In the age of the Internet, where is home?

by Abi Whelan

Welcome to the Internet! I think Bo Burnham puts it best when he asked if he could “interest you in everything all of the time?” Since its inception in 1969, the internet has boomed and become a place of increasingly divided communities. But it wasn’t always like this. Think back to just a few years ago.

Let me set the scene – the burning hellscape of Tumblr, circa 2016. A new episode of Sherlock has been released, Superwholock is everywhere, Dashcon was only two years ago and Penis Friday is (thankfully) no more. The ship ‘wars’ are in full swing, and that textpost about ‘fandom vs. hipster’ blogs forming an alliance in a coffee shop pops up on your dash at least once a week. In my mind, nowhere is more of an online community than Tumblr in the early 2010s. Sure, it was a lawless land – especially before the introduction of safe browsing – but once you found your community you were home. At least, in a chronically online, stealing shoelaces from the president kind of way.

It certainly was a place to be. Whether you shipped Johnlock or Phan, you had found yourself a community of likeminded people, who watched the same things as you, laughed over the same jokes, and cried when the show was really really bad (I’m looking at you and Superhell, Supernatural). There were people who believed they had crossed over from a parallel universe where the only difference was the spelling of ‘The Berenstain Bears’! Imagine! An entire community dedicated to misremembering both children’s shows and the death of Nelson Mandela. There was a community for everyone and anyone. And this wasn’t usually a bad thing . It was a way to meet people who enjoyed the same things as you, and if like me, you weren’t all that popular, it was a welcome respite from the ins and outs of high school.

Tumblr wasn’t always the best place to be though – you might notice I keep calling it a ‘hellscape’. That’s for many reasons. One being you were always minutes away from being ‘cancelled’. Nuance wasn’t really a thing back in 2016 apparently. People were lambasted for having certain groups in their ‘Do Not Interact’ lists, including ‘MAPs’ or ‘Minor Attracted Persons’. Yes, you heard that right. For a brief period, Tumblr was not only was a haven for paedophiles; they were designated a protected community by teenagers on the internet. Whilst finding communities on the internet was a great thing, and people were more connected than ever before, there were many communities to be wary of.

It’s the same today, but communities can be harder to find. Now, you’re fed the content that the all-knowing algorithm wants you to see to keep you engaged. Artificially forming communities that would have probably found each other eventually, the process just happens at hyper-speed now. Of course, there’s less interaction in a lot of these communities and more content just being consumed passively in short 30 – 500 second chunks. But this doesn’t make these communities feel any less like home. Whether you’re on FoodTok, SwiftTok, or any other Tok, these are communities with inside jokes, and even now, with our heavily compartmentalised internet communities, there are still internet-wide jokes. There are references to pronouns “being she, because I can never be her”, there are more dances than I can even imagine, and I’m sure somewhere there is a new ‘none pizza with left beef’.

Inclusion on the internet has many forms, and whilst it isn’t always a good thing, it’s certainly not a wholly bad thing. Of course, there are – and were – toxic communities that were able to do varying levels of harm, from actual Nazis to ones who encouraged and romanticised very serious mental health conditions. But the internet is not as lawless as it once was. There are stricter content controls in place now (which some would argue are too strict on certain platforms), but their presence is certainly felt, meaning these toxic communities are harder to engage with today.

The internet is no utopia. Its scale and reach could never have been imagined twenty years ago. But in enabling us to form communities, the internet is helping us to do something so very human. I spent many of my most formative years on the hellscape of Tumblr, in found communities sharing stories with people who would go on to become lifelong friends. There are mountains of content, some better, some worse, but for many, in the valleys of these mountains there are places that feel like home