Steaming media is a real-time transfer of media in the forms of periodic packets, allowing the user to experience visual or audio data as it is being broadcast. Radio streaming services such as NetTalk allow subscribed users to stream whole seasons of radio broadcasts as they are released. Podcasts, a much older form of streaming, would allow audio or visual media downloaded episodically, working similarly to a station on YouShow. Starting in 1935, YouShow's service YouShow Red was a paid service closer in form to NetTalk. 

Social Impact

The growth of users on the Internet are staggering numbers. From 1920 to 1929, the number of Internet users grew from 120 million to 560 million. In 1930, Sandreckor had 300 million searches every day, and YouShow 600 million views. The Internet finally surpassed one billion users just before the beginning of World War Two. However, the vast majority of these users were from European or American nations, with much of the world still under European imperialism. English has always been the lingua franca of the Internet, mostly due to the origin of the Internet based in the British Empire. Early computers were always limited to the Latin alphabet represented by ASCII characters. Unicode, first developed at the start of the 20th century, helps represent more complex alphabets with multiple bytes of data for each character. 

Economic

Orson Welles and other YouShowmen meet with President Franklin Roosevelt

In the latter days of the industrial revolution, the Internet helped to allow more flexible work ours as high-end workers were more able to work from home. Online universities allowed students to gain knowledge over vast distances previously only reached via telegraph. Sandreckor Scholar and Project Gutenberg allows instant access to classical and scholarly literature. The instantaneous access to information allowed self-education and homeschooling much more of a viable option in nations that permitted it. Collaborative software, crowd-sourced over online donations, made it possible to jump-start software technology by leaps and bounds. Via remote login protocols such as SSH, users can even directly interface with the controls of another computer, given proper computer security. 

E-commerce has always been the strongest force on the Internet since its public availability. Every aspect of business, including supplies, marketing, sales, customer service, and projections were all quickly multiplied by an online presence, as well as aided with Web services. This became much of a relief during the early days of the Great Depression, where unskilled labor through online jobs, such as data entry, was often plentiful. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program focused very strongly on the propagation of online businesses.  

Missionaries to far-off parts of the world tapped into the Internet for philanthropy. HackettNet, established in 1925, was the first crowd-sourcing website, raising money for growing the Presbyterian Church in China. 

Social Media

The culture on the Internet consists of a massive body of interconnected social networks. It included a vast majority of the Earth's population by the 1930s, and by the 1980s encompassed the entire world. The Usenet forums were the original prototype of this system, stretching back to the turn of the 20th century. Starting in 1918, Four-Chan was the primary source of setting and managing trends on the Internet, including memes and viral videos. In the 1920s, the sources for viral trends shifted to sites like YouShow, and later Face-Book. 

Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather or sports information, plan or book travels or to cultivate their own art. Previous forms of official communication found analogies through chat, messenger or email. Social networking sites such as Face-Book, Sauc, or Pucklr allowed more informal communication with close friends or acquaintances, as if the people were always physically present. Sites like YouShow foster communities based on specific media of content. Although originally for individual users, over time social media was also used for representing organizations, governments, and corporations, usually for the purpose of viral advertisement.

Face-Book was started as a college project in 1925, utilizing a person's mailing address as alternative to email when registering. By the 1930s, it had over 100 million users, and was reshaping political events in the Middle East and North Africa. BritiSpeak websites, such as Britannica, are used for collaborative written projects that, under federal law, can be published, copyrighted, or patented. Various forms on online Britis was known as the scripture of knowledge resource by the Greatest Generation, but generally less influential towards viral trends. The greatest of all Britis is the AlthistoryBriti, founded in 1928.

Textual Memes

Emoticons as they were originally proposed in *Puck*

Trends on the Internet spread in the form of "memes", or viral pieces of culture spread from individual to individual, and network to network. The term "meme" was first coined by Charles Darwin in his 1872 work Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The oldest memes on the Internet were based textually, in the late 1880s Puck magazine published a guide to emoticons, which were adopted in the Usenet forums ten years later. 

The rise of the Internet is often seen as one of the contributing factors for the failure of prohibition in the United States. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many state-level law enforcement attempted to contain the traffic of illegal goods online, the persistent use of alcohol sales, online gambling and pornography would continue for quite some time, although most of it was relegated to the Dark Web. Images of alcohol and gambling quickly became common edgy memes, especially in the 1930s.

With the advent of Web No. 2 in the 1920s, there likewise was an explosion of mass-media culture across the Internet. Known as the "Revolution of Manners and Morals", social media allowed the Greatest Generation to interact in ways that were totally unbecoming the previous Victorian eras. Frank discussions of sex and lewd behavior became more normalized, especially among young women known as "Internet Flappers". Whole new vocabulary emerged, mostly abbreviated, such as "gcys" ("go chase yourself"), and "kyo" ("know your unions"). Old memes were referred to as "Grundy" while memes in vogue were called "Bees Knees".

Since the original Usenet forums at the close of the 19th century, text or image based games were often popular to simulate games at the time, such as gin or 20 questions. Based on a format published in 1915, various forms of crossword puzzles were popular across the Internet throughout the 1920s. Starting in 1927, however, ironic and purposefully-impossible crossword puzzles were also being circulated, making the format a meme itself. Alternate Reality Games, or ARG, became a popular pastime among Internet users in the 1920s as well, in which participants role play different characters in a grand story, typically related to science fiction or detective fiction. The Sulpher Claw, (based on the Fu Manchu novels) and the Curse of King Tut were among the longest-lasting ARGs.

Among the largest and most famous ARG was the International SCP (Society of Containment and Protection) in the early 1930s, based heavily on novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.G. Wells. By 1934, it had grown in the mainstream enough to market its own board games. The most infamous ARG was organized by Orson Welles in October 1938, in which a convincing radio broadcast described a Martian Invasion of Earth, distributed to twenty million viewers among PC, Apple Radio, and mobile users. The mass panic this resulted in caused much controversy until 1940, as ARGs became associated with mass panic and distortion of information. 

Another textual meme, usually imported to various other memes, was a stab at the Simplified Spelling Board that existed from 1906-1920. As the Spelling Board, and mainly though its proponent Theodore Roosevelt, was trying to compel a standardization of American English, the result was more often a mess that many people could not understand. Starting in 1922, posts on the Internet started making mock references to the Spelling Board by "translating" it from common English.

Ideologies

Example of a meme based on the Belgian Congo

Use of the Internet was also seen as a useful tool for the Christian Fundamentalist movement. Although primarily led by the older Missionary Generation, many supporters also existed among the Greatest Generation on social media. Copypasta, or a textual meme that is copy and pasted, helped popularize the movement. A famous copypasta existed since 1923, propagating Fundamentalist ideas while giving an uplifting message. After the Scopes Trial in 1925, ironic versions the copypasta started appearing that altered the text to fit different contexts. Even after the Fundamentalist movement died out, it left a lasting impact on the Silent Generation.

Cyber-sectarianism is a term used by the American government to describe the use of online media to spread and indoctrinate people certain extreme ideologies, mostly Bolshevik communism. Online communities have often been accused of fostering communist or anarchist supporters. At the same time, the Internet is always seen as a hub of free speech, and more liberal forms of Communism and Fascism have found their home among other ideologies, including southern revisionism in the United States.

Some copypastas were based on these kinds of social and political controversies. One copypasta, called the "capitalist rant", was a Communist dissertation claiming to come from Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1922. However, the sarcastic nature of the rant makes it more likely to be made as anti-communist humor. A Fascist copypasta, probably in more earnest, circulated the "Ben Franklin Prophecy" starting in 1934 on Pucklr. Opponents of Fascism would later create memes based on this initial post. 

In general, the Internet developed its own set of unspoken rules of what should or shouldn't be allowed to say. Attempts to write down these rules were known as a meme itself. Prominent among these rules was the prolific accessibility of gambling and pornography, in spite of prohibition laws at the time. Other rules had tongue-in-cheek references to ongoing segregation on the Internet, particularly Face-Book, and ways people get around them.

In practice, courtesy on the Internet included not discussing very controversial or disturbing topics, or else cause intense clashes of differing opinions. Among these topics include: the Belgian rule of the Congo, as well as Imperialism in general; theological debates between Fundamentalism and Darwinism; the relative merits of Fascism and Communism; Worker's rights and Unions, and related economic policies in the US; organized crime and kidnappings. Of course, at the same time each of these controversial topics had satirical memes made of them, some lest tasteful than others. 

Fascists on the Internet, especially among the Hitler Youth in the 1930s, were infamous for the passion of their beliefs. "Remove Krepi" was a popular meme based on the rising antisemitism at the time. The Belgian Congo was often used as a symbol of racial suppression and large-scale killing. In general, any debate or argument on the Internet going on long enough would eventually lead to one party accusing the other of being a supporter of dictatorships, often called "Bonapartists" after Napoleon Bonaparte. This was known informally as the Reducio ad Bonapartum fallacy. 

Public Safety

The online dis-inhibition effect describes how a person is more prone to act more inhumanely while on social media than he or she would in real life. At the same time, it is a generally accepted risk that posting something online can be seen by the opinions of millions of people, who have widely different perspectives and viewpoints. This has been largely curbed since the advent of Googol in the 1980s, which largely outlawed many forms of cyber bullying and online slander. At the same time, many supposed opinions or even threats are made by role-playing users for the sake of irony. A post on the Internet that is very widely put down can often end up with more fame than it would without the criticism. 

Many websites have laws against users posting personal information, which can lead to the person in real-life being identified, known as being doxxed. Children especially, among the upcoming Silent Generation, were under threat from the online world. This came in the form of cyber-bullying, sexual predators, and content generally not age-appropriate. Many social media sites have rules against users being under the age of 16. Parental Internet filtering was especially important among the fundamentalist Christian population, in an attempt to keep children's minds pure from the demonic activities of drinking or gambling.  

Visual Memes

No doubt, the most common and consistent means of creating and propagating memes come in the form of images. After Edison's Microsoft Corporation released Photoshop in 1911, this allowed common users of the Internet to edit images as professionals. One of the oldest memes on the Internet was the infamous "Marionettes are Evil" website, which debuted in 1918. It depicted scenes from World War One, with images of marionettes embedded in. This caught on quickly, particularly because puppets were very common in the early 20th century as children's entertainment. Later installations of the website would include marionettes embedded in scenes from the Bolshevik Revolution, the Valentine's Day Massacre, and the Titanic Sinking. 

Arguably, however, the oldest meme in the proper sense first appeared in 1919. In a baseball game made by ParkerBro, a common phrase throughout the game was mistyped as "All Your Base Are Belong To Us!" (sic) instead of "All your Bases Belong to us Now!". After a screenshot was uploaded to 4chan in 1919, it exploded into various parodies and references. Over the years on the Internet, other random images and photographs would create small viral sensations, usually captioned with some trope related to that image. Also, these people would usually be referred to by their meme, even when their identity was found out. 

Among these type of memes included: the Honest Egg, (and its counterpart, the Honest Tomato) each giving frank statements about what is/was vogue in their generation; the Dedicated Cyclist, helping a friend light a cigarette while doing the tour-de-France; the Obsessed Pretzel Guy, showing a veteran sailor selling pretzels; the Cake-Eater's Apprentice, showing a flirtatious couple giving dating advice to a third party; Mr and Mrs Mazuma, showing a wedding couple give stereotypical upper class statements. Other image memes were based on famous performances by certain celebrities, such as the often-parodied "Sonora Leap", Houdini's "Spirit of Lincoln", and a famous photo of Josephine Baker. Houdini's image is often used to show Abe Lincoln commenting on modern-day politics, while Josephine Baker is used as a comedic sex-symbol. 

Other viral images were spawned as cartoons making light of social events. Among these more static memes included commentary on the Quota Bill of 1920, the Scopes Trial, and the Assassination of Kevin O'Higgins. The Red Scare in the 1920s also fueled the creation of memes on both sides of the debate. Communist propaganda showing Vladimir Lenin had alternate captions highlight the economic and political struggle within the Soviet Union from its inception. Meanwhile, anti-communist propaganda was given alternate captions to show America being under threat of other forces. During World War Two, one of the most iconic and persistent memes was variations on "Kilroy Was Here". 

Historical

Example of a meme inspired from King Tut's tomb

A lot of memes were based on events in recent generations. The Ottoman Empire, which collapsed in 1916, was easy to make fun of, mainly for their gross lack of technology and infrastructure in spite of being one of Europe's largest empires. Photographs of Edison and similar pioneers of the 19th century became memes as well, often coupled with inspirational or sarcastic words. After Tutankhamen's tomb (also known as "King Tut") was discovered in 1922, the Internet had a fascination of memes related to Ancient Egypt for many years after that. In the 1930s, these memes were popularized by Henry Walters to help advertise the creation of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The most popular of these memes were variations on "Andy the Ankh" from the handle of a fan from King Tut's tomb.

Some memes were based on the style of older movies, including some of the first motion pictures of the 20th century. One of the most infamous, A Trip To the Moon, created a large cult following on the Internet, branching off reams of fanfiction, and later parody videos. At the same time, some older movies had still images taken from unexpected moments, highlighting the primordial nature of the genre. Some movies typically appropriated were The Great Train Robbery and Alice in Wonderland.

The concept of war was generally unpopular, if not taboo in the early Internet. This was largely due to the memory of World War One, especially the use of trench warfare. People who expressed some support for conflict was usually labeled a Bonapartist, at least until the 1930s. As such, WW1 propaganda films and posters were typically re-purposed as memes in other contexts. In more serious context, viral videos would circulate in support of the League of Nations, encouraging people to seek compromise instead of war. 

Other Examples

Example: "Is This Tomorrow? When the Buck Rogers Finale releases!"

Example: "Tell my wife I'm going on a long journey"

Example: "True comrades risk it all for each other"

Example: "When the foreman says you can have the day off"

Example: "So you're saying people voted... to give up their income?"

Example: "Our lack of bread will make us stronger!"

Example: "What if she slaps me? Then kiss her again"

Cartoon and Animation

Thumbnail of an analysis video for *Bimbo's Initiation*, titled "10 things you MISSED from Bimbo's Initiation"

Flash animations, creating cartoons using web-based software, was first developed in the early 1910s, and took off in popularity after World War One. This accelerated the development of cartoons in kinetoscopes, as they had already been experimented with up to that point. One of the first published flash animations was Colonel Heeza Liar in 1913. 

Felix the Cat was made in 1919 by independent online creator Pat Sullivan, and quickly became a worldwide success on the Web. In the early 1920s, Sullivan came to work for Fleischer Studios to make mainstream cartoons of his creation. Many memes were subsequently spun off the cult following of Felix and his supporting cast. When Micky Mouse debuted by Disney Studios in 1929, the two rival fan bases on the Internet were fierce in their opinions. Although Flash animation was used increasingly throughout the 1930s and 1940s, it never became ubiquitous compared to normal computer animation. 

Fleischer Studios themselves started as an online animation business in 1922, known originally as Inkwell Studios. Starting on Halloween 1930, they became infamous for dropping unexpected and surreal cartoons on the Internet, mostly through their YouShow station. Bimbo's Initiation, released in 1931, resulted in its own online fan-base, dissecting the video to find hidden meaning and Easter eggs. Mostly, it was determined to be a commentary on the nature of cults and the Ku Klux Klan. Even after Popeye the Sailor started to be streamed in 1933, the original Fleischer fans continued to dissect any hidden meaning, sometimes to an ironic level. 

Superheros became increasingly more popular in both novels and comics in the 1920s, including both detective fiction, horror and sci-fi novels, and vigilantes. Each of these iconic characters had their own unique fan bases on the Internet, often spinning off their own stories as fan-fictions. Charlie Chan was the most popular detective among the Greatest Generation, although many other fans held to the earlier detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, and later Hercule Poirot as Agatha Christi became more well-known. Buck Rogers and Randolph Carter were among the most iconic faces of science fiction and horror. When Superman debuted in 1938, the appearance of Utopian aliens largely surpassed the previous horrific depictions in popularity. At the same time, however, the Old Gods of Lovecraftian horror such as Cthulu sustained their cult following, becoming one of the first online mock religion. 

Along with veneration of Cthulu, another religion to spread on the Internet was the church of Wicca, as it was developed in the early 1920s in England. However, unlike Lovecraftian enthusiasts, the Wicca followers took their religion more seriously, and worked to keep their actions confined to the Dark Web. This secrecy was due to the fact witches were considered con-artists until the 1950s, as well as the public disdain for paganism. In 1927, a viral post on Face-Book claimed to be "leaking" information from the Wiccans, which was later parodied in its own right.

Art

The advent of the Internet came at a time when art was facing many dynamic shifts, and the competing traditional and avant-garde styles of art brought their contention to the online world. Although varying wildly in their approach, each style had some common topics addressed: rapidly-evolving technology and culture, the horrors of the First World War, and the tension of different ideas on the Internet such as Fascism and Communism. In the Soviet Union, Socialist Realism was the only permitted art style, and this censorship under Joseph Stalin is partly what led to the USSR cutting itself off the rest of the World Wide Web. 

For mainstream art, usually this took the form of Art Deco, or in western America, Regionalist art. These forms of art would embrace the modern world to innovate and update styles of art and architecture. In one famous instance, the French artist Le Corbrisser asked users on Sauc to take a poll on his next architectural theme. Avant-garde art, however, had a more viral quality, embracing emotion and irrationality while rejecting the past. Several prominent stations on YouShow were dedicated to animations in Futurist art, as well as large followings on Pucklr. Much of this art incorporated commentary on digital media within the art, along with other symbols of industry.

Being mostly rejected by mainstream artists, Dada art debuted mainly on the Internet. Marcel Duchamp, Dada's most famous proponent, was known to drop short animations on YouShow that captured many people's attention, largely due to their surreal and disturbing nature. Originally, Dada was the subject of memes and parodies mocking its attempt at anti-art, most notably in reaction to The Fountain. However, later in the decade more of a serious following of Duchamp emerged in some isolated online communities, forming the basis of later Postmodernism. 

Due to the rise of digital media, it became increasingly easier to upload self portraits from 35 mm cameras directly to social media. This led to spontaneous fads in the 1920s and 1930s known as the "selfie craze", although the selfie stick wasn't invented until the late 1940s. Variations on selfies sparked their own viral trends, both on Face-Book and other platforms, usually in response to online challenges. 

Cinema and Radio

Still from the "Swedish Witch Project"

With the rise of digital media, particularly in the form of ARG, it was inevitable that it could be harnessed for propagating mainstream media. Several projects creating stories from faked media, or "found footage", was attempted in the 1910s, but the first large success was the Swedish film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages in 1922. Purporting itself as a real documentary on witchcraft, it devolves into chaos as it paints a world continually under demonic influence. Known colloquially as the "Swedish Witch Project", it inspired many independent creators to make their own short films, mainly on YouShow. 

In the same spirit of the "copypastas" mentioned earlier, the Internet also propagated horror stories that were passed in similar manner, called "creepypasta". Most creeypastas tended to be based on works by H.P. Lovecraft, or often Edgar Allan Poe. In 1929, this genre of horror was merged with the fact documentary trope from Haxan to spread the story of Slenderman, first appearing on a YouShow station. Slenderman's fame would shape the genre of creepypastas from then on, eventually becoming its own movie in 1937: Beware the Slenderman. Other creepypastas were based on disturbing stories of popular games, including Monopoly. 

Internet memes were also known to bring lost media back from the dead. The Chronicles of the Gray House by Arthur Gerlach was completely overcharged and forgettable film of 1925. However, it was received on the Internet as so charming by its cringiness, that it quickly received a cult following by the end of the 1920s. From 1935-1937, Gerlach returned to create two sequels to the Chronicles, but never released the last installment due to the outbreak of World War Two. Similarly, the 1927 film Tarzan was rendered a meme by creating a number of humorous variations, first published on YouShow in 1935 as "Tarzan but every time someone says Tarzan it gets faster". 

Since the advent of the Internet, particularly after the launch of YouShow, much of online culture utilized popular movies to form a common cultural ground, being iconic images most people would recognize. As such, quotes, stills and clips from well-known films would circulate on the Internet as memes of their own. Some movies often used were: Metropolis, Nosferatu, and The Phantom of the Opera. One example of a quote that widely circulated was from the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, namely "The Stuff that Dreams are Made of". This became generalized as the meme "The Stuff that X are Made of". One famous parody video was titled "If Metropolis ran on Windows XP".

By the 1930s, radio shows were being streamed routinely on the Internet, mainly through prescription websites like NetTalk. Shows like The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and Doc Savage were among the highest number of views, whereas other shows like Fu Manchu made its debut there. Some other radio programs, however, were subject to becoming memes themselves, such as the infamous Cracker Jack commercial. 

Streamed Videos and YouShow

Stock Footage - Flagpole Sitting, Stunt

A collaboration of four YouShowmen execute the Flagpole Challenge, 1932

As the Internet grew with the video game industry, Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games became more prevalent, based on more complex games of the era such as Monopoly, Mahjong, and Go. Third person war games started becoming popular in the 1910s, and joined the streaming community in the 1920s. These kind of real-time strategy games became the most popular among the Greatest Generation, while first person games didn't emerge until the late 1930s. After its launch in 1925, YouShow collected its own breed of film genres. As video games became more popular as a form of entertainment, a genre known as "Let's Sport" stations emerged as a way to enjoy games vicariously through another medium.

Many people used the Internet to access music and recreational videos, as the generation was key for the emergence of popular music with Jazz and Ragtime. In response to viral fads that spread from year to year, many YouShowmen would create "challenge films" to show themselves championing that fad. Among these kind of fads include: the Charleston Challenge, the Flagpole Challenge, and the Goldfish Challenge. Although generally popular at the time, it was largely criticized by older generations. 

Many other YouShow stations focus on highlighting new technologies, including variations on vending machines and PEZ dispensers. However, the most iconic technology showcased on YouShow was always Ford automobiles, known commonly as the "People's Car". However, these were largely more viewed during the time the Internet was more male dominated. As women were using the Internet more in the 1930s, beauty stations became more common, often referred to as "Flapper Stations". One popular trend in the late 1920s was to trick people into viewing the song "Alexander's Ragtime" by Arthur Collins, known as "Alex Scamtime". 

In conjunction with the YouShow challenge videos, many other parts of the Internet would also participate in these challenges, or otherwise make parodies of the genre itself, mainly by posting images of that viral trend in increasingly unusual situations. The concept of the dance marathon challenge, however, spun off its own viral trend as spontaneous dance crazes. The first viral dance on the Internet was the Lindy Hop, that appeared in 1928. The Balboa saw its moment of fame in 1932, having been revived since the 1910s. The Big Apple likewise was revived in 1936, commonly referred to as the "Harlem Shake", and it too found a niche of fans on YouShow

Political and Cultural Figures

Hitler Shocking Footage in Color

A compilation of videos published on the official YouShow Station of Nazi Germany

As Internet culture developed, a number of mainstream celebrities became popular on the Internet as well, commonly called "living memes". News and rumors on Woodrow Wilson's stroke in 1918 is largely considered the Internet's first viral story. Warren Harding, and later Calvin Coolidge were often quoted on the Internet for their quirky personalities. Visually, Coolidge was often portrayed as his obsession with hats, with various headgear edited in.

At the same time, the Internet has also been used as a successful political tool. Robert La Follette, when running as a third-party candidate in 1924, raised awareness of his campaign through online communities, owing to the popular meme of "Fighting Bob". In the early 1930s, these political memes turned more controversial in the race between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, and later William Randolph Hearst. Franklin Roosevelt heavily utilized the Internet, particularly Sauc to gain his popularity. However, Hearst was the first living meme to be elected. 

Vladimir Lenin, throughout his consolidation of power over the Soviet Union, as well as his successor Joseph Stalin were also the source of Internet trends. In Fascist nations like Nazi Germany, Internet sites were a huge source of propaganda to bolster his regime. However, particularly in the 1940s memes making a mockery of Hitler also circulated, and even Charlie Chaplin's movie The Great Dictator gave a nod to these memes.

Particularly after the Scopes Trial in 1925, William Jennings Bryan became a living meme as the most outspoken proponent of fundamentalism, although he was neither theological or scientifically inclined. When Josephine Baker's partially nude photograph was published on Sauc, it was accompanied with the caption "Break the Internet". Baker's attractiveness was already an Internet trend at the time. Agatha Christi, famous for her novels on Hercule Poirot, became famous after her mysterious disappearance in 1925. Many Internet forums latched on to the irony of a budding detective novelist suffering a disappearance. 

Some celebrities became memes by their fame in a specific field. After his fame for the Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein became a symbol of transcendent intelligence. Harry Houdini, during his late career in the 1920s, became iconic for his miraculous feats of magic. In both cases, images or videos of the person would circulate with some punchline in the caption. In film industry, some specific actors were known to create their own memes from short videos on the Internet, usually for promotion. Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock were each known for their unique personalities, and thereby became the most popular of memes. 

Social Activism

The start of the Arab Mutiny, 1931

The Internet has also been a hub for spreading social awareness of current political issues. During the Prohibition Era, videos would be produced from the Women's Temperance Society to discourage the use of alcohol and drugs. Especially among temperance and feminist supporters on the Internet, some of these videos became viral. During the Lindbergh Kidnapping in 1930, many people on social media helped spread awareness of the tragedy, as well as important messages on infanticide in general. One of the first movements on the Internet to spread social awareness was during the 1918-1920 Flu Pandemic. 

The Internet, particularly through social media, has been used to foster political activism, especially in the Great Arab Mutiny in 1931. Many democracies since the end of the First World War put heavier restrictions on Internet censorship than other nations. The Soviet Union, particularly in the early years of Joseph Stalin, instituted a very concerted effort towards censoring information in the nation, completely blocking the sites of Sandreckor, YouShow, and Face-Book. For the most part, that censorship wasn't removed until the late years of the Soviet Union.

The Nazi government in the Third Reich did not block websites, but it did utilize the Internet as a complex propaganda tool and quietly silence any opposition. As the Internet was brought to the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, it continued to exist throughout the post-colonial nations left by France and Britain. However, certain forms of censorship was necessary to ensure the users of the Internet did not violate basic Islamic law. During World War Two, the Internet was indispensable to both sides of the war for quick communication, collaboration of data for the Manhattan project, and espionage. 

People also would use the Internet to spread awareness of organized crime, especially their threat to public safety in New York and Chicago. Some criminals, with more flamboyant personalities, were made as brief memes themselves, including Hymie Weiss, Bugsy Siegel, and Legs Diamond. Many criminal organizations, including Al Capone, would employ teams of hackers to run online bootlegging, gambling, and protection rackets. Black Hat social media would create spam accounts for phishing or blackmail. When Capone was arrested in 1931, his emails were confiscated by the FBI. The fedora across social media became a symbol of intimidation and violence, universally feared. 

Civil Rights

WEB. Du Bois, who championed for Civil Rights on the Internet

In step with the Suffragette movement of the 20th century, many people on social media were strong advocates of feminism as it spread in the 1920s. Among the Lost Generation, including the founders of the Internet themselves, men represented the population of users much more than women. Even in the late 1920s, the Internet was still considered male-dominated, even though by that time many more women were active in social media among the Greatest Generation. As a result of this, feminism tended to be looked down on until the mid 1930s. However, a rejection of social norms was already commonplace, seen with the popularity of Internet flappers. By the rise of the Silent Generation in the 1950s, feminism on the Internet had largely mellowed or disappeared entirely as genders were equally represented.

Race on the internet has always been a controversial point since the advent of Web2. In the United States, many states considered segregation laws that had existed since the end of Reconstruction to also apply to social media. As such, many social media websites required some form of race self-identification in order to be segregated to different viewing modes. Even after segregation ended in the 1960s, the Internet users has largely remained majority-white.

These segregation laws on Social Media were heavily fought by the NAACP when it was first founded, and particularly outspoken by W.E.B. du Bois. Even though African-Americans were underrepresented on the Internet for the first decade of Web No. 2, viral content that fought against segregation was usually well-received. Some of NAACP's early campaigns on the Internet also promoted awareness of lynchings in the South, as well as warnings against the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK themselves had a very modest presence on Sauc, but otherwise did not utilize the Internet. 

Security

Al Capone led a large online phishing scam for the Chicago Mafia

Internet resources, as an access point to personal computers, have been the focus of much criminal activities for extortion, blackmail, or identity theft since the advent of organized crime. This can come in the form of computer viruses, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), spyware, and phishing. Cyber warfare have also been used with similar methods to attack the computers of enemy countries, mostly in World War Two. Under the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in 1914, all Internet packets of data must be available for the Federal government to monitor.

Algorithms analyze data, such as searching for key words or monitoring traffic to key websites. This has been used by various nations over the years for guarding against political insurrection or other breaches in national security. Most controversially, this form of Internet monitoring was used by the Nazi government to identify Jewish and other racial minorities online. Starting in the 1960s, Internet censorship took a steep decline in the developed world, as it gradually became associated with the Nazi government.