Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

most people discovered internet community by person-based platforms, those that allowed us to import our existing friendships online. The group that discovered this was made up of people who already had friends but lacked the autonomy to spend time with them: teenagers. Teens didn’t need a specific topic to find each other: they already knew each other, and just wanted a place to hang out. In Chapter 3, we noted that suburban isolation and anti-loitering laws discouraged teenagers from hanging out in the offline spaces that had once been theirs. For a while, popular teens hung out on landline telephones, and only misfit teens turned to the internet in search of community. But as the internet became mainstream through the mid- and late 1990s, so did hanging out with your friends there.