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[Putnam]

You guys haven't seen the Navy Seal copypasta before?

From past experience, I think it's safe to say that many people on here are only on here and some insular IRC communities. It's kind of bizarre.

[Reelya]

Or perhaps netizens who know every copypasta out there are actually a much more niche subset of humanity than we care to think.

e.g. i met some random young people, back when Nyan Cat was the "huge" thing (quite a while after maximum Nyan Cat exposure too). None of them had even the slightest idea what Nyan Cat was. Basically any time you break out of the techie/netizen bubble you realize how niche all this stuff "everyone must know" really is. Next to nobody actually knows it.

e.g. even major stuff like "all your base are belong to us" or the "arrow to the knee" thing. If you pick random real-life humans and ask if they know wtf those are, i'd say you'd be lucky to get even 1-2% who'd heard of those. The knee-jerk reaction is "surely it must be more than that" but that's just because we're inside the bubble. The 98% includes everyone on the planet. Talk to most people who aren't hardcore gaming / net junkies (and social media doesn't count) and almost all "universally known" techie / gaming memes will be met with blank stares.

[scourge728]

I like memes, but I mostly stick to gaming, television, movies and YouTube related topics, and as such don't know of many other memes than gaming and the (relatively) few television shows and YouTubers I watch

[Reelya]

Another realization is how few people actually know that e.g. touhou or vocaloid even exist. In one of my college classes i had to do a presentation on something so I did a thing about the touhou metal subculture. Nobody in the class of ~30+ 20-somethings who were animators, artists, game designers, music and film people had even heard of vocaloid or touhou (they didn't know what touhou was so I mentioned vocaloid as perhaps a point of reference, met with blank stares). And these are young net-savvy college-educated content creators.

Us on the fringes forget how pervasive the mainstream media bubble still is. Most people only exist in that bubble and hardly know anything outside it exists. Except they know about that guy called 4chan who keeps hacking things.

[scourge728]

Another realization is how few people actually know that e.g. touhou or vocaloid even exist. In one of my college classes i had to do a presentation on something so I did a thing about the touhou metal subculture. Nobody in the class of ~30+ 20-somethings who were animators, artists, game designers, music and film people had even heard of vocaloid or touhou (they didn't know what touhou was so I mentioned vocaloid as perhaps a point of reference, met with blank stares). And these are young net-savvy college-educated content creators.

Us on the fringes forget how pervasive the mainstream media bubble still is. Most people only exist in that bubble and hardly know anything outside it exists. Except they know about that guy called 4chan who keeps hacking things.

it's a sad world they live in

[Putnam]

Or perhaps netizens who know every copypasta out there are actually a much more niche subset of humanity than we care to think.

I'm irritated at how dismissive this seems, so that's coloring this response, so mind that.

It's not exactly "every copypasta out there", it's been consistently one of the most popular copypastas since... 2014?

[AzyWng]

I remember how some curator or whatever described Touhou as something resembling a cheap Chinese knockoff.

I suppose that sort of thing is a result of poor parenting...

[Reelya]

Or perhaps netizens who know every copypasta out there are actually a much more niche subset of humanity than we care to think.

I'm irritated at how dismissive this seems, so that's coloring this response, so mind that.

It's not exactly "every copypasta out there", it's been consistently one of the most popular copypastas since... 2014?

That just makes the point even stronger. Ask joe blow types about the most popular copypastas and they won't even know those. If you just grab someone at random and ask if they've heard of the "navy seals copypasta" be prepared for a lot of blank stares. Almost all regular people only stick to instagram, twitter, facebook, they don't venture onto forums or places that they would encounter forum or gaming-related memes of that type.

One of the things that happened to me at college was a discussion of all those alt-identities like pico-gender, demi-sexual etc. I mentioned that a lot of that stuff originated with the tumblr community, and everyone in the class started yelling at me, "no it didn't! I've been on tumblr and never seen any of that!" ... but then the one guy who had started the discussion said "yeah, a lot of it did originate with a subculture of the tumblr community". So, in other words, 30 non-nerds, all of whom were on Tumblr due to them being content creators, yet hardly anyone had even heard of the fairly well known connection between Tumblr and the sjw / non-binary genders thing. Which is kind of a major deal.

Most people are willfully ignorant (and this is at college) and if you tell them things outside their experience, they get actively hostile rather than interested to hear more. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in motion: those who know the least about something assume that they know it all. They use their knowledge of a subject to estimate how much there is to know. e.g. if they know nothing about something, they assume it must be a pretty small domain (which is patently wrong: any area you haven't ever looked into is probably a never-ending rabbit-hole of content).

Basically, average people live in a walled garden inside a walled garden and don't have the first clue about diversity or range of online life, not even the slightest idea. They think that 90% of the internet is on Facebook and that anything outside that must be a small niche of content.

[smjjames]

Even if it's the most popular copypasta, if it doesn't get used much outside some circles, then it won't be, as per reelyas point. Edit: ninjad

As for the tohou thing, I've definetly heard of it, mainly associated with Japanese anime and manga, without looking it up right now, I'm not exactly sure what it is, aside from being associated with Japan. I'm even vaguer on vocaloid, some 80's thing, dunno.

[Loud Whispers]

I think it is odd in ways that other such things are not odd, because for the millions of people who must have extensive knowledge of such internet culture, for the most part the variances are not that great despite the vast geographical distances involved. This then causes the first shock, of those of 8chan, 4chan, forums, funnyjunk, imgur, dank youtube and reddit all having the same culture and understanding with complete strangers who are like-members of the aforementioned community. Such members have a habit of sharing similar interests and so gravitate towards similar physical spaces, thus inflating the impression of the numbers of that community - when to go forth from that space, is to understand just how much the majority of the world has no knowledge or understanding of such culture.
It is often a joy of mine to read academic studies of online culture. Even the most basic and elementary stuff is almost always interpreted and studied wrong, with such "studies" then coming to spread amongst academic and journalistic circles as representative of the culture. When it comes to the more deliberately incomprehensible communities, they do not stand a chance, despite the low level of effort it would require to understand such a community. The mainstream bubble still exists despite the ongoing informationizing of the world, largely because I imagine, the real world directs most traffic from most people to internet entities which most resemble real world things. Thus Facebook seeks to replicate real world social pressures, Youtube wishes to replicate the dying TV medium it replaced and so forth

[smjjames]

I should be ashamed of myself, Tohou is a long running series of bullet-hell games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project

And vocaloid is a voice synthesizer that was developed not all that long ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid

[Rolan7]

Ninjedit:  Thanks for the links, good idea!

Whereas I'm much more familiar with Touhou than vocaloids.  Partially from this forum, partially a favorite LPer who discovered Danmaku a couple years ago (Slowbeef), and mostly because I happened to find 6: Perfect Cherry Blossom growing up, just looking for free games.  And loved it, and never knew it was a "sensation" for years after.

I basically only know about vocaloids from my friend/ex who links them sometimes.  They're cute!  I tend to avoid pop music for irrational reasons but it is nice sometimes!  Particularly J-pop, heh.

And I unironically like Lady Gaga AND HEY this J-Pop (Korean, IIRC?) is thread relevant!  Even if you don't know Planetside 2, I think.

[redwallzyl]

I think it is odd in ways that other such things are not odd, because for the millions of people who must have extensive knowledge of such internet culture, for the most part the variances are not that great despite the vast geographical distances involved. This then causes the first shock, of those of 8chan, 4chan, forums, funnyjunk, imgur, dank youtube and reddit all having the same culture and understanding with complete strangers who are like-members of the aforementioned community. Such members have a habit of sharing similar interests and so gravitate towards similar physical spaces, thus inflating the impression of the numbers of that community - when to go forth from that space, is to understand just how much the majority of the world has no knowledge or understanding of such culture.
It is often a joy of mine to read academic studies of online culture. Even the most basic and elementary stuff is almost always interpreted and studied wrong, with such "studies" then coming to spread amongst academic and journalistic circles as representative of the culture. When it comes to the more deliberately incomprehensible communities, they do not stand a chance, despite the low level of effort it would require to understand such a community. The mainstream bubble still exists despite the ongoing informationizing of the world, largely because I imagine, the real world directs most traffic from most people to internet entities which most resemble real world things. Thus Facebook seeks to replicate real world social pressures, Youtube wishes to replicate the dying TV medium it replaced and so forth

Well obviously they didn't do the requisite participant observation and anthropological methods. Silly sociologists trying to be anthropologists. I assume.

[Reelya]

And I unironically like Lady Gaga AND HEY this J-Pop (Korean, IIRC?) is thread relevant! 

Nah, that's K-Pop in case you weren't being ironic. The key difference is that (Korean) K-Pop sounds basically identical to the typical American top 40 R'n'B / hiphop inspired stuff, whereas (Japanese) J-Pop is like something from another planet, much more "layered" and tends to have complex vocal harmonies, plus they're more willing to throw things like metal-sounding guitar riffs and the like into the mix, or Jazz style vocals, or other things you don't normally see in Western pop music. It ranges from cutesy bubblegum pop up to stuff that's pretty rocky/metally, but still pretty clearly in the pop genre.

This is why I like J-Pop but not K-Pop. It's also why mixing them up isn't useful. It's not all the same because they're Asian. To give you a rough idea, these are both considered to be in the J-Pop genre:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M3JKOgKew4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBQprWeOx8g

Whereas these are typical K-Pop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTlv5_Bs8aw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWfsla_Uh80

[EnigmaticHat]

I actually had seen the navy seal copypasta before

Just not in such dramatically drawn out slow motion.